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is beginning to reach the general public is whether hate crimes creates a sense of divisiveness and therefore should be repealed.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.
