As if Suffolk County couldn’t look any worse.
Hispanics are routinely harassed by bigots, treated unfairly by police and the climate is a direct result of inflammatory rhetoric coming from politicians, according to a report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an Alabama-based nonprofit that monitors hate groups. Although the four-month-long study did not find evidence of organized white supremacists in the county, the summary of the past decade of bias incidents painted an equally disturbing picture.
“They are regularly taunted, spit upon and pelted with apples, full soda cans, beer bottles and other projectiles,” reads the 28-page report, Climate of Fear: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y. “Their houses and apartments are egged, spray painted with racial epithets and riddled with bullets in drive-by shootings.
The area surrounding the Patchogue train station has seen three high-profile bias crime investigations in the past year.
“Numerous immigrants reported being shot with BB or pellet guns, or hit in the eyes with pepper spray. Others said they’d been run off the road by cars while riding bicycles, or chased into the woods by drivers while traveling on foot. The SPLC recorded abundant first-hand accounts of immigrants being punched and kicked by random attackers, beaten with baseball bats or robbed at knifepoint.”
Not surprising, when seven high school students are awaiting trial for the allegedly hate-motivated murder of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero, who was fatally stabbed near the Patchogue train station in November 2008. Not to mention another three teenagers who were charged with attacking a day laborer two weeks ago and anti-Hispanic notes that were found in a Spanish-speaking church the night before SPLC’s Sept. 2 announcement. Both incidents happened blocks from where Lucero was killed.
“There is a large number of hate crimes out there and only a tiny percentage of them are making it to the point of criminal investigation,” said Mark Potok, a director with SPLC, describing how those polled, including both documented and undocumented immigrants, said police have dissuaded their reporting hate crimes. An unknown number of hate crimes also go unreported because immigrants don’t trust police, he added.
“These things do not occur in a vacuum, they do not come out of nowhere,” said Potok, who credited Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who he called the “enabler in chief,” with fomenting the anti-immigrant environment. Levy made his reputation as being against illegal immigration and has argued that being for better immigration law enforcement doesn’t equal racism.
Levy did not directly speak to the report in a statement: “While we can continue to disagree about policies related to the economic and social impacts of illegal immigration, we can all agree that any violence against a fellow human being cannot and will not be tolerated.”
Potok cautioned that the report does not mean that all Suffolk residents, politicians and police officers are anti-immigrant—green card or not.
“Some of the report had concrete ideas, most of which we are already implementing, but other parts were rife with inaccuracies due to the law center’s failure to interview the police department, the district attorney or elected officials,” Suffolk Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said in a statement.
Joselo Lucero, Marcello’s brother, urged victims to speak up. “The victims never do nothing,” he said. “They have to stand up, defend themselves.”
Suffolk recently held the first of a series of Hate Crimes Task Force hearings, the next three are as follows: Sept. 10, Briarcliffe College, 225 W. Main St., Patchogue; Sept. 22, Suffolk County Community College (SCCC) Culinary Arts & Hospitality Center, 20 E. Main St., Riverhead; Oct. 6, SCCC Convention Center, Crooked Hill Road, Brentwood. All start at 5:30 p.m.
With Associated Press.
