Homeless in Arizona

I think it is wrong for the government to give people extra punishment or less punishment because of they committed a crime against some "protected" or "unprotected" group of people.

I also suspect laws like this which give special treatment to some people will always end up being abused.

For example while I suspect the purpose of the law is to "protect" gay people who are beaten up, a cop or prosecutor who hates gay folks could use the law could be used to give extra harsh treatment to one gay person who gets into a fight with another gay person, and give the government a lame excuse to railroad gay people.

Source

Phoenix touts police focus on hate crimes

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Nov 23, 2012 12:14 AM

Phoenix is expected to rank among the nation’s top cities in hate-crime reports once again when the FBI releases hate-crime data next month.

Although that status might sound disturbing, police and civil-rights advocates say it’s not so much a stain on the city, but more of a tribute to the diligence of Phoenix police and their efforts to educate the public, collect detailed information on suspected hate crimes and report it accurately to federal officials.

But to assault victims such as Austin Head, those distinctions are merely semantics.

Head was assaulted in early November after he left a popular gay and lesbian nightclub near Seventh Avenue and Camelback Road. Head and a friend were standing near Central Avenue and Osborn Road, about 2 1/2 miles from the club, when two men walked toward them.

“What you say, (expletive)?”

A pejorative name for a gay man was the last word Head and his friend, Eric Kelly, said they heard before the assault began. Head remembers little of the attack, waking up in the hospital with a cut and two fractures under his eye.

Two brothers, Jermon Barnes, 22, and Ernie Barnes, 24, were arrested in connection with the case.

Phoenix investigators determined the case was motivated by anti-gay bias. The severity of the victims’ injuries resulted in both suspects being charged with aggravated assault. If either man is convicted, and prosecutors present evidence of anti-gay bias as a factor for the court to consider at sentencing, it could result in a longer prison term.

The investigators’ view that bias motivated the attack does not guarantee that prosecutors, a judge or jury will agree. Even when all the elements of a hate crime appear evident, judges and juries can stop short of declaring that a crime was motivated by hatred.

At a federal trial earlier this year in which bias was alleged, two brothers faced charges of mailing a pipe bomb in 2004 to then-Scottsdale Diversity Director Don Logan, who is Black. Prosecutors claimed Dennis and Daniel Mahon carried out the bombing for a White-supremacist group, the White Aryan Resistance, which encourages members to commit acts of violence. During the trial, they played messages Dennis left for an undercover informant in which he referred to Logan using a racial slur. The jury found Daniel not guilty of conspiring to damage buildings and property but convicted Dennis of the same charge.

When it came to decide whether the bombing was a hate crime, the jury could not agree that Logan was targeted because of his race. The distinction was largely academic: Dennis Mahon, 61, received a 40-year sentence for the bombing.

By then, however, the damage to the community had been done, said Bill Straus, director of the Arizona Regional Office of the Anti-Defamation League. It stretched beyond the injuries suffered by Logan when the bomb exploded in his hands.

“You know why hate crimes are such a big deal for us? It’s the only kind of criminal activity that sends a message to an entire community,” Straus said. “If you’re Black and you read about a hate crime committed against a Black man, you feel targeted.”

Phoenix ranks high in hate-crime statistics

In 1990, when the federal government passed legislation requiring the U.S. attorney general to collect data on hate crimes committed in the U.S., the FBI published a book with data from only 11 states. More than 20years later, nearly 15,000 law-enforcement agencies, including 89 in Arizona, collect and report hate-crime data to the FBI. But the results are uneven.

Phoenix has consistently reported the third-most hate crimes in the country, behind New York and Los Angeles — but well ahead of larger cities like Houston and Chicago.

Phoenix reported 135 hate crimes in 2010, while Chicago and Houston reported just 17 and 13, respectively. That disparity is consistent going back through 2007.

Chicago averaged more than 200 hate crimes annually in the 1990s and reported 215 as recently as 2002. But there has been a steep decline in the number of hate-crime reports taken by city officers and reported to the FBI. In 2010, Chicago police received 46 reports and found 17 of them legitimate.

“The Chicago Police Department is mandated to report bias crimes to the FBI; however, only bona fide reports are counted,” Chicago police Sgt. Antoinette Ursitti wrote in response to e-mailed questions from The Arizona Republic. “The Chicago Police Department releases annual hate-crime reports that address all incidents. Over the years, there have been fluctuations in the number of reported bias crimes. Community service organizations often play a role in increased awareness and reporting.”

Like Chicago, Phoenix police have liaisons who work directly with community-advocacy groups. Local police credit those relationships with the number of hate-crime reports taken by Phoenix officers.

Law-enforcement and civil-rights experts say that local hate crimes may be rising slightly but that the disparity between Phoenix and other cities is attributable to the fact that Phoenix police have continued to focus on identifying hate crimes during a time of shrinking budgets and changing leadership in the department.

“We’ve seen so many different types of hate crimes, and I think in some ways people’s expectations of what the (hate crimes) law was going to do is different from what happened in reality,” said John Tutelman, a Phoenix prosecutor who has prosecuted bias-crime cases; served on the Scottsdale Human Relations Commission, which promotes diversity; and trained law-enforcement officers on hate crimes.

“A lot of people saw it (the law) as protecting specific minority groups,” Tutelman said. “I think now there’s a much bigger realization that it’s protecting our sense of ourselves as a community. It’s not really protecting groups so much as it is protecting our society from bigotry and bias.

“It really is a result of Phoenix’s commitment to ensuring that people who are bigoted and are hateful aren’t allowed to get away with committing crimes that involve those elements.”

More crimes reported against some groups

The Police Department’s determination that bias motivated the assaults on Head and Kelly puts the case in a growing file of crimes targeting gay men in Phoenix. African-Americans were the most frequent targets of hate crimes in Phoenix last year, followed by gay men and Hispanics.

Phoenix police Sgt. Jeff Young, who leads the department’s bias-crime unit, said getting caught up in statistics can leave the mistaken impression that other minority groups are not targets. Slurs targeting Blacks, Hispanics and gay men are more recognizable as signs of intolerance, making it easier for patrol officers to record crimes targeting members of those groups in which they believe bias played a role.

“Hate crimes can be perpetrated against any group — that’s the message we need to get out there,” Young said. “We want each and every victim to know: We’re not concerned about anything other than the crime that has been committed against them. We’re dealing with a lot of different groups, we want to do the best job we can for that community.”

The spike in hate crimes targeting Hispanics that many observers anticipated after passage of Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law has not materialized, although advocates stress that many crimes against Hispanics go unreported because of the very nature of the law, which critics say discourages undocumented residents from making contact with law-enforcement or government agencies.

A Republic review of Phoenix police records found that Hispanic victims were more likely to be targets of intimidation, while Black victims most frequently suffered vandalism and property damage. Gay men were most frequently victims of physical violence.

“I’m not surprised at all,” said Michael Lyon, a friend and mentor of Head’s and the executive producer on a documentary about HIV-positive youths that featured Head.

“Gay men are easy targets,” Lyon said.

But cases last year in Phoenix ran the gamut.

A Phoenix woman of Guatemalan descent reported to police in January 2011 that someone broke into her home, stole nearly $23,000 of her family’s belongings and did more than $3,000 in damage to the house, including spray-painting “Leave” on walls throughout her home. The woman also told police that the rear bumper of her truck was stolen three months earlier and that her family’s cars were vandalized two years before that. Neither of those incidents were reported to police.

“What we tell people all the time: If you call the police and say, ‘I don’t expect an officer, but my neighborhood was leafleted by (neo-Nazis) overnight,’ at least the police have that information if something happens a week later,” Straus said.

A Black man living in Phoenix reported in January 2011 that his neighbor pulled a gun on him in a dispute about the victim’s failure to pick up after his dogs. The victim told police his neighbor also repeatedly used racial slurs against him. Officers contacted the neighbor the same day. According to police reports, the neighbor began yelling statements that included profanity and a racial slur and “began making comments about how a White man has no rights.”

The neighbor was charged with assault and later pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct.

That case and the example of the Guatemalan woman highlight the disconnect between legislation and reality in Phoenix.

Arizona’s bias-crime statute allows harsher sentences in felonies involving bias. But the majority of hate crimes in Phoenix are misdemeanors, leaving city prosecutors to present the facts to judges in the hope that they lean toward the higher end of the sentencing range for low-level crimes if bias is a factor.

“I think where we have tagging or graffiti that doesn’t have any element of a bias or hate crime, that the judges tend to not view it as seriously as when there’s something that implies a hate-crime bias, and they sentence accordingly,” Tutelman said.

“Although the aggravator is not statutorily applicable to misdemeanor crimes, we certainly try to use it to aggravate it with a small ‘A’ — in other words, we try to encourage the judges in Municipal Court to see it in the same light that the Legislature did.”

The Barnes brothers are expected to go to trial next year in Superior Court, where county prosecutors could try to convince the jury that bias played a role in the assault and that the crime had an impact on the entire community.

Head, the activist who was victimized, has his own message for the community.

“I don’t really live in fear, it’s unproductive,” he said. “I can’t be a wilted flower. That’s why they attack you: They think you’re weak. I would just say, ‘Be aware and stay strong.’”