Society should build awareness of hate crimes

Wednesday, November 25, 1998

Society should build awareness of hate crimes

PREJUDICE: Citizens must report incidents to enforce intolerance
of racial prejudice

Recent tragedies have spawned a nationwide dialogue on hate
crime prosecution. The nature and the motivations behind such
crimes against specific, targeted groups necessitate greater
punishments. Hate crimes can terrorize entire communities;
therefore, every citizen has a civic duty to recognize such crimes
and report them when they occur.

There is a common misconception that higher penalties for hate
crimes confer special treatment upon minority groups. In actuality,
hate crime laws exist to protect even a white, heterosexual male;
these laws protect any person who could be the victim of a hate
crime.

The state of California defines a hate crime as any criminal act
or attempted criminal act directed against a person or group based
on the person’s "race, color, religion, nationality, country of
origin, ancestry, disability or sexual orientation." Though the
recent death of Matthew Shepard has engendered a greater awareness
of hate crimes inflicted on homosexuals, the leading motivation
behind hate crimes in Los Angeles is race, according to the Los
Angeles Police Department.

California state law draws a distinction between hate crimes and
other crimes, such as robbery and manslaughter; the state
establishes a more severe punishment for hate crime perpetrators
whereby misdemeanors motivated by hate are sometimes prosecuted as
felonies.

Hate crime offenders face more severe penalties than other
criminals because they maliciously commit acts with the intent to
threaten both the victim and the particular group to which he or
she belongs. In Texas, three white males killed James Byrd, an
African American man, who they chained to the back of their pickup
truck and dragged for two and a half miles. In Wyoming, two young
men tied Matthew Shepard, a young gay student, to a fence,
pistol-whipped his face, and eventually beat him to death. In 1996,
a UCLA alumnus and former Vietnamese Student Union leader, Thien
Minh Ly, was stabbed to death by a member of a white supremacy
gang.

These crimes, which affected entire communities, may not have
occurred if the perpetrators had not been prejudiced.

Efforts are being made to educate people on hate crimes. The
LAPD has created new training program that teaches officers
precisely what crimes are classified as hate crimes. On campus, the
Undergraduate Student Association Council (USAC) also hopes to
educate students on hate crimes with the Hate Crimes Prevention
Campaign. Currently, USAC’s efforts are still in the developmental
stage.

For 1998, 500 hate crime cases have been reported in Los
Angeles; in 1997, at UCLA, only one crime was reported. The small
number of hate crimes reported are not believed to reflect the
actual number of crimes committed.

Though the shame that is often associated with hate crimes might
prevent a victim from reporting such a crime, the predominate
reason hate crimes go unreported is that many victims, witnesses,
and even police officers, do not recognize that a crime motivated
by prejudice even occurred.

It is unfortunate that it took the tragic deaths of James Byrd,
Matthew Shepard and Thien Minh Ly to generate a greater awareness
of hate crimes. Hate crime laws cannot be enforced without the
active participation of the state’s citizens. These laws are futile
unless we send a clear message to hate crime perpetrators: Crimes
motivated by prejudice will not be tolerated.

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