Mayor plans meeting to combat problem
By Enric Volante
The Arizona Daily Star
Arizonans reported 117 crimes motivated by hate in the first half of this year.
They ranged from vandalism to assaults and took place in homes, gas stations, restaurants, parking lots and on the road, according to preliminary statistics released yesterday by the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
The frequency and type of reports in 1999 indicate bigotry persists at about the same levels as last year, said Mark Lieberman, the Arizona chairman of the Anti-Defamation League.
The surrender Wednesday of a white supremacist who killed one person and wounded five others in a machine-gun attack on a Jewish community center in Los Angeles prompted Tucson Mayor George Miller to call for police, educators, religious leaders and others to speak out against hate and racism.
In a statement issued yesterday, Miller said they will meet at 11:30 a.m. Monday at the Jewish Community Center at North Dodge Boulevard and East River Road. Chief Richard Miranda of the Tucson Police Department is to discuss plans to avert violence by working with the area's four largest school districts.
The Los Angeles attack ``speaks to the fact that it can happen anywhere at any time,'' said Dennis Noonan, chairman of a local anti-hate-crime task force.
Pima County and Tucson created the task force in 1995 after a South Carolina-based Ku Klux Klan leader unsuccessfully tried to organize a chapter in Tucson.
Noonan said he's not aware of any organized hate groups in the Tucson area.
The Anti-Defamation League, however, says it's concerned that a black-supremacist group surfaced in Tucson recently with 11 known members.
``They believe all whites are inferior and subhuman,'' Lieberman said.
Glen Howell, the Tucson co-chairman of a statewide task force on hate crime, said the group's literature that he's seen doesn't say that. But he's trying to learn what the group advocates because he's concerned by the literature's brief reference to black ``supremacy.''
A bigger concern, said the league's Lieberman, is that the National Alliance - the ``most powerful and extremist'' of the nation's neo-Nazi groups - opened two new offices in California and is thinking about starting one in Arizona.
The DPS reported 29 of this year's 117 hate crimes occurred in Pima County, including 22 in Tucson and one in Oro Valley.
Other counties and their tallies were Maricopa, 89; Mohave, four; and Yuma, one.
Vandalism led with 42 Arizona cases, followed by 39 simple assaults, 30 cases of intimidation, 14 aggravated assaults, two robberies and one burglary.
The actual number of hate crimes may be much higher. Experts cite numerous reasons why some go unreported.
Police who investigate may not recognize an incident as a hate crime. Gays in the closet may not want to risk exposure. Some other cultures consider it too embarrassing to report.
Local law enforcement authorities in rural areas tend not to investigate or report sufficiently, Lieberman said.
When vandals burned a cross on the lawn of a black family in Lake Havasu City, for example, the case went unprosecuted until an investigator with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office looked into it on his own time and turned his findings over to the U.S. Attorney's Office and FBI, Lieberman recalled.
Federal prosecutors in 1997 charged three men with violating the civil rights of that family.
The DPS statistics, compiled from local law-enforcement agencies, also show that most offenders were white.
Blacks were the victims in twice as many crimes - 51 - as any other minority group, followed by gay men (23), Hispanics (10) and Jews (8).
Other hate-mongering incidents don't fit in crime reports.
In Tucson, one or more people working in pre-dawn darkness have been tossing literature with anti-Semitic and other hate messages in the front yards of homes off and on for the past three years, said John Peck, a community relations officer with the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona.
The leafleting dies down and then resumes a few months later in neighborhoods all over Tucson, he said.
His group reports the incidents to police. But distributing hate-mongering literature is not necessarily a crime in a free-speech society.
``Does it help foster an environment of violence and prejudice?'' Peck said. ``Absolutely.''
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Read more about hate crimes at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
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