Lancaster Lacks Hate-Crime Policy, Officials Admit

City and county officials acknowledged Wednesday that more than a year after a county commission recommended that Lancaster adopt reforms to quell skinhead violence, the city still lacks a broad policy to deal with racially motivated crimes.

Two African Americans were assaulted in Lancaster on Monday, the latest in a series of attacks on members of minority groups during the past 18 months.

Three suspected skinheads were arrested, sheriff’s deputies said. The assailants allegedly shouted “white power” before slashing 16-year-old Marcus Cotton with a machete-like weapon and mauling and spitting on his 17-year-old cousin, Angela McKenzie. Both escaped serious injury.

Danny Williams, 22, of Lancaster was being held on $20,000 bail at the Antelope Valley sheriff’s station in Lancaster and was expected to be arraigned today on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and committing a hate crime, said Sheriff’s Lt. Tom Pigetts.

Two boys, one 16 and the other 15, were being held in Juvenile Hall, authorities said.

The attack took place just three days before the Lancaster City Council was scheduled to discuss implementing a hate crimes policy that would include assisting victims of bias crime, creating a telephone hotline to report them and speaking out publicly against such acts.

After three men identified as skinheads were arrested for firing six shots into as parked car containing four African Americans, including a year-old baby, in February 1995, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission issued a report that suggested a sweeping series of reforms. The suggestions included educating youngsters in schools, holding public forums and establishing human relations councils in Lancaster and Palmdale.

The commission report led to few changes, however. In part, a commission member said that progress was stalled by debate in both cities about whether they had a problem with hate crimes and, additionally, whether too much attention was being focused on crimes against minorities and not enough on violence against whites.

“We have not instituted the reforms. But if it was up to me, we would have had a policy a year ago,” said the Rev. Henry Hearns, the only African American on the Lancaster City Council.

“I don’t have a good answer to why we took so long, except that I think we tried to please everybody,” Hearns said.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the Antelope Valley and requested the study of skinhead groups there last year, also called on Lancaster and neighboring Palmdale to take action on the commission’s report “to address this cancer.”

In Palmdale, meanwhile, the City Council, at its meeting Wednesday night, was scheduled to discuss establishing a hate-crime hotline in a joint venture with Lancaster and funding for a billboard advertising the hotline. The item was removed from the meeting’s agenda, however, before the attack on Marcus.

Half a dozen speakers at the meeting criticized the city for not moving faster to implement the hotline. Mayor James C. Ledford Jr. did not want to put up billboards advertising the hotline out of fear they would advertise racial tension in the area, complained Palmdale resident Steven Lichtenstein.

“He needs to draw aerospace and homeowners, and the billboards would admit there is a problem,” Lichtenstein said.

Ledford, however, told a packed audience that he had postponed discussion on the joint hotline to set up a separate hotline for Palmdale alone. He said that would put it into operation sooner, although he did not say when that would be.

Earlier Wednesday, Antonovich called for those accused in the attack on Marcus to be tried as adults and asked that the district attorney’s office offer no plea bargains.

“We need to send out a strong message that this uncivilized activity will not be tolerated,” said Antonovich.

In addition to the Cotton beating, the Antelope Valley has been the scene of a series of highly publicized incidents that authorities suspect were racially motivated.

In February 1995, the same month that shots were fired at the African Americans in a parked car, two carloads of white youths chased a group of black students walking home from Hillview Middle School. Both incidents were blamed on the same skinhead gang.

Earlier this year, an African American student at Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster was stabbed in the back with a screwdriver on the campus by a suspected skinhead gang member.

Local civil rights activists say the attacks on minorities are probably caused by a combination of tough economic times and changes in the Antelope Valley’s demographics.

The cutback in the aerospace industry, an Antelope Valley mainstay, has driven up unemployment and driven down property values. Meanwhile, large numbers of African Americans and Latinos have moved into the area. African Americans, who made up 3.3% of Lancaster’s population in 1980, were 7.2% of the 97,291 residents in 1990.

The Antelope Valley branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People has recorded 218 race-related incidents in the area since January 1995, said Consuela Williams, a NAACP board member.

Capt. Mike Aranada, who heads the Lancaster station of the Sheriff’s Department, said the department has recorded three hate crimes so far this year in the Antelope Valley, compared to nine in 1995.

The Sheriff’s Department estimates the number of skinheads in the area at 80 to 100, said Pigetts, who supervises detectives at the Lancaster station. “We don’t have a large number of them in the valley, but the ones we do have bring a lot of attention to themselves and us,” he said.

But Ronald K. Wakabayashi, executive director of the Human Relations Committee, who wrote the “Skinheads in the Antelope Valley” report, said the numbers are less important than the violence they commit. “The pattern that we’ve seen, that we’ve got to be concerned about, is that they have been particularly violent,” he said.

In working for change, he said, “Clearly there have been people trying to move the process along. But you need more of them, and you need their colleagues to join them in a very serious way. . . . There’s got to be more people willing to take leadership.”

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Williams is a Times staff writer and Gonzales a correspondent.