Aaron Levinson

Vigils and rallies earlier this month marked the one-year anniversary of a bloody rampage that stunned the San Fernando Valley and the world.

On Aug. 10, 1999, a gunman left three children, a teenage camp counselor and a receptionist wounded at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills and Filipino American letter carrier Joseph Ileto dead on his Chatsworth delivery route.

Buford O. Furrow Jr., an avowed white supremacist, was charged in the shootings and is scheduled to go on trial in February for murder, attempted murder and hate crimes.

The San Fernando Valley Hate Crimes Alliance was formed in the wake of the shootings to raise awareness of hate crimes and make sure the community does not become complacent about bigotry.

The alliance includes the Anti-Defamation League, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission, the Los Angeles Unified School District and Cal State Northridge.

The Times recently spoke with Aaron Levinson, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Valley office, about the alliance’s activities in the past year.

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Question: What were your goals when you formed the Valley Hate Crimes Alliance?

Answer: Increasing hate crime reporting was one of them; community education about hate crimes was another. We also wanted to provide assistance to victims of hate crimes and provide a resource for community members who wanted to provide expertise or volunteer to work on the issue.

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Q: Did those elements not exist before the alliance was formed?

A: They existed in different organizations. Certainly, the Anti-Defamation League was there, the LAPD and the county Human Relations Commission were there. But this is kind of a collaborative forum so that all these agencies could work together, which was a unique thing in the San Fernando Valley. More specifically, it was created not just because of the shootings but also because we recognized that the number of hate crimes in the Valley had experienced a significant jump.

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Q: Have you made progress toward accomplishing your goals? The latest reports show an increase in hate crimes by 12%.

A: I think there has been some progress. We’ve certainly seen an increase in hate crime reporting. Some might say, “Well, hate crimes are up.” But we can’t say that’s for sure. A lot of us are saying increased numbers are the result of increased awareness and increased reporting. Somebody who didn’t know what a hate crime was in the past might have just reported it as simple vandalism. Or simple assault.

Also, California has for the most part cooperative and progressive law enforcement agencies, and perhaps it’s more of an increase in their willingness to report incidents as hate crimes. I think we’re going to see significant increase in numbers in other states because law enforcement agencies that traditionally have not wanted to report incidents as hate crimes will be doing so in the future.

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Q: If, in fact, this 12% increase represents an increase in reporting, does it follow that there has been in fact a decline in incidents since the Jewish Community Center shootings?

A: I wouldn’t say we’ve had a dramatic shift in either direction. If every year everyone who was the victim of a hate crime reported it as a hate crime, we’d probably see a general decrease over a five-, 10-year period.

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Q: To what do you attribute that?

A: Better relations between communities, more increased awareness of diversity; a better economy certainly is always a factor.

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Q: Did you find, after a while, that you had a problem maintaining momentum in keeping the alliance going after the shock of the original incident wore off?

A: It’s certainly not a piece of cake mobilizing people to come to meetings and town halls and to help plan them. But it’s important enough that we do it. Community education can be an uphill battle, but it’s very rewarding, and there are a lot of people out there who do want this information, and even the ones who think they don’t want it, once they hear about it, they’re inevitably engaged. It just a matter of finding the way to get to them. Is it television advertising? Is it newspaper? Is it local town hall meetings?

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Q: When you started the alliance, you had a fairly ambitious agenda, including issues like addressing bigotry so it doesn’t manifest itself in violence. Are you still involved in those areas?

A: We’re trying to explore every angle of the hate crime arena. That was the theme of our last town hall, the roots of hate and where does it come from. So we had a former skinhead speak.

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Q: What do you do with this information? Do you take it to schools, churches and synagogues to share with young people?

A: As far as the alliance goes? It’s undetermined. The Anti-Defamation League already has a program called Stop the Hate where we do similar training for high schools. But a lot of the time we have to battle the apathy that the teachers or the administrators have. The principals have to want this program to bring it in. We can’t just bring it in without their permission. We can do it as much as these schools want us to. But they have a lot of people who don’t want to address these things. If you’re the one principal bringing in this diversity training program, it might look like you’re the one school with the problem.

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Q: Do tensions between ethnic groups, especially among young people, reflect the immigrant experience in America?

A: You might be on to something there. But a lot of it also has to do with gangs. There don’t tend to be a lot of mixed-races gangs, for some reason. You don’t see a lot of African Americans, Armenians and Latinos hanging out in the same gang. So, inevitably, you have an African American gang fighting a white gang. Or a Latino gang fighting an Armenian gang. Why is it that those gangs form that way? Is it family background? Is it what they’ve been taught? Is it that’s who they’re comfortable with? That’s who they know? It’s probably a little of all those things. Our job is to try to break down these stereotypes and these barriers to get them to talk and realize that, really, they’re all the same.

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Q: Is it possible, in a place like Southern California, in this day and age, to raise children who are free of these kinds of biases or who can be stopped from acting on them? Is that something the alliance is exploring, and are you optimistic that that can ever happen?

A: I think we can do it, there are things that can be done. We have materials that can be given to parents [that] they can read and learn about how to teach [their] children to be less prejudiced.

But Los Angeles is an interesting place because we have such a segregated society. Everyone says it’s the most diverse city in the world, and it really is. But we’re really divided into neighborhoods, from upscale white neighborhoods in Calabasas to Koreatown to Pico Rivera. And people don’t go to these neighborhoods. You don’t have a subway like in New York, you don’t have the El like in Chicago, you don’t walk on the streets like [in] San Francisco, so you get in your car and you drive through these neighborhoods, not looking at them and not stopping in them. And you go from your gated community to your work and back, and you don’t meet the people outside and you don’t get to know them. So everybody is somebody scary and different.

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Q: Does the Internet complicate the job for parents?

A: Yeah, there’s that as well. Maybe kids are staying inside more and in doing so passing up the little chance they might interact with people different than themselves.

And we’ve got who knows how many hate sites on the Internet now. Some say 1,500, some say 2,500, sites that can be intentionally accessed or innocently accessed. A kid doing a research report on the Holocaust and [who] types in the word “Holocaust” or “Auschwitz” on his search engine will come up with an almost exhaustive list of mostly legitimate sites, but also some Holocaust denial sites that promote that the Holocaust never happened. Or if it happened, it wasn’t 6 million killed, it was a million. It wasn’t gas chambers, it was disease. And they use the title “doctor,” and it’s colorful and attractive because that’s easy to do on the Internet. A 13-year-old who won’t know the difference gets these ideas in his head like: “How come I never learned this in school? Maybe there is some sort of conspiracy going on.”

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Q: Do you get the sense that, now that the shootings are a year in the past, people have let their guards down?

A: About a week to the day after the shootings, the Jewish Federation and others conducted security seminars for religious institutions, churches, synagogues, schools, different organizations. We did this in conjunction with the police department. We had four of these around Los Angeles, and there was literally standing room only. I mean, people clamoring to get in. We gave out great tips, and everybody walked away a little happier and feeling a little more secure.

The Jewish Federation tried to do another security seminar about two months later. And they were doing it with a top-notch security firm. They had to cancel it due to lack of interest.

There’s a sense of apathy not just in terms of hate crimes, but I think many issues in our society. Somebody reads about it in today’s paper; they forget about it tomorrow.

But at the West Valley JCC, where my office is, there is still a metal detector. They brought it in on the day of the shooting and they brought a more high-tech one a few months later. So security measures are still up there, and I know they’re still up at the North Valley JCC. Some synagogues have added security. I know there are guards at certain places. But not every agency can afford this, and not every agency wants this.

We don’t advocate that you need an armed guard in front of every house of worship. There has to be a sense of balance. People have to have a rational sense of alertness all the time. You have to rationalize what’s appropriate and what the true dangers are out there.