Latino Hate Crimes

For some time there have been reports about the rising tensions between African-Americans and Latinos in California. Be it school fights or prison fights, it appeared that there was something afoot in Cali. Recently a case of gang members from the Avenues set were put on trial for specifically targetting African-Americans for murder in a manner not to different from the Ku Klux Klan in their heyday. I am not particularly fond of hate crime legislation since I think the government should not be policing peoples thoughts no matter how despicable they may be. This case really challenged me on this point but I still think that at best the government could have gotten the desired end result (jail time) without the need of Civil Rights legalizing. But let's get back to the case since it is particularly disturbing. The LA Times reports on the conviction of 4 Avenues gang members:

unlike other racial gang strife in the city, the Avenues' violence was deliberately aimed at African Americans with no gang affiliations, including women and children. The gang scrawled threats and racial epithets in graffiti on walls.

Among crimes committed by the defendants from 1995 to 2001, according to testimony, were shooting a 15-year-old boy riding a bike; hitting a jogger in the head with a pistol; drawing outlines of human bodies in chalk on a family's driveway, along with a racial slur; and knocking a woman off her bike, threatening her husband with a box cutter, and saying, "You niggers have been here long enough."

One night in April 1999, the defendants were riding in a van and came upon a black man, Kenneth Wilson, parking his Cadillac. When Martinez asked if anyone wanted to kill a black man, three of them jumped out, ran up to Wilson's windows and opened fire, witnesses said. A shot to the head killed him before the car had even rolled to a stop.

Saldana bragged later that he just wanted to test out his new 9-millimeter Ruger.

Another black man, Christopher Bowser, was harassed and beaten up by the defendants for years. In December 2000, he filed a police report saying Martinez had assaulted and robbed him at a bus stop near his house. A week later, Bowser was shot to death at the same bus stop on Figueroa Street.

Five days later, Avila told a fellow gang member, in a taped phone call from jail, that he and Martinez had been beating up mayates for weeks, using a Spanish-language epithet for blacks. After mentioning Bowser, he added, "That fool is gone." Avila was convicted in state court of the murder.

I really wanted to believe that the actions of these individuals was along the lines of "normal" gang activity including random violence against civilians, but the testimony makes it pretty clear that the targets were targeted for being black. Period. The question that has to be asked is whether the attitudes informing the actions of these individuals are aberration or the violent outbreak of an undercurrent that exists within the various communities that make up the population referred to as "latinos".

I think that the defenses use of blacks who had not had any problems with the Avenues was faulty. Like the Klan, they didn't go after each and every black person they saw. It was when the Klan wanted to "put blacks in their place" that they showed out.