They were hate crimes. Period.
We do not call them that in Colorado, never have. But when someone kills, attacks or otherwise targets a person based on race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, physical or mental disability, or sexual orientation, that is a hate crime.
What Colorado calls it is a “bias- motivated crime.”
Over the past week, this has raised a considerable hue and cry in Denver, with outraged folks charging the district attorney with “political correctness” for not charging all of the 35 black men, women and children who targeted mostly whites during their late-summer, early-fall crime spree downtown with a “hate” crime.
I have to believe he would if he could.
What most people do not know is that Colorado was the first state in the union with a hate-crime law. The Ethnic Intimidation Act of 1988 included very limited protections. But it was a start.
Almost every year afterward, a legislator or two would float a bill to expand its protections. It was always shot down. What, too many legislators fretted, was the need? A crime, they huffed, was a crime.
Finally in 2005, a coalition of mostly Democratic legislators got together and stiffened the language of the intimidation act. Even then, they could not get “hate crime” in the title.
They settled for “Bias-Motivated Crime,” adding sexual orientation and mental and physical disability as protections. I remember well the day it became law without then- Gov. Bill Owens’ signature. People all around me cried tears of joy.
So today, it galls me to listen to the cries that not every person charged will stand against a “hate crime.”
“If it had been gangs of white boys targeting black people downtown, can you imagine the cries of discrimination?” is how one caller put it.
His point, apparently, is that not charging all of these black kids with a hate crime must be reverse discrimination.
He followed that up by saying he legally carries a concealed handgun and that he would never be such a victim.
To make sense of this, I called Lynn Kimbrough, Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s spokeswoman.
When the DA decided to charge nine people Tuesday and 19 on Wednesday with a bias crime, he and his office based their decision on whether they thought they could make the charge stick.
“You have to look at each case individually,” she said.
When we finally said goodbye, I wondered aloud where all the hate-crime-bill proponents were when the legislature years before had dithered.
When your bacon is not firmly in the cross hairs, I guess dithering is an option.
What the lesson of this downtown nonsense should be is that targeting anyone because of race is pure ignorance. It doesn’t matter the skin color of the attacker. The hurt clearly is just as deep.
One of the attackers, I learned, was to everyone around him a good kid, a great basketball player who had college scholarships awaiting him.
“He fell in with a really wrong crowd” is how one investigator put it to me. “Dumb kid. His parents must be just devastated.”
Hate, no matter what you call it — legally or otherwise — clearly knows no race.
We merely confuse ourselves to our deep peril when we attempt to view it only one way.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
