[Part 1: Blood on the Streets]

[Part 2: A Twice-Shaken City]

Part 3: The Hole in the Law

Not surprisingly, the decisions by Seattle Police leadership that led to the Mardi Gras disaster became the focus of the controversy that continued to swirl for several weeks — indeed, months — in Seattle.

For awhile, the city’s Police Guild contemplated taking a no-confidence vote on Chief Gil Kerlikowske, who had been hired to restore the department’s credibility after the WTO fiasco but who himself had overseen a disaster of the same scale. In the end, however, it settled for hiring an outside agency to investigate the department’s command.

This review eventually found that the command structure “completely disintegrated” in the riot and placed blame firmly on Kerlikowske’s shoulders. It also concluded that the department allowed the Mayor’s Office and City Council to interfere with police decisions, and found that the department continued to ignore the lessons of the WTO debacle: Planners, it said, failed to prepare for a “worst-case scenario,” command roles were poorly identified, and tactical plans were inadequately disseminated. “The review team was astounded to learn that none of the recommendations contained in the [post-WTO outside review] had been adopted by the Police Department,” the report said. “Sadly, if they had been adopted and followed, these recommendations could have significantly improved police response to the chaos that occurred.”

A total of four task forces began examining the Fat Tuesday mess. The first, convened by the Police Department, focused on capturing the criminals who had carried out the assaults and other crimes during the event. Mayor Schell also put three other task forces in action, focused on addressing safety and planning for the Mardi Gras; one to examine the general issue of safety at other city events; and a third, to study youth violence and what the city could do in working with troubled teens to prevent such violence.

These panels, however, proved notoriously ineffective, in part because some of them insisted on closing their meetings. Moreover, the issue of the role of race in the violence was supposed to have been folded into the teen-violence, but this matter eventually was officially dropped–and never effectively raised again.

Thus the question of whether hate crimes were perpetrated in a massive scale by the gangs of young thugs that night was never adequately addressed in any way by any significant component of the community: law enforcement, city officials, the media, civil-rights leaders, the churches. Though police recommended prosecuting Khalid Adams, County Prosecutor Norm Maleng never filed such charges against him. Instead, he wound up pleading no-contest to felony theft and rioting, for which he received a six-month sentence.

And when the police task force closed up its shop in December, it announced it had arrested forty-one of the seventy-one suspects it had identified as responsible for the Fat Tuesday violence; most of these were young black men and women, though there were some whites and Hispanics arrested as well. Most of the subsequent convictions for the Fat Tuesday assaults were bargained pleas — ten for misdemeanors, three for felonies. Five juveniles received stiff punishments.

Eventually, Jerell Thomas was convicted of second-degree murder for Kristopher Kime’s death and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Aaron Slaughter, the nineteen-year-old man caught wielding the brass knuckles in the P-I’s front-page photo, wound up pleading guilty to second-degree assault and rioting, both felonies, and two counts of misdemeanor assault, for which he was given a three-year prison term.

However, there were no further recommendations to file hate-crime charges, and none were; police cited the difficulty in obtaining the evidence required for the high bar set by the state’s hate-crimes law–and most of all, they pointed to the inadequacy of the law itself in dealing with these cases.

The most immediate problem was the paucity of proof. The bulk of the evidence that police wound up using in prosecuting the assaults was on videotape or still photos, most of it taken from the rooftops of the surrounding buildings — which meant that there was very little evidence of the verbal assaults that accompanied the physical, all of which could have comprised actual evidence of hate crimes. For that, police would have needed eyewitnesses — and they had all disappeared into the night as they fled the tear gas and rubber bullets. Many came forward later, but it was only a relative handful, and their testimony, as far removed from the action as it often was, proved to be only marginally helpful.

The lack of evidence was also to some extent a result of the police officers’ failure to recognize that they were witnessing bias crimes and to act immediately. Police in fact were positioned both on the perimeter of the melee as well as above it on the rooftops, where many of them later described events they saw unfolding below. The intentional selection of white victims by blacks was apparent to witnesses on the ground (myself included) and should have been to those viewing it from above.

Though police, positioned outside the crowd as they were, may not have been able to pick up immediately on such indicators as the victims’ and witnesses’ perceptions about the crime or the perpetrator’s comments, the abundant presence of the differences between perpetrator and victim, and the fact that similar incidents were occurring in the same location, should have made the pattern self-evident.

Moreover, it was clear there was a threshold of violence upon which police did finally act — namely, the five shots that were fired as the melee reached its climax. Had the possibility of the eruption of hate crimes been on the officers’ radars, and most of all, had bias-crime prevention been as significant a priority to police leadership as dealing with gunplay evidently was, the police likely would have acted sooner and more decisively.

Just as important, recognizing the eruption of hate crimes at the Mardi Gras scene would have required a wholly different response than the riot-squad clearing of the square that was in fact conducted. Criminal-justice experts uniformly recommend sealing up the scene of any bias crime, flooding it with officers, terminating the violence, treating the victims and securing the evidence, including interviews with eyewitnesses at the scene; collecting and photographing physical evidence; identifying the criminal evidence on the victim; requesting the assistance of translators when needed; and generally conducting a preliminary investigation. Police guidelines also recommend that officers assign only one officer to interview each victim, protect the anonymity of the victims, and refer the victims to support services in the community. Notably, they also urge officers to report the suspected hate crime to their supervisors.

None of this happened, of course, on Fat Tuesday. However, the most serious impediment to prosecuting any of that night’s assaults as hate crimes was Washington’s bias-crime law itself. It is a standalone “malicious harassment” statute that makes anyone committing such a crime liable for a Class C felony. As such, it is useful for stiffening the sentences of lesser “parallel” crimes such as threatening, intimidation and vandalism when committed with a bias motivation. Conversely, it is utterly useless when it comes to more serious crimes, especially most forms of assault–only fourth-degree assault is less than a Class C felony (it is a gross misdemeanor), and first-degree assault is a Class A felony.

In other words, a prosecutor confronted with the choice of prosecuting someone for aggravated assault or malicious harassment would naturally, under Washington state law, choose the traditional “parallel” crime to pursue, because it carries stiffer penalties and is a more serious crime. Given that choice–as well as the paucity of evidence–it is utterly unsurprising that the King County Prosecutor’s Office decided to focus on pursuing various levels of assault and rioting charges against the Fat Tuesday thugs.

In the end, hate crimes went unprosecuted, and the target community was left wondering why. I had seen this before, but in a different setting: the small resort town of Ocean Shores.

***

On Fourth of July the summer of 2000, three young Vietnamese men from Seattle — twin brothers and a neighborhood friend — visited Ocean Shores, which is about a three-hour drive away on the Washington coast, west of Olympia and near Aberdeen, the hometown of Kurt Cobain. They were there to set off fireworks and enjoy the beach.

At about 1:30 the morning of the Fourth, the three of them drove from their hotel to the local convenience store at a nearby Texaco to get a late-night snack of ramen noodles. When they pulled up to the station, they were confronted by a group of about five to eight young white men, most of them with close-cropped or shaven heads, who had been hanging out in the store’s parking lot.
As it happened, these young men had been terrorizing minorities throughout the earlier part of the weekend in Ocean Shores. In one instance, they had attacked two families of Filipinos in a local parking lot; police had intervened, but merely escorted the Asians to the town borders and sent the young men on their ways with a stern warning. In others cases, they had threatened two different black men on the beach, one of them with a knife. At the end of a day of drinking, they had drifted to the Texaco parking lot, which was where a lot of young people from town were hanging out.

This was the group that began verbally assaulting the three Asians. One of them — a 20-year-old named Chris Kinison, the apparent ringleader — was waving a Confederate flag. They shouted racist epithets at the three Asians as they emerged from their car (”Fucking gooks!” “Go home!” “This is our country!” “White power!”), but the men made it safely inside the store and were not followed.

Once inside, though, Kinison and a few others continued to taunt them from outside. Kinison held his Confederate flag up to the window, pointed at the men, and made a slashing gesture across his throat. One of the twin brothers, fearing the worst, stole a pair of shrink-wrapped paring knives from the store shelf and put them in his coat pocket.

When the trio re-emerged from the store, they were again verbally assaulted, but one of them made a gesture at his pants leg suggesting he had a knife, which seemed to give the attackers pause long enough to let them reach their car safely. But as they tried to pull out of the parking lot, Kinison stepped in front of their car with his flag and prevented them from leaving.

One of the twins got out of the car to talk to Kinison and was promptly decked by two smashing blows to the face, sending his glasses flying. As he lay on the ground, his twin brother emerged from the passenger side of the car and flew at Kinison. The two men exchanged blows in brief flurry that seemed to last only a minute or so. But Kinison stepped away at the end of the exchange and told his friends he was hurt, then staggered to a curb and fell down. He had suffered 23 stab wounds — three of them, fatally, to the heart. He died there within a matter of about 10 minutes, before an ambulance could arrive.

The three Asians in the meantime had fled back to their hotel, not realizing that Kinison had been killed, and called police to report the incident. Minh Hong, the one who had wielded the knives, was himself severely cut on the hands. Police questioned them briefly and took them to the local hospital for treatment. The next morning, both brothers were arrested in Chris Kinison’s death — though eventually only Minh Hong would be charged.

I covered Hong’s manslaughter trial, where prosecutors tried to convince jurors that Hong had broken some kind of credo about bringing knives to a fistfight, never acknowledging that he had been the victim of a hate crime — a crime that innately inspires a real fear of serious injury or death, which is also one of the conditions required by the courts for a finding of self-defense. Minh Hong explained it best to me outside the courtroom one day: “I just didn’t want to end up like that guy down in Texas.”

As it happened, the Grays Harbor jury had better sense than prosecutors, and voted 11-1 to acquit Hong. It was a mistrial, but the DA, wisely, chose not to refile charges. [The case and the trial form the core of my forthcoming book, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America; you can also read a quick summary of the case from Alex Tizon’s excellent postmortem for the Seattle Times.]

The Ocean Shores case was still fresh in everyone’s memory — especially mine — the night of the Seattle Mardi Gras disaster. Certainly, my sharpened awareness of the nature of the state’s malicious-harassment law made me acutely aware that what I witnessed in Pioneer Square was almost certainly a series of brutal hate crimes.

My brief encounter with the screaming young black man that night at the Mardi Gras, of course, only gave me an inkling of what it is like to be the victim of a hate crime. I was only briefly threatened, and did not really come close to experiencing the horrendous assaults that I saw occurring around me. I did not experience the kind of long-term trauma associated with hate crimes; only a deeper appreciation for the kind of fear that runs through the bones of people confronted with the violent face of racial hate. And I was surrounded by other whites. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might have been like for someone like Minh Hong, virtually alone in a sea of white faces.

What I felt more deeply, I think, was the frustration that all communities that are the larger victims of hate crimes endure when law enforcement fails to adequately punish these acts, and when the larger community treats them, ultimately, as “just another crime.” Seattle, for all its vaunted multiculturalism and veneer of racial tolerance, proved every bit as impotent in confronting the racial divide from which hate crimes erupt as its rural counterpart in Ocean Shores.

Perhaps, as some of the conservative whites who lined up to attack both police and the black community suggested, there was indeed a kind of reverse racial insensitivity at work. Perhaps police were indeed slow to recognize these assaults as hate crimes because they were inclined to think of them as white-on-black events. Perhaps the melee indeed revealed a tilted field that favored minorities when it came to prosecuting these crimes, and thereby exposed a kind of hypocrisy practiced by liberals and minority-rights groups in their concern about them.

Of course, it is also probably worth observing that if this is true of liberals and minorities, the same conservative white critics were guilty of precisely the same hypocrisy: After all, none of them stood up and protested the hate crime in Ocean Shores only six months before, let alone the behavior of both police and prosecutors in that case. (Indeed, a few conservative Seattle talk-radio hosts briefly flirted with the claims of NO FEAR’s David Jensen that the Ocean Shores case represented a “hate crime” against whites.)

However, a more considered examination of the police failures in Pioneer Square on Fat Tuesday in dealing adequately with hate crimes reflected the same causes for these lapses revealed by a 2000 Department of Justice study of hate-crimes reporting:\ a lack of recognition, a failure to act immediately, a slowness to gather the necessary evidence.

These all ultimately are products of a headquarters culture that does not consider hate crimes a significant enough problem to warrant special handling. While Seattle, like many large cities — but unlike most rural and smaller jurisdictions — does have a single officer or team specifically designated to focus on hate crimes (which FBI guidelines consider an important element for big departments), it does not stress training in recognizing or dealing with hate crimes, as do many of the cities where the crimes are a priority. Indeed, Seattle’s hate-crimes officer says she was consulted only peripherally during the course of the Mardi Gras investigation.

Thus, even though the DOJ study did reveal a pronounced problem in rural America regarding hate-crimes law enforcement, it is clear that this extends well into urban districts as well. Indeed, the study stresses that the lapses in hate-crime reporting occur in a number of larger cities as well as entire states. Urban centers are in fact the main places in which adequate hate-crimes reporting and law enforcement occurs, but this is not always the case. Even well-trained departments can miss the crimes or fail to investigate them properly. While the problem is more pervasive in rural America, it is hardly exclusive to those regions.

What the Mardi Gras riot revealed was that the larger issues of misinformation about the natures of hate crimes, and the continuing impotence of law enforcement as well as the larger community in confronting them, is prevalent across the American landscape, in the city or the country.

For that same reason, the riot revealed the breadth of the damage hate crimes inflict: They made clear that hate crimes can happen to anybody at any time–you could just be someone who went down to the convenience store for noodles late at night, or someone who just wanted to join some friends in a large city celebration. And they demonstrated with stark clarity — as they always do–just how fiercely they can tear communities apart, and sow the seeds of fear and distrust between races.