November 7, 2018 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 3
News
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between the Portland of
1988 and the Portland of
2018. In particular, com-
paring hate-crime data
or analyzing trends over
time is difficult, in part
because of the nature of
the data and in part be-
cause it hasn’t actually
been tracked in a consis-
tent way over time.
“There’s been kind of
a rush to get a handle on
“
There’s al-
ways kind
of an aster-
isk next to
hate crime
data
the hate crime data of
the moment. There’s no
easy answer to say, ‘Are
they up, are they down?’
There’s always kind of
an asterisk next to hate
crime data,” said Randy
Blazak, a former sociolo-
gy professor who in 1997
co-founded the North-
west Coalition Against
Hate Crimes.
In 1988 Oregon passed
laws defining a bias
crime as damaging prop-
erty, threatening anoth-
er person or subjecting
them to offensive phys-
ical contact “because of
the person’s perception
of the other’s race, color,
religion, sexual orienta-
tion, disability or nation-
al origin.” The state also
passed a law requiring
law enforcement to track
bias-crime incidents that
appears to slightly pre-
date a federal law man-
dating reporting.
“Investigating intent
is based on the suspect’s
motivation,” said Port-
land Police Bureau De-
tective Jeff Sharp, who
serves on the bureau’s
bias crime team.
As OPB reported last
week, because the law is
focused on the suspect’s
intent, it creates a high
burden of proof for re-
porting and prosecution.
But different jurisdic-
tions also report data
in different ways. For
example, Eugene takes
reports on hate incidents
that may not rise to the
level of a crime.
Portland did too, once.
News stories from the
immediate aftermath of
Seraw’s death cite hate-
crime statistics using
reports from two infor-
mation-gathering bodies
apart from the police,
one local and one region-
al. One — the Northwest
Coalition Against Mali-
cious Harassment — is
definitively defunct. The
other – the Metropol-
itan Human Relations
Coalition — appears
to have been renamed,
killed, shuffled from one
bureaucratic home to
another and revived. In
its current incarnation
— the Office of Equity
and Human Rights — it
does not take hatecrime
reports from the general
public.
Also notable: in the
1980s the Portland Police
Bureau’s Gang Enforce-
ment Team had an offi-
cer dedicated to track-
ing White supremacist
gangs. Sharp confirmed
the bureau no longer has
such an officer, instead
folding such investiga-
tions under the umbrella
of intelligence gathering.
That is in part because
the face of hate has
changed.
“Some of these White
supremacy groups are
not obvious,” Sharp said.
The daily skinhead
uniform — leather jack-
et, lace-up boots, shaved
head, swastika badges
and tattoos — is gone,
White-power zines have
been replaced with on-
line forums and in-per-
son meetings and re-
cruitments went online.
But hate still manifests
in violent street confron-
tations.
In their daily lives, rad-
ical racists brand them-
selves more carefully,
said Jim McElroy of the
Southern Poverty Law
Center.
“Tom Metzger, then
and now, has been urg-
ing lone wolves. He told
the skinheads, ‘Grow
your hair out, get a job at
a bank, join the military.’
And they did,” McElroy
said.
So tracking hate inci-
dents and hate groups
— and stopping them —
needs to focus on what
happens online, McElroy
said. The SPLC has been
in communication with
social-media companies
about that, but it’s been a
struggle, he said, noting
Facebook is able to scrub
99 percent of pornogra-
phy from the site, but not
hate speech.
Racial-justice
advo-
cates say the city’s re-
sponse has been anemic.
“When threats were
made against Good in
the Hood last year, it
was stunning to me how
little the city reacted —
because people had the
luxury of not reacting,”
said Nkenge Harmon
Johnson, CEO of the Ur-
ban League of Portland.
“There were no police
around to say, ‘Hey, let’s
help you get a plan to-
gether,’ or to say, ‘You
know what? We are going
to come. The police unit’s
going to march in this pa-
rade because we’re not
going to stand for it. That
just didn’t happen. And
that’s not because folks
don’t know what to do.
It’s because they have the
luxury of not doing it.”
PHOTO BY SUSAN FRIED
Hate
I-940 Passes
Sonia Joseph, whose son, Giovann Joseph McDade, was killed by Kent police in June 2017, hugs Athena Taylor and another supporter
after they learned that I-940, the initiative that would require more de-escalation and mental health training for police officers and
change the law regarding police use of deadly force had passed overwhelmingly on election night. Hundreds of I-940 supporters
gathered at the Southside Commons on Nov. 6 to wait for the returns and celebrate the victory.
Seraw
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“The irony is, he was fleeing
violence, and violence got him
killed,” said Engedow Berhanu,
Seraw’s uncle, who sponsored his
relocation to the United States. “I
can’t explain the situation to my
family. How could that happen in
America, a so-called civilized and
peaceful place?”
“
The irony is,
he was fleeing
violence, and
violence got him
killed
Seraw’s story made headlines
all over the country. Local and
national media were just then be-
ginning to cover the racist skin-
head movement that had started
in England in the 1970s, crossed
the Atlantic and bubbled up in
punk scenes across the U.S. in cit-
ies, including Portland.
At the same time, a larger
White supremacist movement
was spreading across the coun-
try, and it was particularly per-
nicious in the Northwest. A gang
Election
enforcement officer tracking
skinhead gangs for the Portland
Police Bureau told The Oregonian
in February 1989 that such gangs
were probably more aggressive
in the Northwest, because there
were fewer racial minorities in
the region to begin with.
Yet for the amount of attention
it received at the time — and has
received in recent, national me-
dia stories like last year’s CBS
documentary on race relations in
Portland, Seraw’s story seems to
have been buried.
“It almost feels intentional, to
wipe out the record,” said Ewnetu
Tsegaw, a policy specialist for the
Urban League of Portland.
For several months Tsegaw has
been working to organize a con-
ference — which will take place
next week on the 30th anniversa-
ry of Seraw’s death — to commem-
orate Seraw and to talk about
ways to fight hate in an era when
far-right racists are less likely
to talk about “White traitors” in
the federal government than to
express enthusiasm for Donald
Trump’s ascent to the presidency.
And for the first time his life
and death will be commemorated
with a physical marker at the in-
tersection where he died. On Nov.
14 the Urban League of Portland
will unveil street sign caps, writ-
ten in English and Amharic, and a
physical marker at Southeast 31st
and Pine — the intersection near-
est the apartment Seraw last lived
in, and the intersection where he
was attacked.
Part of a national movement
“Coming from Ethiopia, you
never would think about some-
body being racist. I personally
never thought about such harm
coming to us,” said Abbinet Haile,
who came to Portland from Ethi-
opia in 1983 to attend school and
because her family was affected
by the civil war. As part of a small
community of Ethiopians in Port-
land, she knew Seraw personally,
and described him as an “incredi-
bly gentle soul, a really quiet per-
son.”
After Seraw’s death, she said,
Ethiopians in Portland were
afraid to go out at night and made
sure to travel in groups.
Read more at TheSkanner.com
cont’d from pg 1
Other local results of note in-
clude:
• Oregon voters approved Mea-
sure 102, allowing local bonds
to finance affordable housing,
56 to 44 percent;
• Measure 103, which would have
amended the state constitution
to prohibit taxes on certain
items, was defeated, with 57
percent voting against the mea-
sure and 43 percent voting for
it;
• Voters also killed Measure 104,
which would have amended the
constitution to require a three-
fifths majority to approve bills
raising any revenue (not just
taxes), by a margin of 65 to 35
percent;
• Oregonians also decisively
•
•
•
•
defeated Measure 105, which
would have repealed the state’s
decades-old sanctuary law, 63
to 37 percent;
They also defeated Measure
106, which would have prevent-
ed the use of state funds for
abortion services, 64 to 36 per-
cent;
Measure 26-201, approving a
tax on certain large retailers
to fund clean energy and job
training, passed (65 percent
voted yes; 35 percent no);
Measure 26-200, limiting can-
didate contributions (FOR
CITY RACES?) and requiring
campaigns to disclose funders,
passed in a landslide (88 per-
cent yes; 12 percent no);
Christine Lewis was elected
as Metro Council Director, po-
sition 2 (55 percent voted for
Lewis; 45 percent voted for op-
ponent Joe Buck);
• Jennifer McGuirk was elected
as Multnomah County’s auditor
(57 percent voted for McGuirk;
42 percent voted for opponent
Scott Learn);
• Earl Blumenauer was re-elect-
ed as U.S. Representative in
District 3 with 73 percent of the
vote (Republican Tom Harrison
got 20 percent and third-party
candidates shared the other 7
percent).
Full election results, includ-
ing breakdowns by precinct, are
available through Multnomah
County Elections Divison’s web-
site at https://multco.us.