ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : A Shameful Expansion

Orange County is no stranger to crimes against people based on their race, skin color or sexual orientation. Unfortunately, the list has now been expanded to include disability.

Two weeks ago, a Lake Forest woman who has multiple sclerosis found her car tires slashed and a note on her windshield threatening her life and that of her baby daughter. The woman said the incident occurred one day after several residents berated her for seeking to have a parking space at her apartment complex set aside for handicapped parking.

Orange County Sheriff’s Department investigators are seeking suspects, who could be charged with vandalism and making a terrorist threat. The director of the county’s Human Relations Commission said the offense was a hate crime, meaning one motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or, in this case, disability. Commission Director Rusty Kennedy said he believed it was the first reported instance of a hate crime against a disabled person since the county began documenting such information in 1991.

The commission’s annual report showed that reported hate crimes and incidents last year numbered 183 in Orange County, the highest in four years. This week, a jury convicted a man of murder for stabbing a Vietnamese American college student in the county’s first capital case involving a hate crime.

Crimes against people targeted on individual attributes such as religion or disability deserve the stiffest punishment provided by law. In an increasingly diverse society, people’s differences must be respected, not attacked.