Summits Seek to Stem Hate Crimes

An Arcadia man is convicted of waving a gun at a black neighbor and screaming racial epithets and death threats at him.

In Granada Hills, authorities prosecute a man for painting swastikas on an apartment complex with mostly Jewish tenants. And in North Long Beach, teenagers are charged with setting dozens of racially motivated fires.

At a time when the overall crime rate is falling locally and nationwide, hate crimes such as these 1997 incidents are rising steadily in Los Angeles County. A dramatic 25% increase was reported in 1996.

Pledging to take action, local politicians and law enforcement officials gathered Wednesday to announce a series of special regional summit meetings aimed at stemming the rising tide of hate crimes in the nation’s most populous and diverse county.

At the public summits--the first of which is set for Carson later this month--the county Human Relations Commission and other county officials will take testimony from a wide array of experts, authorities and, it is hoped, victims.

The goal of the summits is to find a way to defuse existing conflicts caused by racial, religious or sexually oriented tension and to stop further problems before they occur.

County Supervisors Zev Yaroslavsky, Don Knabe and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke joined Sheriff Sherman Block, Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn and hate crime prosecutors at a news conference to call for educational efforts and tougher laws and policies at all levels of government.

“We will be undertaking a countywide conversation about hate crimes and the root causes of hatred and how we can turn this around,” said Yaroslavsky, who is chairman of the Board of Supervisors.

“We are at the proverbial fork in the road in Los Angeles; are we going to build a society where children are safe, or are we going to be a seething caldron of divisiveness, hatred, suspicion and ignorance?” asked Yaroslavsky. “We need to confront and engage this head-on.”

Last year, Los Angeles County law enforcement agencies recorded 995 hate crimes, compared with 793 in 1995. That included a 43% increase in crimes associated with the sexual orientation of the victims, a 20% increase in racially motivated hate crimes and a 9% increase in crimes sparked by religious hatred.

Ron Wakabayashi, executive director of the Human Relations Commission, said Wednesday that the level of hate crime activity in the county has been growing since the commission, an advisory body to the Board of Supervisors, began monitoring the situation 18 years ago.

Although Wakabayashi and other county officials attribute the rise in part to improved reporting methods, they also said Wednesday that other factors are responsible.

Those include migration patterns in which a previously dominant ethnic group is displaced by newcomers of another ethnicity, and the rise of organized hate groups, including skinheads and white supremacists who have been blamed for a recent series of attacks throughout northern Los Angeles County.

Each of the four summit conferences will have a different topic, Wakabayashi said.

The Carson conference, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 21, will bring together various experts to discuss the causes--and the extent--of the hate crime problem in the county through the examination of social, economic, demographic and historic factors.

Each summit also will address specific clusters of elevated hate crime activity. The Carson meeting will review recent black/Latino and Asian/Latino conflicts in Long Beach, and black/Latino tensions in the Harbor Gateway and Hawaiian Gardens areas.

The second summit, planned for November in the San Fernando Valley, will focus on ways to improve law enforcement response to the problem.

A third conference will focus on prevention, counseling and other forms of community involvement, followed by a countywide summit early next year. Officials will then draft a final report, including proposed improvements.