Surge in O.C. Hate Crimes Raises New Concerns, Fear : Racism: This year, 34 incidents are reported, up from 16 in 1990. Experts tie some of the boost to the Gulf War.

A white Catholic, the 18-year-old high school graduate has heard plenty of locker room slurs against minority classmates. But he says he never really had to confront the issue of racism himself--until a week ago Sunday.

That was when he got jumped by a gang of skinheads, apparently in large part for being in a park with a Chinese-American friend. The attack brought home for him a reality that many minorities say they must deal with regularly--the reality of racism.

“I don’t want to think if I’d been with one of my black friends what they would have done,” said the 18-year-old, requesting anonymity.

As a white person, he said, “it felt really, really, really strange to be in that position. . . . The one thing that kept going through my mind was their Nazi salute.”

The college-bound youth was an unwitting participant in one in a string of racially tinged events--”hate crimes,” in the parlance of police and prosecutors--that have raised anew the concerns and fears of some authorities and residents in Orange County.

“I’m not sure what to make of them,” Fullerton Mayor Chris Norby said of the 15 to 20 skinheads reported to have attacked three youths in a local park.

“I know they’re out there, I know they’re dangerous, I know they’re punks,” he said. “But I’m surprised they’re operating in these great numbers.”

The number of reported hate crimes in Orange County is on the rise this year, as seen in authorities’ accounts of violence, threats, and graffiti targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Jews, gays and other groups around the area.

Experts say it is difficult to tell whether such statistics accurately reflect the racial climate, but the recent string of incidents has nonetheless prompted some immediate response--such as the creation of an anti-hate crime task force in Mission Viejo.

In the days just before the Fullerton attack, a white man was arrested for allegedly trying to run a group of white and black children off the road in Mission Viejo, then yelling racial slurs at a 12-year-old black as he hit him.

The attacker questioned why the white girls were with blacks, police said.

A black man flying into John Wayne Airport from Northern California says he was verbally harassed with racial slurs and struck to the ground as he waited for his ride. Authorities did not feel they had enough evidence to prosecute the case as a hate crime.

A Jewish family in Rancho Santa Margarita had anti-Semitic graffiti sprayed on their lawn.

And an Anaheim businessman, once the chairman of the Jewish Defense League’s Orange County chapter, set up a bogus telephone hot line offering rewards to those who turn in illegal immigrants.

The Orange County Human Relations Commission, a public agency that has tracked incidents of “hate crimes” and other reported racial harassment for the last several years, has seen its reports climb to record levels this year.

The agency already has recorded 34 such incidents this year, up from 16 in 1990, 14 in 1989, and 20 in 1988, said Rusty Kennedy, the commission’s executive director.

By comparison, Los Angeles County--with about 3.7 times the population of Orange County--had only 2.4 times as many reported hate crimes last year, with 38 reports.

In part, the increase in Orange County so far this year can be blamed on a noticeable surge during the Persian Gulf War in harassment and attacks against Jews and Arabs--or those even appearing to be from either group.

Mission Viejo Mayor Robert A. Curtis calls this “a byproduct of misplaced patriotism, a kind of jingoistic reaction that caused the internment of the Japanese in World War II.”

During the war, for instance, someone broke into the Mission Viejo home of an Asian-Indian family, burglarized it, and spray-painted inside with “Arabs Go Home-You will Die,” Kennedy said.

And in early February, a Jewish Community Center in Laguna Beach was hit by vandals who painted “No Blood for Zion” on the building.

This was one of several incidents that “appeared to be related to the Gulf War,” said Elizabeth Gale, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in Orange County.

Gale said tracking trends in racial incidents is difficult because of a lack of data from the federal, state and local levels. But she added: “Whether these crimes that have occurred in the last couple of weeks are typical or atypical has to be addressed.”

Kennedy, of the Human Relations Commission, agreed, saying he has been anxiously awaiting the enactment of a recently approved U.S. Justice Department program for tracking hate crimes--as well as similar statewide efforts--to gauge the problem.

“Things go on all the time that we just don’t hear about,” he said. “We can’t say there’s a significant trend; we just don’t have a good enough record.”

Curtis, in Mission Viejo, said: “The community is outraged and sickened by these hate crimes, but I can’t yet determine whether these activities are perpetrated by a growing racist element in the area or are just isolated, individual acts.

“Hopefully, our task force will be able to get a better handle on that.”

If there can be a positive outgrowth from the publicity surrounding the most recent string of racial incidents in Orange County, Kennedy and others suggested, it will be the growth in public awareness about the existence of the problem and the solutions available.

“The community needs to know exactly how much of this stuff is going on around us,” Kennedy said.

Some victims of racial harassment say they, too, have become more resolute in their desire to expose such attitudes to the public.

Mission Viejo high school student Tomeka Bradley, for instance, got a letter earlier this year after she was profiled in a story about her activities at school as part of Black History Month.

In the typewritten letter, the author wrote: “We moved down here to South Orange County to get away from black people. We don’t like them. . . . We don’t respect them. We regard them as generally lazy, rather stupid and violent. We don’t regard them as a race, we think of them as a major disgrace.”

The letter frightened her, Bradley said, but it also made her determined to keep working on black issues. “It makes me mad, and it makes me want to do more. So other people know it’s not true (that blacks haven’t contributed to society) and we did do something. It kind of fuels the fire.”

Times correspondent Zion Banks contributed to this report.

Racial Hatred in Orange County

Ranging from harassing phone calls to beatings, 35 hate-related incidents reported since January to the Orange County Human Relations Commission have touched all races, but owing to the Gulf War, the year has been particularly bad for people who look as if they have Mideast origins: JANUARY

* The preschool at the Orange County Mosque in Garden Grove receives a bomb threat.

* A Kuwaiti junior high student on a school playground in La Habra is pushed and taunted by a group of white students.

* A 19-year-old man is assaulted in Costa Mesa by several men who shout slurs against gays as they kick and punch him.

* A junior high school student in La Habra announces in class that all students should boycott a local 7-Eleven store because “they’re Arabs.”

* A 37-year-old gay man in Laguna Beach is abducted, beaten and shot in the leg by three men who shout slurs against gays.

* An Asian-Indian man is verbally abused with profane racial slurs by an irate white man outside a Fullerton post office.

* A 49-year-old Jewish woman receives a threat from an unidentified male phone caller who uses a profane, anti-Semitic epithet.

FEBRUARY

* A 78-year-old Jewish anti-war demonstrator is called a profane, anti-Semitic epithet over the phone at her retirement home in Laguna Hills.

* A security guard in Yorba Linda is fired after refusing to tell his boss if he is Iranian.

* An Asian-Indian man in Cypress is questioned antagonistically by a white man about his nationality and told, “You don’t look American.”

* A death threat is spray-painted in foot-high letters on the home of an Asian-Indian family in Mission Viejo. A computer is also stolen from the home.

* A black student at Capistrano Valley High School receives a hate letter after being featured in a newspaper article during Black History Month.

* Profanity against Iraq is painted in huge letters on a hill in Laguna Hills.

* An Arab student at Chapman College is verbally accosted by other students who say that because the Gulf War is being fought against Arabs, Arabs should not be on campus. The woman also reports that other Arab students on campus have had their cars trashed.

MARCH

* Anti-white graffiti are painted on a white-owned store in a Stanton Latino neighborhood. Fires are lit in the store and in a trash bin. Local Latinos tell the owner that he doesn’t belong in the neighborhood.

* A man presumed to be gay is jumped, beaten and taunted by four teen-agers outside a fast-food restaurant in Laguna Beach. He also reports a previous incident where a epithet against gays had been written on the lawn of his home.

* A white man yells racial slurs at a black woman in the parking lot of a Mission Viejo supermarket, insisting that she took his parking space.

* A Latino man in Laguna Niguel reports being harassed by a white man, who also shouted an ethnic epithet at his daughter.

* Anti-Semitic flyers are placed on cars outside a supermarket in Fountain Valley.

APRIL

* A black-white married couple featured in a newspaper article receive harassing phone calls after the article’s publication.

* A racial epithet is shouted at a black woman jogging in her neighborhood. A black woman reports her elementary school-age son is being harassed at school by white child.

* A Cypress City Council member makes an anti-gay remark at an Orange County division meeting of the League of California Cities. He publicly apologizes twice and writes more than 30 letters of apology to public bodies and gay-rights groups.

JUNE

* An Iranian family’s home in the Saddleback Valley is burglarized and a swastika scratched on its BMW.

* A Latino family receives a threatening note with a profane ethnic epithet, the result of a neighborhood dispute over noise.

* A gay man in Laguna Niguel reports neighborhood youths harassing him and yelling anti-gay insults at him.

* Anti-Semitic flyers are found in Garden Grove and Buena Park.

* Two Japanese-American women at a Huntington Beach restaurant are assaulted by several white men and women. The two are hit and have drinks thrown at them because they are speaking Japanese.

* A man reports seeing an anti-homosexual bumper sticker on a car in Costa Mesa. It formerly had an anti-drug message and had been altered.

* Three men of unknown racial origin yell racial epithets at a black man at John Wayne Airport. One also knocks him into a parked car with a large box.

* A white man is charged with attacking a black child in Mission Viejo and screaming profane racial epithets at him. The child’s mother had been the victim of a racial hate incident in March.

JULY

* After driving across a gas station in Irvine to reach a street, an African-American man is called a profane epithet by an Iranian-American employee. The African-American stops his car and punches the employee. Police arrive, but the employee declines to file charges.

* A Jewish family in Rancho Santa Margarita has the word Jew sprayed in 3-foot-high letters on their front lawn by a group of youths.

* News stories report that a phony telephone hot line in Placentia promises rewards for reporting illegal immigrants. The recording contains an ethnic epithet. It turns out to be part of a man’s dispute with a Spanish-language radio station.

* A Chinese-American high school student is jumped and beaten unconscious in Fullerton by a group of white supremacists. Two black youths may have been confronted by the same group earlier in Placentia.

Source: Rusty Kennedy, executive director, Orange County Human Relations Commission