An issue in academic circles that is beginning to reach the general public is whether hate crimes creates a sense of
divisiveness and therefore should be repealed. I was personally involved in the creation of the concept during my work as consultant to the California Attorney General's Commission on Racial, Ethnic, Religious and
Minority Violence from 1980-1985 and perhaps can add some insight into the rationale for their creation that has generally not been raised by those who debate their value.Except in rare instances there was no way for
the public to learn of intergroup conflict or tensions in their communities prior to the enactment of hate crime laws beginning in the 1980's. The types of incidents I investigated when I worked for the
California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (then known as the California Department of Fair Employment Practices) prior to 1980 only reached notice when victims managed to overcome layers of resistance and get
their stories into the press.
In one series of incidents I investigated, an African-American high school student was chased home by white students, who then returned and stood on his front lawn with baseball bats
taunting him with racial slurs and daring him to come out. The line officer who responded wrote on the report that it was one of a continuing series of incidents of African-Americans being attacked in the
community, but no one ever reviewed the report. The other incidents against African-Americans in the area during a period of a few months included a shotgun blast through the front door of one family, garbage
being dumped in the swimming pool of another, excrement being used to scrawl racial epithets on the wall of the house of another, and young white men driving their cars on the lawn of the home of a single mother then
spinning their tires and screaming racial epithets.
Initially no one but the victims and the officers who responded were aware of what was going on in the community. Almost all the police reports were
listed under the heading of ''suspicious circumstances'' and ''malicious mischief'' and were not reviewed by anyone in higher authority because reports under those headings were skipped by the reviewing officers
who concentrated on ''more important criminal activity''. Similar scenarios occurred throughout California and the rest of the nation prior to 1980.
In 1980 then California Attorney General John Van de Kamp
created the Commission on Racial, Ethnic, Religious and Minority Violence. The Commission held hearings throughout California to identify levels of intergroup tension and conflict and to recommend strategies for
dealing with them. The hearings began to follow a similar course. In most communities residents would come forward with a litany of bias-related incidents and atrocities while law enforcement and other
public officials provided testimony portraying a vision of a harmonious community free from intergroup conflict and strife.
The Commission concluded that it was important to pierce the veil hiding intergroup tensions
and conflicts where they occurred so that the communities could respond to them and begin working on ways to reduce their occurrence. Commissioners argued that intergroup tensions and conflicts would escalate if
they were not addressed. The Commission also recognized that there are barriers to recognizing the presence of intergroup tensions and conflict because of the unfavorable attention and damage to the reputation of
the community that it would bring. Even today, particularly on school campuses, in tourist areas and small communities, public officials and the media often fail to report intergroup conflicts.
The Commission
formulated the concept for establishing a new class of crime to distinguish those that were motivated by bias and bigotry from the vast majority that were not. They also proposed the use of procedures that would
ensure that crimes motivated by bias and bigotry would get a second level of review within the police hierarchy regardless of whether they were labeled as ''malicious mischief '' or ''suspicious circumstances'' or
not. After hours of debate the Commission finally settled on the term ''hate crime''.
The formation of ''hate crime'' laws were not based on the notion that providing greater penalties for
crimes motivated by bigotry would deter their occurrence or that longer terms would ensure that the perpetrator refrains from repeating his/her activity. Instead, Commissioners were seeking a pragmatic way
to pry out information on intergroup conflict that they considered an essential first step to ensure the long term health of the communities where they were occurring. Included in the reports were recommendations
for schools and communities to organize to address the areas of intergroup conflict exposed in the crime reports.
