San Diego Unveils Plan to Combat Hate Crimes

With the city witnessing a major increase in reports of hate crimes, officials have announced a plan to offer aid and comfort to victims of such crimes and make San Diego “off-limits for hate and bigotry.”

Mayor Susan Golding said Friday that San Diego has been awarded $100,000 by the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance to develop a comprehensive plan whereby victims can receive counseling, legal assistance and other help, such as home repair if their houses have been vandalized or marred with graffiti.

The program, which will marshal existing community resources, is meant to help victims “get their lives back in order,” Golding said.

Police Chief David Bejarano will tell the City Council this week that 251 hate crimes were reported in San Diego in 1999, a jump of 124% from 1998.

“We want to send a strong message: We are not going to tolerate hate crimes in San Diego,” Bejarano said at a news conference in front of police headquarters announcing the plan.

One of last year’s hate crime victims was Bejarano’s 18-year-old daughter, who was stalked and violently shoved from behind while she was shopping in a department store. The incident was captured on the store’s security camera.

A 28-year-old ex-convict is set to stand trial next month for allegedly assaulting Yvonne Bejarano and six other women in what prosecutors say were attacks based entirely on the fact that the victims are women. Using the state’s hate crime law, the charges against Billy Dean McCall have been elevated from misdemeanors to felonies, which would lengthen any sentence.

Officials said that much of the increase in reported incidents is probably attributable to greater awareness by police officers as to what constitutes a hate crime.

A crime that in years past may have been listed simply as an assault is now listed as a hate crime if it was provoked by race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or religion. Each police station now has a designated hate crimes detective.

Still, Morris Casuto, director of the local Anti-Defamation League, said that racist Web sites have vowed to make San Diego “America’s Most Racist City,” mocking the city’s slogan proclaiming it “America’s Finest City.”

The city and suburbs have also seen a fivefold increase in the clandestine distribution of racist fliers, often near schools. The fliers contain quotations from Tom Metzger, former Ku Klux Klan leader and now head of the Aryan Resistance League, who lives in northern San Diego County.

The racist “Johnny Appleseed” fliers seem to be an attempt to influence teenagers. Statistics show that more than 50% of local hate crime assailants are under 21 and 92% are male.

There have also been a string of anti-Semitic spray-paint attacks on synagogues, several attacks on African American churches, and one on an Islamic center.

“Hate crimes are message crimes: The message they carry is ‘You don’t belong here, you don’t matter,’ ” Casuto said. “The message we mean to convey is just the opposite. . . . Those who would make our people afraid and divide our communities will not succeed.”

Most of the hate crimes involve racial attacks. The next most common are incidents of gay-bashing, followed by attacks based on religion and disability. Arrests are made in fewer than 20% of local hate crimes, officials said.

The $100,000 federal grant had been awarded to San Diego, to be administered by the Anti-Defamation League, even before the 1999 hate crime statistics were compiled. The goal is to use San Diego as a pilot program that, if successful, could be copied by other communities.

Clinton Proposes Enforcement Boost

President Clinton, in his Saturday radio address two weeks ago, said he is proposing a boost in the Justice Department’s budget to enforce civil rights laws, including federal hate crime laws.

Hate crime experts say that victims often suffer depression because they were singled out to be victimized because of traits they cannot change: skin color, gender, etc.

“The victims of hate crimes go through many of the same kinds of traumas of other crime victims, plus they have other issues to deal with: anger, frustration, isolation, even paranoia,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Hector Jimenez, who heads the district attorney’s hate crime prosecution unit.

Jimenez could not attend the news conference. He was in court accepting a guilty plea from an avowed skinhead who admitted attacking a Latino because he was dating an “Aryan woman.”

“There are some people out there who are severely under the influence of ignorance,” he said.