Valley Perspective : Children of Hate: A Matter of Degrees : In Bosnia, Rwanda and Granada Hills, Our Capacity for Savagery as Well as Kindness Is a Common Bond

In 1998, on a beautiful springtime day in the little town of Drvar, in the western mountainous region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I stood in the uniform of a deputy commissioner of the United Nations International Police Task Force, amid the charred remains of the Trninic family home. A few nights before, the Serb couple, in their 50s, had returned home after earlier being made refugees by the war. Their night was interrupted by an intruder who shot and killed them both and set their home on fire, leaving their bodies in the blaze.

This brutal crime was a reaction to the increasing return of Serb families to a town that had been almost all Serb before Bosnia’s war of 1992-’95. The reaction escalated soon afterward to a street riot, the burning of the United Nations police station and other international facilities in Drvar.

As I stood there in the charred Trninic home, I pondered my own home and family and the social environment that would make such a crime impossible there. My year in Bosnia taught me many things about people. One stands out among the rest, a linkage to a cynical expression handed down to me in my early years as a street cop: “today’s victim, tomorrow’s suspect.” Whether Croat, Muslim or Serb, all had been victims at one time or another and every one of them had been children . . . once.

On return to the United States, I was reunited with events and issues of our time and country, but somehow, much of it seemed trivial by comparison. People spoke with passion about a burgeoning economy and decreasing joblessness, but I had returned from a postwar country with 80% unemployment and economic depression. And so, although revolted by news reports of abhorrent incidents of hate violence--the dragging of an African American man to his death behind a pickup truck--it seemed in perspective, relative. I had returned from the scene of a hate crime resulting in the loss of 250,000 lives, many of them children, a million people still out of their homes and continuing devastation from the carnage of a million or more land mines remaining in the ground. And how effective this hate crime land mine is, planted around homes of displaced families by military of another ethnicity or religion, to perpetuate “ethnic cleansing” years after the war.

This was America wasn’t it, and we had emerged from our darker past, hadn’t we?

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But somehow, when I saw live coverage of a murderous attack on Jewish children and their caregivers, by a man with an assault weapon just three miles from my home, I was stirred with a connection to the Balkan tragedy. All of us in this century and on this small planet, every Buford O. Furrow Jr., every Balkan war criminal, every leader of the recent Hutu-Tutsi genocide, Hitler himself as well as Mother Theresa and Raoul Wallenberg, all of them and all of us have been children. Each of us was born with the capacity of unbelievable savagery and enormous kindness. What we are taught at our kitchen tables, in classrooms, in houses of worship by associates and friends, it all shapes us in one way or another.

In Bosnia, I reminded reluctant police leaders of the need to unite their forces under contemporary police values rather than ethnic agendas and party lines. I reminded them of how important it was for police to reflect leadership in neighborhoods replenishing with returning refugees. I pointed with pride at the flag on the patch on my shoulder, a model of the United States, a united people, and of the Los Angeles Police Department, a united police force. Make no mistake, American history is not a paragon of tolerance and pluralism, and I was often reminded of this by Bosnian antagonists. But had we not managed to move along a solid continuum of progress?

Maybe so, but I wonder how united we really are. With radical violent extremism always there in a variety of groups, with opportunity for enormous damage at the same time as huge exposure in a continually starved media market, with our American penchant for unbridled freedoms, I fully believe that we have the capacity for forms of violence yet undiscovered that will shock the average American.

I hear about violence stirred by video games and movies or music, about guns and their availability, about unbridled hatemongering and so on. But the fact remains that despite every attempt to find the upstream source, it will evade us in the complexity of the human spirit and in the capacity for good or for evil.

In these remarks I offer only a short summary of questions, perhaps a checklist for leaders, law and policy makers and all of us who share the connection to the issue, like it or not:

Information

We often vilify the function and craft of intelligence gathering, thereby failing to give our governments sufficient tools to reduce the uncertainty about groups or individuals who may be inclined to acts of hatred. What could public agencies have done to anticipate what Buford Furrow was about to do? We should have known. And what about Timothy McVeigh and his little sordid clique? We should have known.

Insanity and Criminality

I have been around long enough to see the unintended counterproductive effects of legislation, specifically the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made extended involuntary commitment almost impossible. It also created a huge gap between criminality and insanity. Some people need to be institutionalized and cannot be by law. Because there is no criminal case pending, they fall into the legal breach. If hatred is in their psyche, watch out because a hate crime is in the making.

Data

Although some responsive agencies collect data in all incidents motivated by hatred or prejudice, some do not. How else can a community have a valid read on events that become trends in our societies? The data should be compared with other agencies’ in an attempt to build uniform reporting systems.

Guns

In my view, public agencies at the state and local level work inadequately on illegal gun trafficking and sales. Narcotics peddlers get the full treatment, and so they should. But gun-running is most frequently left to the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. We are often so quick to ban this and ban that that we overlook the evil already in our midst, the gun traffickers who will put guns into the hands of hatemongers, no matter the laws of the state and nation.

Investigation

Some agencies require a “class A” investigation for each tire slashing and other so-called minor crime, when based on hatred. Some do not. When investigated fully, victims and those affected get the sense that the police do, in fact, care. The spinoff is that the police get the pulse of hate violence emerging in communities before it spreads.

Arrest, Prosecution, Sentencing

Although we admittedly need to explore new hate crime legislation, we also need to make absolutely sure that we adequately enforce laws already on the books. We need to couple the investigation and the prosecutorial case with adequate intelligence on the nuances of the case, so as to substantiate fine points of law necessary to convict on the hate motive. This may require special units.

Supervision

Probation and parole agencies often find themselves doing the impossible with insufficient resources and legal teeth. Are these supervision resources being deployed effectively and efficiently? Are “hate-based” criminals adequately flagged?

Communities

Communities need to work with police agencies to form solid police-community prevention and response efforts to incidents of hatred, so as to convey that the communities do not side with the hate. We are often given to the one march or candlelight vigil, the T-shirt with the antiviolence slogan and bumper sticker about random acts of kindness. We need to join in longer-range and perhaps less flashy efforts to prevent hatred from growing. Neighborhood Watch groups are a good place to start.

Responsibility

Finally, do we each sense the connection between a Tutsi child murdered in a hospital bed in Rwanda and a postal worker gunned down in Los Angeles because he is “of color?” Do we live in this wonderful country oblivious to the real possibility of an explosion of racial hatred that will pit neighbor against neighbor, as it did in the streets of my neighborhood in Sarajevo? Do we realize that hatred’s close bedfellow is indifference? Do we want our children to grow in the nurture of love and the abhorrence of hate? Are we too busy? Do we even care?