Hate Crimes Up in L.A. County

The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission issued its annual hate crimes report on Thursday. The report said there were 763 hate crimes last year, up 28 percent from the year before.

Steve Julian: You might have heard Larry Mantle, about eight or 10 minutes ago, mention hate crimes in Los Angeles, and how they've gone up 28 percent in 2007 from the year before. There were 763 hate crimes, about two every day. African-Americans were the most frequent target. There were more than 300 racially motivated attacks on blacks. Robin Toma is the county human relations director.

Robin Toma: You know, this has been a longstanding feature of our hate crime statistics, so it's definitely not anything new. What I think is of concern is that racially-motivated crime in general has grown to become 68 percent of all hate crimes, and the majority of that racially-motivated crime is targeting African-Americans. You know, I think that we're still dealing with a long legacy of negative stereotyping about African-Americans, and some of that's reinforced by, you know, sometimes the crime coverage that we see on news.

Julian: Toma says he's not sure why hate crimes went up. He noted Latinos were the alleged attackers in more than 70 percent of the crimes against blacks, and that African-Americans were the alleged attackers in just over half the crimes against the Latinos. He blamed tensions over the worsening economy, and racially motivated gang violence.

Toma: We do know that there are certain areas where there are still gang-involved hate crimes, and that often can set in motion a dynamic of retaliatory violence and tensions, and building more hostility among communities that can spill over into non-gang involved hate acts.

So, we're still trying to figure out what is going on here. We certainly know that it's not just limited to that, because the increases that we see are... includes anti-white hate crime, anti-Asian/Pacific Islander hate crime, anti-Jewish hate crime. All of it rose.

Julian: Only Muslims saw fewer hate crimes last year; they were down by 11 percent. Gay men are still a popular target. The second most often attacked group, with more than a hundred incidents, almost all involving gay men.

Toma: We've been in a period where there's been a lot of controversy about the same sex marriage issue, and there always is a relation between what happens in communities and the political debates, and what plays out in terms of acts of discrimination, and even hate crime.

You know, it could be that the debate has generated more hostile attitudes and resulted in attacks. It's not clear from what we can see so far what exactly is behind it, but we certainly are concerned, given the fact that we're entering a period where you have a very controversial ballot initiative that is going to be focusing on same sex marriage.

Julian: The hate crime report found white supremacists played a role in 17 percent of all attacks. Toma says they got all the information from police agencies across Los Angeles County; he concedes only a fraction of what the commission defined as "hate crimes" were prosecuted.

Toma: The cases that are given to us by law enforcement agencies as hate crimes are based on the report taken by law enforcement. A variety of things can occur, but what we do hear from prosecutors is that, you know, often they have a real challenge in proving the mental state of the individuals.

In order to prove a hate crime, it's a lot harder than just proving simply an attack, an assault, or a murder. You have to prove that what was in the head of the person, what motivated them, was substantially prohibited prejudice.

Julian: We'll parse these numbers even more with Larry Mantle at 10 this morning on AirTalk. Robin Toma joins him then.