Our First, Quick Reaction: Hate Crime

Funny how our minds, so often at odds, can run suddenly in sync.

We hear a skimpy news flash about a bald man in black--no, it was green, maybe military camouflage?--shooting up a Jewish community center full of children, and the synapses start crackling along the same paths to a single conclusion: hate crime.

That’s where my mind leaped when I heard the news on my car radio. That’s what one colleague asked instantly, rhetorically: Was it a skinhead? From another colleague came this e-mail flash: “Sounds like a hate crime.” From helicopter height, TV types would soon float the same notion.

In searching for answers, the mind tries to match up action with reason, and when it can find no reason, only the unreasonable remains. And what could be more unreasonable than this?

A hate crime against children, if such it was, is so heinous that it would almost be a relief if we were to hear today or tomorrow that the guy was only a garden variety robber with a quick trigger finger, someone out for cash or jewelry. Just please, not a hate crime.

In one of those mirror-image moments of synchronicity, at the instant the adults and children at the Jewish community center in Granada Hills were looking down the bore of the gunman’s 9-millimeter weapon, some of their friends and siblings were gazing upon the distilled essence of a hate crime: They were visiting Los Angeles’ Museum of Tolerance.

In the late morning, as the museum phone began clamoring with calls from parents wanting to make sure their children were on the tour and not lying in blood and spent cartridges in Granada Hills, the 20 children were left to take the tour in the little peace and silence that remained in their day.

For two hours, then, the 10- and 12-year-olds listened to the voices in the Whisper Tunnel, a murmuring swirl of vicious remarks about race or gender. They walked down a replica street in Hitler’s Berlin, and entered the gates of Auschwitz.

Not until the children were back on the bus and heading north again did the program director tell them, at last, how it looked as if hate may have struck much more recently than 1945, much closer to home than Nazi Germany.

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Until the Orwellian year 1984, the phrase was not even part of our lexicon.

Then it began to creep in, modified at first, set off in quotes to denote its unfamiliarity--”so-called hate crime”--until at last it found permanent purchase in the vocabulary of our brains.

It is shorthand for what happened to a black man dragged in chains behind a truck full of yahoos in Texas, a Senegalese man shot to death at a Denver bus stop for being in “white territory,” a young homosexual man beaten bloody and crucified on a Wyoming fence.

By 1990, the LAPD had a Hate Crime Monitoring System up and running, and in it and related databases, for several years now, the San Fernando Valley and environs have led in reports of hate crimes and incidents. A phone call to a Latina in Palmdale telling her that black men would be sent to get her, to run over her daughter. Swastikas swabbed on the walls of a Sherman Oaks apartment building. And now, maybe, Tuesday at the JCC. “The truth is,” says Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, “that’s the way it looks. Everyone knows this was a Jewish institution.”

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Another crime story flew, understandably, under the media radar, below the flak storm of news of Tuesday’s shootings, but it bears mentioning all the same.

Two Asian brothers were charged Tuesday with the hate crime of attacking their sister’s friend and smashing up his car because he is African American, and they did not want their sister dating a black man. As the deputy city attorney tells it, the pair ran up to the car where the couple sat. One reached in and grabbed the man by his shirt as the other smashed out the car’s back windows, and when the man tried to drive away, they gave chase in a pickup truck.

I suspect that if they are convicted, these two young men will spend some time at the Museum of Tolerance, where those 20 children were Tuesday.

For several years, the museum has offered an educational program. It was designed originally for professionals--law enforcement, educators and doctors--but of late, it has done a busy trade as “creative sentencing” for hate crime offenders, favored by judges who find that jail is not enough.

A young Highland Park man was sentenced to community service there for attacking and insulting a black ex-schoolmate. Some Long Beach skinheads who had plotted to blow up a black church were ordered to sit there and listen.

If Marvin Hier and virtually everyone else who heard the news flash are right, and what happened Tuesday was a hate crime, a course in tolerance would be far too little for the bald man in green, and, for three little boys and the two women tending them, it would be much too late.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com