MARCH 25, 1994 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

7

Anti-gay crimes down in

5 cities-but not Denver

by Carolyn Skorneck Anti-gay incidents declined in five of six major cities last year but "anti-gay violence still pervades the country."

That conclusion was reached by Martin Hiraga, who surveyed reports of such incidents and wrote a summary for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

"Whether reports of anti-gay incidents are up or down, anti-gay violence remains an epidemic that is out of control," Hiraga said in releasing the report.

The number of anti-gay incidents reported to gay and lesbian service agencies in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York City and San Francisco declined 14 percent, from 2,103 in 1992 to 1,813 last year, the report found.

But the number in Denver, where voters passed an anti-gay measure in 1992, rose 13 percent, from 204 in 992 to 229 in 1993.

Kat Morgan, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Community Center of Colorado, said that in November of 1992, after passage of Amendment 2, there was an increase of 275 percent over the monthly average, and December of 1992 and January and February of 1993 all showed increases of more than 100 percent.

"There has and continues to be a clear trend of violence against gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, and we believe there is a direct correlation between anti-gay initiatives and the increase of hate violence against (this group)," Morgan said.

The NGLTF began tallying anti-gay crimes in these six cities in 1986. At that time, they were the only cities where lesbian-gay groups kept such statistics.

The number of reported anti-gay offenses such as harassment and vandalism-rose 5 percent, from 3,316 to 3,484, in

those cities, the report said. That includes 300 apparently-orchestrated harassing phone calls over one weekend to a group in Minneapolis-St. Paul. That campaign was counted as 300 offenses, but just one incident.

The number of offenses per incident, excluding the Minnesota phone campaign, rose 11 percent, from 1.6 to 1.8.

Many other incidents, including numerous anti-gay murders, occurred outside of the six cities and were not counted in the statistics but were cited separately as evidence of widespread anti-gay violence.

Among the anti-gay murders were a man shot in the head in Kansas City, Mo., on June 27, the day of a Lesbian and Gay Pride Picnic; a 25-year-old lesbian shot in the back at a gay bar in Macon, Ga.; a young gay man beaten and stabbed to death by three young men in a “cruisy" park in Little Rock, Ark.; and a gay man shot 15 times by three men in Tyler, Texas.

Meanwhile, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program found there were 7,442 hate-crime incidents reported in 1992, and there were 8,075 motivations for those incidents. A single incident could have more than one motivation if, for example, a person hated blacks and gays and attacked a black gay man.

Anti-gay bias accounted for 11.5 percent of the motivations, this month's FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin said. Anti-black motivations topped the list at 35.7 percent; followed by anti-white, 20.6 percent; antiJewish, 13.4 percent; and anti-Hispanic, 6.2 percent.

The FBI started collecting hate-crime information in 1991 after Congress passed a law ordering it in 1990. Most Uniform Crime statistics come from more than 16,000 law enforcement agencies, but the hatecrime data came from just 6,180.

66

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99

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