County Not Immune to the Plague of Hate Crime

Racist and homophobic graffiti scrawled on the walls of a Thousand Oaks college campus. A red swastika painted on the front door of a Meiners Oaks temple.

Three Ventura College basketball players--all black--injured during a brawl after a group of young whites allegedly yelled supremacist slogans.

And a 26-year-old black man viciously attacked by a crowd of party-goers hurling beer bottles and racial slurs.

Although far from everyday occurrences, more than a dozen hate crimes have been reported across Ventura County in the last two years.

They are the type of bigotry-motivated offenses that have gripped communities across the nation, prompting President Clinton last week to convene the first-ever White House conference on hate crimes.

“I think people need to open their eyes and see that there is a problem,” said assault victim James Wilson, whose ear was partly severed when the Ventura party-goers pelted him with open bottles last year. “What happened to me, I’ll never forget it. I’ll never get over it.”

The president’s address, which endorsed legislation that would expand federal hate crime laws, is part of a yearlong campaign to confront racism and promote tolerance in such a diverse nation.

Clinton is pushing a series of initiatives to address the issue, including enforcement of existing hate crime laws, improving the collection of data and educating young people about the harm caused by hate crimes.

In Ventura County, a similar push already is under way. Educators plan to launch an Anti-Defamation League program this month geared toward confronting biases and challenging prejudicial behavior.

“It’s on board,” Ventura County Schools Supt. Charles Weis said last week. “It’s to help students understand the differences between people and to celebrate and appreciate those differences--not to fear them.”

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The new program, which has students put themselves in the role of hate-crime victims, is among a handful of tolerance-promoting efforts already in place in schools across the county.

“I think I could say with confidence that every district is doing something,” said Diane Dempwolf, director of curriculum for the county schools office.

Most of the programs already in place focus on teaching children tolerance, communication skills and ways to resolve differences without violence.

They range from preschool programs teaching toddlers not to fight or call each other names, Dempwolf said, to high school social studies and history lessons focusing on the Holocaust.

In fact, one program offered through the county schools office brings war survivors into classrooms to share their experiences while stressing to older students the need for tolerance to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Attorney Randall Smith, who filed a civil lawsuit against the hostess of the party where Wilson was beaten, as well as her parents, said education may be the only way to effectively deal with the problem.

“Without a doubt a dialogue is important, and it should take place in the schools,” Smith said. “At least if it comes bubbling up to the surface, people will be forced to deal with it.”

Practically speaking, the effort to combat hate crimes becomes more difficult beyond the confines of the classroom.

Law enforcement officials say unreported hate crimes probably are occurring in the community, and prosecutors say the ones that are reported are often tough cases to crack.

“The difficult part in all of these crimes is finding who did it,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Redmond, who supervises felony prosecutions. “Even the cowards in the Ku Klux Klan wore their masks.”

In the last year, only two cases identified as hate crimes have resulted in criminal prosecution: the assault on Wilson and the vandalism at Cal Lutheran University.

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In Wilson’s case, two men were charged in the May 10, 1996, attack, although several bottle-throwing party-goers reportedly were involved.

Mike Morales, 21, and Jefferson Byrd, 23, were charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon. Byrd was also charged with assault with mayhem and allegations that the attack was racially motivated and caused great bodily injury.

After a 10-day trial, the jury found Morales guilty of a lesser offense--misdemeanor assault and battery--and he was ordered to serve 30 days in County Jail.

The same jury, however, found Byrd guilty of one assault charge, along with the racial motivation and great bodily injury allegations. In June, Byrd was sentenced to 10 years in state prison.

In handing down the sentence, Municipal Judge Roland Purnell expressed dismay that such a hate-driven crime could occur in this community.

“It almost defies belief that something like this could happen,” Purnell said.

Students and educators at Cal Lutheran felt the same way when their Thousand Oaks campus became the target of neo-Nazi literature and racist graffiti earlier this year.

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Between February and April, campus officials reported at least 10 incidents of vandalism, including racist slogans scrawled on bathroom walls and homophobic fliers slipped under office doors.

Authorities arrested two men in the incidents. Brian Schorr, 23, and Kevin Tam, 22, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor vandalism charges in August.

Schorr, a resident of Huntington, N.Y., was sentenced to three years probation and ordered to serve five days in jail, according to court records. Tam, a Thousand Oaks resident identified by campus officials as a Cal Lutheran student, was placed on probation and ordered to spend eight days in jail.

Other hate crimes have been reported in recent years--the painting of a red swastika on the front door of a Meiners Oaks temple, the vandalism of a black couple’s home in Camarillo, a cross-burning in Ventura.

But without witnesses, law enforcement officials say such cowardly acts often go unsolved, leaving lingering fear and tension in the communities where they occur.

“The community needs to work together to discuss the issues that divide us and take that tension away,” said Lt. Don Arth of the Ventura Police Department.

Statistically, it is difficult to gauge whether hate crimes are on the rise or on the decline in Ventura County.

Data on such incidents is spotty, because police agencies only began reporting such crimes to the federal Department of Justice three years ago.

In 1995, seven offenses were reported countywide. Jurisdictions have reported statistics for 1996 to federal authorities, but the numbers have not yet been broken down on a county-by-county basis, said Stacy Snow, a crime analyst for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

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But nationwide, the numbers appear to be growing.

Reported hate crimes rose to 8,759 last year, a 10% increase over the previous year. The FBI reported 7,947 hate crimes in 1995, with California tallying 1,751, the largest number of any state.

But the increase may also be attributed, in part, to more law enforcement agencies reporting such offenses.

Federal lawmakers have called the collection of hate crime statistics an integral step in combating bigotry-motivated violence.

There are other steps being pushed at a national level as well, including proposed legislation that would broaden current hate crime statutes.

Federal law now prohibits attacks based on a person’s race, color, religion or national origin.

Legislation proposed by Sens. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) would also make it a crime to injure people because of their sexual orientation, gender or disability.

Thirty-eight states have laws against hate crimes, and 18--including California--apply their statutes to attacks against people based on their sexual orientation or gender. But the penalties vary widely.

In this state, the punishment for committing a hate crime ranges from a $500 fine for damaging property to up to three years in prison for assaulting someone on the basis of race, sexual orientation or religion.

The proposed federal legislation would establish much stiffer penalties, making a hate crime punishable by a maximum 10-year sentence for those who cause injuries and a life sentence if the victim dies.

But assault victim Wilson is skeptical.

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“A lot of politicians talk and talk,” he said. “Clinton can have them pass all these new laws, but if the community doesn’t realize it’s happening around them, big deal. Nobody cares and it still goes on.”

Wilson grew up in Ventura County, went to school here and worked as an offshore oil platform diver before his eardrum was pierced by a piece of glass from the attack, making it impossible for him to dive again.

He can recover from those kinds of setbacks. But the haunting knowledge that strangers assaulted him because of the color of his skin is the wound that may never heal, he says.

“It is just weird for someone to hate you without even knowing you,” he said. “If they were just trying to take my wallet, I’d understand that. But this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

“I’d always known people were capable of certain things,” he said. “But I thought that was something that happened in the deep South, not in a beach town like Ventura.”