Page One

City discusses recent rise in hate crimes

By Judith Scherr
Saturday October 26, 2002

Berkeley’s not insulated from the nationwide surge in hate crimes reported since Sept. 11, 2001. And so, the city sponsored a Thursday-evening forum “A Community Dialogue to Prevent Hate Crimes.” 

While light attendance was probably due to a simultaneous mayoral forum and the World Series, about 35 residents and 15 city employees, including a number of police officers, were on hand. 

Calling hate crimes “ugly” and “brutal,” City Manager Weldon Rucker said police have documented 38 hate crimes this year and 51 since Sept. 11. The rising numbers – just 14 such crimes were documented in 1994 and 10 in 2000 – are a combination of growing sensitivity to the notion of hate crimes and an actual increase in these crimes, Rucker said. 

“The community needs to report hate crimes to police,” Rucker said. This point was underscored several times during the evening. 

Formal speakers included Chris Lim, associate superintendent with the Berkeley schools. Lim emphasized the importance of “a safe learning environment,” and said the district is targeting not only hate crimes, but also “the increase in bullying-type behavior.” 

A number of residents described their experiences.  

 

Marisa Saunders, an African American woman, talked about receiving hate mail, after helping to conduct a workshop on racism. “They didn’t know me,” Saunders said, asserting that the expression of hate was the letter-writers’ “own fear.” 

A Muslim woman wearing a traditional veil talked about a hateful incident that happened to her when she was driving on a relatively isolated road in the Oakland hills. A teen-ager pulled up beside her and yelled out, “What makes you think you can bomb buildings?” 

“It was very frightening,” she said, noting the irony in the fact that she was born in Chicago, that her father’s ancestors “came over on the Mayflower,” and that her mother’s family has been in the United States for three generations. “The idea of bombing a building has never occurred to me,” she said. 

It’s not always easy to define a hate crime, said Aftim Saba, a Palestinian-American. Saba talked about the confusion in some people’s minds between political speech and hate crimes. “Some people are trying to attack political discourse” as anti-Semitic, he said. 

When some people say that U.S. taxes are supporting Israel’s occupation of Palestine and contributing to the death of Palestinian children, they are condemned as if they have spoken out against Jewish people; in fact, they are opposing actions of the state of Israel, he said. “If I condemn the actions of the Chinese government in Tibet, it doesn’t mean that I’m anti-Chinese.”  

Others underscored that racism can be black against white, as well as white against black. 

While Frank Gorucharri had a story of homophobia to share, he also lauded the community and police department response to the crime. Gorucharri is the director of the Pacific Center for Human Growth, an agency that supports gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and those who are questioning their sexuality. 

He told the gathering that when he got to work on Oct. 7, he found that someone had used a black marker to write “fags” on a flier posted outside the center. He said it was the first such incident he’d experienced in the six years since he’d been the agency’s director. 

He then reported the crime: “I called the police department and it makes me so appreciative of being in this city,” he said. The beat officer showed up very quickly, then a supervisor, then a police photographer to document the evidence, he said. “It was a nice, professional human experience.” 

The next day the Daily Planet ran a story about the incident, he said, and as a result, he got calls from public officials on the local and state level and supportive responses from the community.  

Saba then pointed to the recent 17-year-old Newark murder victim, born as a male and living life as a female and called attention to the critical importance of finding solutions to hate crimes. “We really need to look at the hate that divides us and hurts us,” he said. 

 

To get a copy of the minutes of the meeting and for information on follow-up meetings, call Arrietta Chakos in the city manager’s office at 981-7000.