San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis spoke at The Center’s LGBT Community Coalition Breakfast last Friday to give an update on how her office is responding to the recent increase in local hate crimes against the city’s GLBT community.

“We’ve been aware of more [hate crimes] happening in the gay and lesbian community” particularly after last year’s Pride, said Dumanis.

Last year, police arrested three men who attacked six gay men with a baseball bat and a knife while yelling anti-gay slurs in five separate attacks outside the San Diego Pride festival in Balboa Park.

They stabbed one man in the back and broke another’s facial bones. San Diego Superior Supreme Court Judge Frederick Maguire gave the three assailants between eight- and 11-year prison terms.

According to the “City of San Diego 2006 Crime Briefing,” between 2005 and 2006, hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation rose by 6 percent in San Diego: In 2005, there were 11 such hate crimes, and in 2006 the number had risen to 18. The increase was particularly dramatic in comparison to the decline of 7 percent between 2003 and 2005, as reported in the San Diego 2005 Crime Index. Nationally, 14 percent of hate crimes are motivated by sexual orientation, the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics 2005 reports.

Deputy District Attorney Oscar Garcia, who heads the District Attorney’s Hate Crimes Unit, said he did not know why, other than the unit’s emphasis on public awareness which could increase hate crime reports, the rate fluctuated so widely in San Diego during the three years between 2003 and 2006.

The District Attorney’s Office Hate Crimes Unit, created in 1988, was one the of the first specialty prosecution units in the nation. One of the many things the unit does is train cadets and police specifically to deal with hate crimes. Typically, training takes four hours and covers the significance of hate crimes, their legality and how to respond to them.

“We train the cadets at the police academy on how to handle hate crimes to make sure that it’s in the forefront of their minds,” Dumanis said.

The California Penal Code defines “hate crime” as “any criminal act or attempted criminal act motivated by hatred based on race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability.” A major problem in proving that a hate crime has been committed is proving that the assailant was motivated by hate, Dumanis said. “Just because the person uses that word [faggot] doesn’t mean it’s a hate crime unless you can prove that he was targeting someone that he perceived to be gay or was gay.

“If I just said ‘stick it up’ with a gun and say ‘you faggot,’ OK, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m attacking him because of his sexual orientation. Now if they went to every area in Hillcrest and picked out people and basically made it clear through their actions that they were going after gay people, then it might be able to be defined as a hate crime,” Dumanis said, adding that this “doesn’t mean that we can’t prosecute it as a crime and it doesn’t mean we won’t treat it judiciously or try to go after him. It just means we can’t attach the hate crime to him in order to give him a little bit more time in jail or prison.”

“Hate speech” should always be reported, Dumanis said. “If anyone is ever a victim of hate-motivated speech, it’s a good thing to report because we keep track of those things, and if someone is arrested for a crime, they can pull all those things together” and prosecute the crime as hate motivated.”

If you or someone you know has been a victim of a hate crime or hate-motivated speech, contact the San Diego Police Department at 619-531-2000.