Hate Crime Charge Weighed in Pa. Shooting Rampage

He was a man with a gun. And when he started firing, witnesses said, there was venom in his heart. “Racist pig,” he yelled at one man. “I think I’ll terrorize you for a while.” It had all the hallmarks of a hate crime. In this case the gunman was black. The five victims, three of them dead, were white.

Pennsylvania authorities Thursday charged Ronald Taylor, 39, with ethnic intimidation in addition to murder. The FBI also has initiated a civil-rights probe in the case. A third victim died Thursday.

Increasingly, state hate-crimes statutes are being brought to bear against minorities--raising questions about whether those who commit such violations against whites are acting out of racism--the classic motivation for a hate crime--or reacting in anger to a history of oppression and injustice.

Taylor, who allegedly started his shooting rampage Wednesday after an argument with maintenance men at his apartment building, had a history of mild mental problems, acquaintances said. Police said Thursday that they found racist writings in his home in the working-class Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkinsburg.

“They were just some of his thoughts. It was basically anti-white, anti-Jew,” Allegheny County homicide Lt. John Brennan said.

“He called us racist pigs, white trash,” recalled John DeWitt, one of the repairmen whose white colleague was the first shooting victim. A black neighbor, Christine McCrae, said Taylor told her as he left the building: “I’m not gonna hurt any black people, I’m just out to kill white people.”

But Wilkinsburg Police Chief Gerald Brewer cautioned that it might be premature to classify the case as a hate crime. “There’s a lot of anger and hostility in this individual, so I think it’s a little premature to simply define this as a racist event,” Brewer said.

FBI investigators will try to determine whether the murder spree violated the limited federal hate crime statute, which covers crimes based on race, color, religion or national origin committed against someone engaged in a federally protected activity.

If a violation is found, the punishment could be life imprisonment or the death penalty, Justice Department spokeswoman Karen Peterman said.

Pennsylvania officials said they will seek to determine whether the state’s own hate crime law should apply in the case.

While white violence against minorities has been well documented, the history of hate crimes committed by minorities is difficult to track. Federal authorities only recently have begun to tally hate crimes nationwide.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors racially motivated violence, said the number of hate crimes committed by blacks increased substantially in the mid-1990s, from almost minuscule numbers at the beginning of the decade.

In 1998, the most recent year tracked by the Justice Department, whites were the victims of about 18% of the 4,321 race-based hate crimes committed. The number was down very slightly from ’97.

But the conservative New Century Foundation--whose financial backers also have contributed to scientists studying purported genetic disparities among blacks and whites--analyzed the Justice Department statistics and concluded that blacks were twice as likely as whites to commit hate crimes, based on their proportion within the population.

In terms of overall violent crime, the foundation said, 90% of the interracial crimes were committed by blacks against whites--making blacks “up to 250 times more likely to do criminal violence against whites than the reverse.”

The study has been seized upon by the far right to mount an argument that there is a double standard in reporting about hate crimes--with the media focusing on high-profile events such as the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas.

Less reported, they say, are cases of black-against-white violence. David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has launched a campaign for wider prosecution of hate crimes committed by blacks and homosexuals, said he may fly to Pittsburgh to seek a vigorous investigation into the Taylor case.

“There’s a big problem here,” Duke said. “I believe the heightened coverage of the so-called white hate crimes against blacks is producing a heightened climate among minorities that itself contributes to the violence.

“Blacks are chronically taught that whites are terrible oppressors and are in fact murdering them, so we’re producing a climate of ethnic hatred against whites.”

The New Century Foundation study has been criticized by analysts, who say it omits key data and fails to take into account why blacks commit crimes against whites.

“The statistics are indeed accurate. But consider first what [the study] fails to point out: Only 16.7% of violent crimes committed against whites are committed by blacks. Some 73% of all violent crimes against whites are committed by white offenders,” Robert Slater, managing editor of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, commented last year.

“Furthermore, we must keep in mind what the accomplished bank robber Willie Sutton used to say when asked why he robbed banks: ‘That’s where the money is.’ Under the Willie Sutton dictum, whites are far more likely to be victims of crime by blacks for the simple reason that, on average, whites hold 10 times as much wealth as blacks. . . . Grabbing the purse of a white woman walking down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is likely to produce greater rewards for the thief than stealing the handbag of a woman walking down Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem,” Slater said.