“One injury to any one community is an injury to all communities,” said Harriet Schachter McKinney, executive director of the American Jewish Committee-Milwaukee Chapter.
This is one of the “very important” reasons that she has become involved in a project organized by the local branch of the Organization of Chinese Americans.
With a $31,000 grant from The Allstate Foundation, the OCA has organized a Wisconsin Hate Crimes Prevention Project, coordinated by local OCA member Janet Lew Carr. It held its first public forum June 23 at the Zelazo Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. About 40 people attended.
Concern about such crimes against Wisconsin’s Asian American community has risen since last November, when a Hmong man shot six white hunters in northern Wisconsin.
Since then, there have been reports of vandalism of Hmong-owned properties and of the appearance of bumper stickers saying, “Save a hunter, kill a Hmong.”
Some 34,000 Hmong immigrants, mostly from Laos, live in Wisconsin; according to a report by the University of Wisconsin Extension, the Hmong constitute about 33 percent of Wisconsin’s overall Asian population of about 103,000.
McKinney, one of the five panelists at the forum, is a former board member of the Hmong American Women’s Association, and has worked with such groups as the Japanese American Citizens League through her activities with the Milwaukee Ethnic Council.
During her presentation, McKinney spoke about anti-Semitism. She told The Chronicle afterward that “people outside the Jewish community need to understand anti-Semitism, and we need to create allies who will stand up for us in the face of anti-Semitism. One of the best ways of doing that is to be good allies to other communities.”
“I think it is crucial for us in the Jewish community to train our allies both to recognize and understand anti-Semitism and then expect them to interrupt it when they encounter it,” she said.
Underreporting issue
Also on the panel was Michael Young, captain of the Milwaukee Police Department’s Intelligence Division. He said in his presentation that district attorneys in Milwaukee County appear to be reluctant to apply the state’s penalty-enhancing hate crimes law to cases, fearing that if a jury decides the crime was not a hate crime, it may refuse to convict on the other charges.
He also said between “zero to five” hate crimes get reported to the MPD in any given year, but it is possible that more happen that do not get reported. He said language barriers and mistrust of police may be the reasons.
In response to a question from a Chronicle reporter, Young said there appears to be no consistency about how crimes are classed as hate crimes or who does the classifying. A police officer on the scene may not think a crime is a hate crime and not report it, while a victim or a D.A. may think it is, he said.
Audience member Alix Olson, a detective with the Madison Police Department, added that training police officers to recognize hate crimes and establishing “human connection” between police and communities “will affect reporting” of such crimes.
Other speakers at the forum included:
• Denis Bailey, field vice president for the Midwest region of The Allstate Foundation.
• Anh Phan, director of communications for the national OCA.
• Doua Thor, deputy director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, based in Washington, D.C.
• William Yoshino, Midwest director of the Japanese American Citizens League.
• Enrique Figueroa, assistant to the provost for Latino affairs and director of the Roberto Hernandez Center, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The project plans to hold workshops and lectures around the state during the summer and autumn.
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