Posted on 02/02/2007 8:25:57 AM PST by dead
America's long battle with racism has taken a nasty new twist on the mean streets of Los Angeles. Peter Huck reports.
It was a Halloween fright fest that went horribly wrong for three young women. Shortly after they left a "haunted house" in a middle class area of Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, on October 31, a teenage mob set upon the women.
Even by the savage conditions that often prevail on Los Angeles's mean streets, what followed was a vicious assault. The women were surrounded by a group of kicking and punching teenagers. One victim suffered multiple fractures to her face and needs surgery to reposition an eye that was smashed in. Another was knocked unconscious by a skateboard. The third has a bruised lung.
But for the intervention of a passer-by, the victims believe the mob - estimated by witnesses as about 30 strong - would have killed them. Last week, after an emotional trial fraught with legal histrionics and claims of witness intimidation, eight girls, age 13 to 18, and one 18-year-old male were found guilty of hate crimes, while a 12-year-old girl was acquitted. Two other boys were subsequently charged and await trial.
Long Beach is used to violence. Gangs are endemic. Murder frequent. But the Halloween case has had a big impact.
All the defendants were black. Their victims were white. Not only that, but the defendants, who chanted "F--- white people!" and other racial epithets during the melee, were charged with hate crimes, a charge traditionally seen in white-on-black crimes.
"I think the case has the potential to have a much wider impact," says Tracy Manzer, who covered the story for the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Few would disagree.
Yet apart from the Press-Telegram and, belatedly, the Los Angeles Times, plus heated radio commentary, national press coverage was scant, partly due to uncertainties about how to report a black-on-white hate crime. The Times agonised that laws designed to prosecute hate crimes - defined by Congress in 1992 as "motivated by hatred, bias or prejudice, based on the actual or perceived race, colour, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity of another individual or group of individuals" - might end up "punishing blacks".
This touched a deep nerve that goes back to America's still unresolved racial baggage from the slavery and segregation eras. When white members of a lacrosse team from Duke University in North Carolina were accused of raping a black stripper at a party last year, the case attracted saturation coverage and touched off a national firestorm. Seinfeld's Michael Richards was castigated for saying "nigger" - so insulting it cannot be used in US media - while ranting at hecklers in a Los Angeles club.
So the media's comparative silence on the Long Beach case has been deafening. David Mills, a black screenwriter and former reporter for The Washington Post, told the Romenesko blog: "You don't have to be a card-carrying Klansman to point out that the LA Times surely would be treating this story differently if three black women had been attacked by 30 white teenagers hurling words like 'F--- black people'."
Did the press back off because it was worried it might seem racist? "It's like walking on eggshells," says Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black columnist in Los Angeles. He believes the media's inability to get a handle on a story that reversed stereotypes is perhaps as important as fears of appearing racist. And, as Manzer dryly points out: no one died.
Nonetheless, the Long Beach assaults reflect a disturbing trend. The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, which collects statistics, says hate crimes rose 34 per cent during 2005 (the latest available figure). "The intriguing thing is the hate crimes they're talking about are not the old white-on-black, or bashing Jews, gays and Muslims," Hutchinson says. "The majority of hate crimes in LA County are committed by Latinos and blacks, on each other, or whites."
In the Ku Klux Klan era, hate crimes involved straightforward racism. Now the issue is entangled with other woes. The Long Beach case echoes the 1989 New York "wilding" incident, when black teenagers beat and raped a woman [before hate crime laws], and has led to hand wringing about why children commit senseless violence, a can of worms given its glorification by popular culture.
"Group beatings are extremely common in juvenile crimes," Manzer says. "Kids get caught up in it. It's like a spectator sport."
They also get caught up in gang glorification. The prosecution tried and failed to show the male defendant had links to the Baby Insane Crips, after references to the notorious black gang were found on his MySpace account. The Crips are suspected of intimidating witnesses: one had her car trashed, while the passer-by who broke up the melee later refused to identify any suspects.
While gang involvement in the Long Beach case is contentious, hate crimes committed by gangs - sometimes against non-gang members - are rising, although most gang crime is intraracial. In one chilling example, four members of the Avenues Latino gang were convicted of "ethnic cleansing" of blacks - two were murdered - in Los Angeles. In December two Latino gangsters shot 14-year-old Cheryl Green as she talked with friends. Police said the men were looking to kill blacks who strayed onto their turf. Locals say it was payback for the killing of a Mexican male a week earlier.
The Green case has become a cause celebre, as Los Angeles struggles to counter spiralling gang crime. Last year the city's 720 gangs, with membership estimated at 39,000, were blamed for 56 per cent of the city's 478 murders.
The gang epidemic "is largely immune to general declines in crime", says a recent report by the Advancement Project. It also found that gang crime was spreading to middle-class districts, although residents in the bleaker parts of South Central are 36 times more likely to be murdered than those in the upmarket West Side. Gangs were "public enemy No. 1", thundered the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. Flanked by police chiefs, he pledged war. Days later a black man was wounded by Latino gunmen who chased his two daughters.
"Los Angeles is a city of immigrant marches, black-brown violence, gentrification tension and arguments over the movie Crash," the commentator Ruben Martinez wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times. Yet, given the city's ethnic diversity, most people get along. The exception tends to be those struggling to survive in poor areas affected by rapidly changing demographics.
The most obvious friction is between blacks and Latinos. The former are in decline, while Latinos constituted 49 per cent of Los Angeles's population in 2005. Often Latinos and blacks compete at the bottom of the economic ladder. Prejudice crosses borders. "Dirty" blacks have "messed up" the area, say some Latinos in the Harbour Gateway area.
"When we talk about black-on-Latino or Latino-on-black hate crimes, I think the same rules apply as when we talk about white-on-black crimes," Hutchinson says. "The same fears, the same tensions, the same hostilities."
The Advancement Project believes $US1 billion ($1.3 billion) is needed to create jobs, or improve education and public health in areas where 300,000 youngsters are at risk of joining gangs. Quite how Los Angeles, already pressed to fix its crumbling infrastructure, will find the money is unsure.
Until the Cheryl Green and Long Beach cases forced the city to confront race hatred in inner-city areas, officials had shied away from the issue, fearful of inflaming the sort of tensions that helped fuel race riots in 1965 and 1992. Now the issue is out in the open. Yet, given an intractable gang problem and deep-seated social problems that will take far more than $US1 billion to erase, can it be solved?
Back in Long Beach the verdicts have raised more questions than answers. Why did "regular" children, several with promising sports careers - one had already represented the US in China - and no criminal records or, it would seem, gang affiliations, find themselves accused of hate crimes? "Today is not a happy day," the Long Beach District Attorney said after the verdict. "There are no winners."
With their children facing possible jail time, the parents expressed disbelief in the outcome, insisting the wrong people were tried. While one of the victim's mobile phones was found on one defendant and another had bloodstains on her clothes, there is contention about evidence from the chief witness, who saw events at night, in her rear-view mirror, from 50 to 100 metres. The parents intend to appeal.
Reading to the court from prepared statements on Wednesday, the victims asked the judge to hand down "the harshest punishment possible".
One victim, Loren Hyman, who is 21 and part Latino and part Jewish, told the court. "I couldn't believe my ears when I heard them yell, 'I hate … white people'." Her friend, Laura Schneider, 19, added: "I can't tell you what it did to me to see people get such pleasure from hurting us."
It is hard to know if this ugly episode will hurt race relations. Ultimately, the case raises the spectre of race hatred so deep it still pervades society, crossing race lines and incubating even its youngest members.
"I think the case will redefine how Americans look at hate crimes," Hutchinson says. "Traditionally, African-Americans were victims. Now they're not. It's a new twist in America's racial dynamic." America's long racial nightmare is far from over.
Some animals are equal, but...
There are far more black-on-white hate crimes than the other way around.
Anyone who says otherwise hasn't looked at the crime statistics.
Because they are basically cowards. You'll never see these jackholes picking a fair fight that they might lose.
Thank you dead,
beware: NY times has you on their black-list.
If it wasnt for you, I'd have to pickup my usual "SYDNEY Morning Herald" along with my bagel w/cream cheese and coffee this morning.
Isnt it poignant that it still had to take some rag from AUSTRALIA to read this.
Oh? How many Americans are even going to read, see or hear about this story? The MSM won't because their idea of freedom of speech and the press ONLY applies to their agenda.
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Consultant Ned: You must build a giant catapult. To fire the greatest of projectiles at the sloths of Los Angeles.
Sir Arthur: What kind of projectile?
(Consultant Ned throws a portfolio/sack upon the roundtable)
Consultant Ned: This.
Sir Arthur: Are you suggesting we throw money at the problem?
Consultant Net: Precisely.
There is no authority to arrest somebody for not liking somebody else or even *saying that they don't like somebody else.*
While liberals and people seeking revenge, fantasize that **THINKING IS VIOLENT** because they must find, somehow, "violence" in all that they oppose --- in order to justify thought police state actions --- they have no Constitutional ground upon which to arrest what displeases them and theirs.
The point is, that one of the major ojections among our Founding Fathers (and their ancestors), which gave rise to our new country, was that in the old country, there was too much, and in the history of other countries, there was too much:
Abuse by government - wherein these governments arrested people and usually locked them away in some dungeon, because of what they were thinking, alleged or otherwise.
Our Founding Fathers were ardently opposed to Thought Police State Authority.
Now, because so much "hate crime" prosecution has resulted in a very great bias in fact and in the liberal media and in the public eye ... where so-called "minorities" have been the "victims," there have been occasions when "the white people" have been set upon by so-called "minorities," and some in the public want to enforce "hate crimes" prosecutions, in order to, putting it mildly, "reverse [the long overdue] discrimination."
Does not matter - their wishes to reverse things or get revenge - it is not Constitutional, and ALL "hate crimes" criminal statutes should be promptly revoked and torn up.
They are an abomination and grievous affront to our Constitution, which originally intended that our government(s) not get into the business of Thought Police Actions --- see the First Amendment!
Can you provide a specific reference in the USC to support this? Best as I am aware, it says we can't deprive one of life, liberty, or property without due process. No mention of a violent act. Care to provide a constitutional analysis?
Sadly, here in the US, all our big cities are going to become like LA. Millions of Latinos moving into the cities, into formerly black neighborhoods, taking low-skill jobs. Illegals make it worse because they take the low-end jobs and will work under the table if necessary.
Urban black culture has become so coarse and violent that mainstream whites (and others) will not hire young blacks. Their education is so non-existent as to make them unemployable. Their bad attitude doesn't help, either.
Blacks and Latinos fighting it out in the ghetto. Meanwhile, Asians are becoming the technocratic elite (at least here in CA), and whites are fleeing to the exurbs.
I am retiring very soon. And I am not going to live anywhere NEAR a big city. Between the race riots and the terror attacks, I'll take rural nowhere, thanks.
This is a classic example of my being tired and not getting down on paper what I meant to say, here and there.
I was referring to the distinction between what a person is thinking, during the commission of a violent act, and the violent act itself; a situation, I hope that you'll understand.
We may arrest for the violent act, and charge the perp for that, but we may not charge the perp (piling on charges) for his/her thinking.
It's one count, not two.
My apologies for writing hastily.
No problem, I just thought I had missed something. Keep the faith! ;-)
Be true to the 2nd amendment even in rural America.
Criminals are common to all groups.
The complete spelling actually made it to print (in an Australian paper).
Editorial policy based on complexion, hair texture, facial features.
Good grief, you still think that the Constitution has anything to do with how law is practiced in this country - get a clue!
So you would say we should make no distinction between an accidentally fatal shooting and premeditated murder?
The fact is, the motivation behind an act always has been and always will be relevant.
""I think the case will redefine how Americans look at hate crimes," Hutchinson says. "Traditionally, African-Americans were victims."
This is baloney. Since the introduction of hate crime laws the majority of perps have been black and the majority of victims white and latino. The media has always misrepresented the facts to play on white guilt.
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