Hate Crime Figures Unchanged, but Officials Concerned

Despite a lower overall crime rate, Ventura County continues to grapple with its level of hate crimes, particularly in Ventura where police are trying to stem the growth of teenage white-power gangs.

According to recent statistics from the California Department of Justice, 40 hate crimes were committed countywide against 52 victims last year.

The majority of those offenses involved young white men targeting blacks or Jews through threats, intimidation, vandalism or physical assaults, authorities said.

Some community leaders fear the number of hate-motivated crimes is actually much higher, but are not being reported to law enforcement because victims are afraid.

“I just truly believe there are 10% more hate crimes in Ventura County than they are reporting,” said John Hatcher, president of the Ventura County chapter of the National Assn for the Advancement of Colored People. “Lots of times people do not report them because of fear of retaliation.”

Ventura County law enforcement officials say race relations here are no worse than in other communities across Southern California.

But they remain concerned by the number of teenagers embracing racist ideologies and are trying to keep the county from turning into a hotbed for young white supremacist groups.

“There is a cancer growing in the youth of Ventura County,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Stacy Ratner, who has prosecuted several white supremacists in Juvenile Court. “It’s very frightening.”

Statewide, more than 2,000 hate crimes were reported last year against 2,436 victims, according to the state Department of Justice. Two-thirds of those incidents involved violent attacks and 60% were motivated by the victim’s race or ethnicity.

In Ventura County, the number of hate crimes in 1999 remained the same as reported in 1998, with increases and decreases in individual cities.

According to Department of Justice statistics, Oxnard rose from one hate crime in 1998 to five in 1999, and Thousand Oaks saw an increase from two to four hate crimes during the same period.

Hate crimes in Camarillo dropped from six to two and in Simi Valley they fell from four to none. Hate crimes in the unincorporated areas of the county dropped from six to four.

Ojai, Moorpark and Santa Paula each reported a single hate crime last year. Of those, only Moorpark reported an incident in 1998. Port Hueneme and Fillmore reported none.

The story is different in Ventura, however.

According to the Justice Department, 22 hate crimes were reported last year within the city limits, compared to 19 the year before. That is more than the number of incidents reported in either Lancaster, Oakland or Santa Monica.

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But police say the high numbers locally are largely attributable to diligent reporting and an ongoing crackdown on white-power gangs.

“I think we have been real aggressive,” said Ventura Police Lt. Carl Handy, adding that his department classifies even the slightest racially tinged incident as a hate crime.

“Some of these may not have been documented as hate crimes by other agencies, but we are biased on the side of looking at it as a hate crime,” Handy said. “So obviously, that will skew the data a little bit.”

Handy also noted that the department reexamined the 1999 numbers and decided the actual number of hate crimes was 20. Of those, he said, there were five batteries, four felony assaults, three incidents of weapons being brandished, four cases of vandalism and four threats.

The incidents of vandalism included slashed tires on two cars, one house being spray-painted with racial slurs and another property defaced with a swastika.

Ventura police hope the efforts of their gang suppression task force will prevent such crimes in the future.

Funded by a three-year, $1.5-million state grant, the task force is comprised of five officers, a crime analyst, two probation officers and a prosecutor. Citywide, it has targeted about 100 gang members who usually organize by area, ethnicity or ideology. As a result, their criminal activity can often be categorized as hate-motivated, officials said.

“I think when you are focusing on gang activity you are more apt to identify these things,” said Lt. Ken Corney, who supervises the gang suppression team.

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Among their efforts, law enforcement officials involved in the task force say they are keeping a close eye on nine loosely organized groups of white supremacist teens who have begun to act upon their racists views.

Of the hate crimes reported in Ventura last year, about half were committed by juveniles, and of those about half were white supremacists, officials said.

Other law enforcement agencies say they are seeing a similar trend.

Ventura County Sheriff’s Department Cmdr. Dick Purnell, who oversees special investigations for the department, said hate crimes are often carried out late at night by small groups of juveniles.

“They are primarily teenagers that are doing it and basically it falls into two categories,” Purnell said. “It is vandalism where they are writing things, usually something to the effect of ‘white power.’ And there are also some verbal and physical assaults when they push someone to the ground, sometimes accompanied by a Nazi salute.”

The reason behind this surge of youth hate?

Law enforcement officials say they aren’t certain but believe peer pressure, ignorance and a desire to belong to a group play a big role.

“So many kids are confused,” said Tony Machuca, a probation officer who works with 65 juveniles from the Ventura area, including many who consider themselves white supremacists. “They surround themselves with kids who have these ideas.”

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Machuca, who is working as part of the grant program, has seized Confederate flags, hand-scrawled swastikas and American Nazi Party literature during searches of probationers’ rooms.

In many cases, he said, parents are either unaware of their teenager’s racist beliefs or have themselves planted those seeds of bigotry and hate.

“It runs from one extreme to another,” he said. “Some have come from families where you are speaking with the parents and you don’t see any racial bias. And the other extreme is where you have parents where as soon as you walk in the door, you see a Confederate or a Nazi flag hanging on the wall, and you pretty much know where you stand.”

Rabbi Shimon Paskow of Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks said he and his congregation are aware of the potential violence from local white supremacists.

The temple hired security guards to protect its day school in the wake of the August 1999 shooting attack on the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, for which white supremacist Buford Furrow Jr. has been charged.

Temple Beth Torah in Ventura took similar measures.

“I think there is a growing awareness to take hate crime seriously,” said Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller, who faced the issue when vandals desecrated a building near the temple with swastikas last fall.

“What I can say from our vantage point is that the crimes we’ve witnessed are clearly perpetrated by teenagers,” Hochberg-Miller said. “We’re not looking at sophisticated crimes, and that’s good and bad. It’s disturbing to see that young people at that age feel a need to hate and express that.”

Community leaders and law enforcement officials worry that without intervention at an early age these youths will eventually commit more serious crimes.

“How do you break the cycle?” asks Hatcher of the NAACP. “You are going to have to get to it when it starts happening.”

Law enforcement officials are trying to do just that.

Recently, the county probation department launched a tolerance program called “Eliminate the Hate” to train teachers and probation officers how to deal with racism among juveniles.

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Authorities in Ventura are working with the Boys & Girls Clubs to try to steer troubled teens into sports programs and alternative activities. Some youths are referred to anger management classes and offered free tattoo removals to literally erase their gang ties.

This month, Machuca and others working under the Ventura grant will begin to offer free weekly parenting classes to help mothers and fathers struggling to cope with rebellious teens.

“If parents take an active role in their kids’ life,” Machuca said, “they will prevent, in my opinion, a lot of this from happening.”

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Hate Crimes

Last year, 40 hate crimes were reported to law enforcement agencies in Ventura County. The number of reported offenses has remained consistent during the past few years, with the greatest number reported in the city of Ventura.

Source: California Department of Justice

(Note: There were no reported hate crimes in Port Hueneme)