[See the full account of a terrifying crime below]
A mere 65 hours after the Los Angeles Times first reported a ghastly race-fueled attack on a new black family in Compton by a roaming Latino army of insecure intimidation punks, a phalanx of black and brown civic-political leaders spliced together their shoulders this morning on the steps of Compton City Hall.
With militancy, they vowed they would not allow the hoodlums to xerox their crime in “an otherwise peaceful bedroom community.”
But does that solemn foreswearing weigh more than a bag of cabbage?
The answer may be positive.
The crucial question promptly was put into play.
[img]1679|left|Dr. Earl Ofari Hutchinson||no_popup[/img] Immediately after the heavily covered, no-frills press conference organized by journalist/scholar/civil rights leader Dr. Earl Ofari Hutchinson and Basil Kimbrew, Chair of the California Friends of the African American Caucus, Dr. Hutchinson was asked if the gathering was meaningful or only symbolic?
The setting on a cold, blustery morning was designed for history.
The blue-collar scene will blare with unmistakable articulation later today through the ears and eyes of viewers who will digest accounts from the many television channels that were present.
Periodically, and regularly, the speakers representing the hard-scrabble community were forced to stop. Their chords were overwhelmed as loudly clanging Metro rail cars impolitely, as if it were 1900 yesterday, roared south and north down the tracks.
Dr. Hutchinson stepped toward a quiet corner.
Will there be a positive payoff for Compton residents that survives longer than the headlines? he was asked.
Question: Beyond words, what can you do to prevent a repeat crime?
“Two things need to be done,” Dr. Hutchinson told the newspaper.
“Community-wide, and this was a good start today. People did come together and did speak out. Across the (ethnic) lines. The days of dialogue, that has been talked about, too. That is important.
“The bigger thing that has to be done any time you have violence, any time arrests are made, any time perpetrators, suspects, you have to slap a Hate Crimes charge against them – either the District Attorney or the U.S. Attorney.
“We have called upon them many times in the past to do that.”
Does the government have the will to do that?
“Sometimes they do,” Dr. Hutchinson said.
“It only happens if there is pressure. There has got to be public pressure.
“By itself, the government will not do it. The government will say ‘Basically it is a local issue. A local case. That’s it.’
How do you create that kind of pressure?
“Today is a start. The other thing is, we have actually gotten – in three cases I can think of in the last few years – we have actually reached out. We have had meetings. We have had public protests.
“We have screamed at them:
‘This is a Hate Crime. You have to prosecute it as such. If you don’t do that, essentially it is almost like it is open license. We’ll step back and just treat it as a common, homegrown garden-variety case.’
“That does not send any kind of a message.
“Even more importantly,” said Dr. Hutchinson, “it really sends a message that government agencies take this seriously (if prosecuted as a Hate Crime).”
Six weeks after Jackie Lacey – the first black, the first woman – was inaugurated as Los Angeles County District Attorney, Dr. Hutchinson and Mr. Kimbrew bypassed her.
They selected a more powerful authority, the United States Attorney, the U.S. Justice Dept., “immediately,” said Dr. Hutchinson, Chair of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Round Table. “I challenged him. “I said, ‘You have a Civil Rights Division, a Criminal Division and an FBI. You need to be involved with that. Once there is visible evidence that you are involved, that sends a strong message.
“‘Generally what happens is, they head for the hills.’
“There is something else in play. These are gang members who are involved. We work with a lot of black and Latino ex-gang members.
“It is one thing for a public official to say something. But it really is a whole different game when you have peers who are speaking to each other, gang members speaking to (former) gang members.”
Here is the story of the attack, as reported last Friday night by the Los Angeles Times:
By Sam Quinones, Richard Winton and Joe Mozingo
The trouble began soon after they arrived.
The black family—a mother, three teenage children and a 10-year-old boy—moved into a little yellow home in Compton over Christmas vacation.
When a friend came to visit, four men in a black SUV pulled up and called him a “nigger,” saying black people were barred from the neighborhood, according to Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies. They jumped out, drew a gun on him and beat him with metal pipes.
It was just the beginning of what detectives said was a campaign by a Latino street gang to force an African American family to leave.
The attacks on the family are the latest in a series of violent incidents in which Latino gangs targeted blacks in parts of Greater Los Angeles over the last decade.
Compton, with a population of about 97,000, was predominantly black for many years. It is now 65 percent Latino and 33 percent black, according to the 2010 U.S. census. But it's not only historically black areas that have been targeted.
Federal authorities have alleged in several indictments in the last decade that the Mexican Mafia prison gang has ordered street gangs under its control to attack African Americans. Leaders of the Azusa 13 gang were sentenced to lengthy prison terms earlier this month for leading a policy of attacking African American residents and expelling them from the town.
Similar attacks have taken place in Harbor Gateway, Highland Park, Pacoima, San Bernardino, Canoga Park and Wilmington, among other places. In the Compton case, sheriff's officials say the gang appears to have been acting on its own initiative.
Sheriff's detectives said Friday they had arrested Jeffrey Aguilar, 19, of Gardena and Efren Marquez, 21, of Rialto, both alleged members of the Compton Varrio 155 gang, and are continuing to look for more assailants.
“This family has no gang ties whatsoever,” Sheriff's Lt. Richard Westin said. “They are complete innocent victims here.”
The 19-year-old family friend managed to break free that first day and run into the house, where the children were the only ones at home.
The attackers left, but a half-hour later a crowd of as many as 20 people stood on the lawn yelling threats and epithets. A beer bottle crashed through the living room window as the youngsters watched in horror.
“They were scared if they called the sheriff they'd be killed,” Westin said. “So they called their mom, who called the Sheriff's Department.”
The gang members were gone by the time deputies arrived, but they kept coming back, almost daily, driving by slowly until they got someone's attention, then yelling racial insults and telling them to leave. The mother sent the children to live with relatives and is now packing up to leave herself.
“This gang has always made it clear they have a racial hatred for black people,” said Westin, who has worked in the area for more than two decades. “They justify in their own sick minds because of their rivalry with the Compton black gangs. They repeatedly used racial epithets, they use racial hatred graffiti and they tag up the black church a lot.”
At the home on 153rd Street on Friday, the rain-drenched street was empty and quiet. But the gang's presence was clear.
Its tags marked several long walls, stop signs, curbs and school crossing signs — often with the nicknames of individual gang members included.
Crews remove the graffiti almost every morning.
[img]1678|exact|Graffitti’d steeple of Greater Holy Faith Baptist Church, 155th Street, Compton. Los Angeles Times photo. ||no_popup[/img]
Down the street, the Greater Holy Faith Missionary Baptist Church — a remnant from the time when Compton was almost all black — is often tagged, most recently, just below the cross.
Neighbors say its pastors come on Sundays and no longer live in the area.
“This is a typical American family,” said Sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker. “It is tragic that it can happen in America, let alone L.A. County. We are not going to tolerate it.”
Sheriff's detectives have searched 11 locations in Compton, Gardena and Rialto and are hoping to make more arrests.
Aguilar is accused of beating the family friend with the pipes and Marquez is accused of waving a gun in his face.
Deputies also arrested a juvenile gang member who fought with one of them during a search and tried to grab the officer's pistol.
Compton Councilwoman Yvonne Arceneaux said she was deeply troubled by the incident.
“I'm floored,” she said. “That's blatant to tell a family you can't live in this area because you are black. That's just shocking.”
Two decades ago, when Arceneaux joined the Compton City Council, she said that older blacks occupied the well-maintained, small homes in the neighborhood. But as they died or moved away, Latinos moved in.
Although she noted cultural differences between blacks and Latinos, she said she thought they were minor.
Arceneaux said she plans to reach out to the family and get the City Council involved.
“We need to address these issues,” she said. “Because if they continue to fester like this, then it can spread to the whole city.”
Latino gang attacks on African Americans have occurred periodically since the 1990s in Compton. Johnathan Quevedo, a security guard and college student, said he was shot and wounded by four Latino gang members in 2007.
Quevedo, who has African American features he inherited from his Panamanian mother, said he was walking to the Metro to take a train to his job at the downtown Marriott Hotel one morning when four Latino youths with shaved heads jumped from an SUV and ran at him. One shot him in the head, and Quevedo spent the next year recuperating.
“They didn't know who I was. I didn't know who they were,” Quevedo said. “I got shot because of my skin color, because I'm a black male.”
