Sonoma County hate crimes cut by more than half in 2018

The number of hate crimes reported to Sonoma County law enforcement in 2018 shrunk by more than half compared to a year before, a decrease that outpaced state and national trends, FBI statistics show.

The Santa Rosa Police Department oversaw investigations into all but one of the seven hate crimes reported to the FBI last year, leading to two arrests, the agency said. Victims in three of the Santa Rosa cases were believed to have been targeted because of their sexual orientation; two cases involved racial, ethnic or nationality bias; and a sixth case was related to religious hate, the data showed.

They included an instance in which police learned about a man who was punched by an unknown assailant who called him a derogatory term related to his ethnicity and a woman who repeatedly called a black man a racial slur and threw an unknown liquid at him as he walked to his car after work.

“In some of these cases that we had, it was overt acts of hate,” Santa Rosa Police Capt. John Cregan said. “It’s something that is concerning to us and something we want to ensure our officers have training on.”

The seventh case, reported to the Petaluma Police Department, was also motivated by ?racial, ethnic or nationality bias, according to the FBI data. Petaluma officers handled half of the 16 hate crimes reported in Sonoma County in 2017, figures released by both the California Department of Justice and the FBI last year showed. The rest of the 2017 cases were handled by police in Santa Rosa, Windsor and by deputies in unincorporated Sonoma County.

Statewide, there were 1,063 hate crimes investigated by more than 200 agencies last year, 16% fewer than in 2017. The dip reversed trends seen over the past three years, when the FBI reported consecutive years of double-digit increases in hate crime reporting.

A majority of the 2018 hate crimes investigated were motivated by racial and ethnic bias, a trend echoed in the national FBI data. Hate crimes where the victim was targeted because of their sexual orientation were the second most common in California, making up 22% of such reports.

Across the country, the number of hate crimes reported to police was mostly unchanged. Police investigated 7,120 hate crimes last year, or less than 1% fewer than the year before.

Historically speaking, it is uncommon for victims of hate crimes to report their experiences to police, making it difficult to determine how accurately the FBI statistics reflect the number of hate crimes actually happening in a community, said Phyllis Gerstenfeld, a criminal justice professor at Cal State Stanislaus who wrote a book on hate crimes and has taught classes on the topic since the early 1990s.

Gerstenfeld estimates about a third of all hate crimes end up in police reports, though the fractions get smaller when looking at victims from communities with poor relationships with law enforcement, such as immigrant and LGBT groups.

How agencies train their officers to recognize and investigate hate crimes can also greatly affect the number of such crimes listed in annual reports. Incidents like the 9/11 attacks, which was followed by a surge of hate crimes against Muslims, can also skew the number of hate crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, Gerstenfeld added.

“There’s a lot more visible hate since the 2016 election, so that could be part of it,” Gerstenfeld said, referring to the consecutive increases in the state from 2015 to 2017. While there was no reliable explanation for the 2018 decreases seen on the national and state level in 2018, those figures fall more in line with overall hate crime trends, she added.

Cregan, the Santa Rosa police captain, also could not explain the uptick in hate crime reporting seen at his agency last year, though it was cause for concern, he said.

The agency averaged 1.4 hate crime reports between 2011 and 2017 and had received five hate crime reports in 2019 so far, Cregan said.

The 2018 reports that led to arrests include a July 16, 2018, threat case involving a woman accompanied by two other people and the suspect, identified as Kwama Douglas.

Douglas, who was 45 at the time, was accused of arguing with the group over a barking dog, threatening to hurt the woman and then calling her a slur based on her sexual orientation, the department said.

About five months later, the department received a report about a black man who had a drink thrown on him and was called a racial slur by a woman as he was walking to his car.

The suspect in that case was identified by the department as Anne Elizabeth Nix, now 38. It was determined Nix violated the terms of her parole after the December 2018 crime, said Joan Croft, a Sonoma County District Attorney spokeswoman. Douglas was found to be in violation of the conditions of his house arrest, she added.

Of the five reported hate crimes investigated by the Santa Rosa Police Department this year, one has led to an arrest, Cregan said. Bruno Galindo Jr., 46, was booked into jail Aug. 14, 10 days after he allegedly asked a man about his race and then hit him in the head with a large wrench, leaving him with a fractured jaw, police and jail data shows. Galindo remains at the Sonoma County Jail on bail of $135,000, facing felony charges of assault with a deadly weapon, assault causing great bodily injury, a hate crime, as well as several enhancements, online court records show. He entered a not guilty plea in October and his trial is scheduled to begin next month, Croft said.

The Petaluma Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for information about the hate crime reported in their city last year.

One prominent 2018 hate crime was not reported to the FBI last year. Vincent Joseph O’Sullivan, 55, of Guerneville, was arrested in May 2018 when he made homophobic slurs against a gay barista and threatened blow him up along with the Safeway that housed the Starbucks where he worked.

The hate crime, which led to a guilty verdict earlier this year, was not reported to the FBI in 2018 because the case was still considered open as it made its way through the court system, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Sgt. Juan Valencia said.

He expects it to be included in next year’s FBI data, he added.

O’Sullivan was arrested in connection with the theft of two rainbow flags from a flagpole in downtown Guerneville the same day of his arrest for the Starbucks incident and was found guilty in June 2018, though that was not considered a hate crime.