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At least a dozen anti-gay crimes serious enough to be reported in the Lawrence Journal-World have been committed in Lawrence since the 1990 Hate Crimes Statistics Act was passed.

None were reported by Lawrence police to the FBI as a Hate Crime in the Department’s annual Uniform Crime Reports tally (according to FBI data 1991 through 2005).

This is not the ringing indictment that it may seem to be, since Lawrence is only one of thousands of under-reporting or non-reporting police jurisdictions in America.

Right Here in River City

Prejudice, discrimination, bias, and inter-group hatred are facts of life the world over—and Lawrence is no exception.

Our “Basher’s Dozen,” thirteen possibly anti-gay hate crimes in Lawrence begins in 1990, the year the Hate Crimes Statistics Act was signed into law by the Republican president George H. W. Bush. (All quotations below are from the Journal-World. Links to specific articles are in the online version of this blog.)

(1) Oct. 14, 1990: Rodney Soldier, a 25-year-old Cherokee man, was found around 3:30 A.M. between Strong Hall and Spencer Library, unconscious from a blow to the head. He was hospitalized in critical condition and underwent emergency surgery. (Cited: LJW article)

KU Police knew that Soldier had tried, earlier that night, to break up a fight between an 18-year-old KU student and a 21-year-old Haskell student; reportedly one of the men had once been his lover, but the incident was considered unrelated.

KUPD assigned 14 officers to the case, investigated 125 leads, and contacted 110 people for information. It was never clear if Soldier fell (his blood alcohol was reported as “above 0.10.”) or was struck by an assailant. Three weeks after the injury Soldier was still at KU Medical Center in “serious” condition, and could tell police nothing. (Cited: LJW article)

(2) Oct. 22, 1991: Two male KU students, one of them Art Satterfield, a student senator, were walking near 12th St. and Oread Ave. around 10:30 A.M. when the driver of a Lawrence Bus Co. bus allegedly yelled at them, “You sick (expletive)!”

Satterfield complained to KUPD, who categorized the incident as disorderly conduct. (Cited: LJW article) The driver denied making the remark but admitted laughing when he heard it; he was suspended. (Cited: LJW article)

(3) Jan. 28, 1996: An unidentified man at the Campanile around 4:30 A.M. was harassed with “anti-homosexual comments,” and a rock was thrown through his car window, by four unnamed Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledges.

The boys were expelled from their fraternity and its president apologized. KUPD investigated; apparently no charges were filed. (Cited: LJW article)

(4) June 30, 1996: A 31-year-old man was beaten near the Campanile around 3:00 A.M. by three men, ages 22, 23, and 28 (Joshua D. Fraser, Brandon S. McClung, and Bobby G. Parish), who drove past the victim and called him a “fag.” One of them tripped him as he headed toward a security phone, and they began beating him.

KUPD officers arrived in time to arrest the attackers. Each was charged with misdemeanor battery and released. KUPD logged the case as a hate crime. (Cited: LJW article)

(5) Sept. 20, 1998: Unknown persons set on fire the large, rainbow-

colored LGBT “Diversity Flag” that gay and Mexican-American KU student Michael W. Lovegrove flew on the porch of his Eldridge Street home. Lovegrove said it was a replacement for a similar flag vandalized two months earlier.

The LPD classified the incident as arson motivated by bias, but there were no leads, and the investigation was dropped. (Cited: LJW article)

(6) Oct. 31, 1998: “Rainbow Bash” posters around KU Campus were vandalized by unknown persons, who tore down the posters or wrote “FAGS” on them. The posters advertised a conference organized by KU’s Gay and Lesbian Academic and Staff Advocates called “And Justice For All,” prompted by the beating death of Matthew Sheperd in Wyoming. KUPD found no suspects. (Cited: LJW article)

(7) Aug. 28, 1999: An unidentified male at Riverfront Park around 9:30 P.M. was struck in the head with a tree branch by one of two males, ages 21 and 22, who also hurled anti-gay slurs at him. The victim managed to phone Lawrence police, who arrested the men as they were robbing his car. (Cited: LJW article)

Aggravated robbery charges were filed against Jay Trujillo and Tyrone A. Kazena. Trujillo pleaded guilty and was given three years’ supervised probation; the victim asked the judge for leniency for his attacker. The outcome of Kazena’s trial was not reported. (Cited: LJW article)

(8) Sept. 30, 1999: A 25-year-old man identified only as “Jeff” was walking on the 800 block of Massachusetts St. around 1:00 A.M. when he was harassed by David T. Hutson, of Lawrence, and Chris Whidden of Labella, Florida, ages 23 and 29, for not walking “like a man.” (Cited: LJW article)

The victim talked back, reportedly calling the two men “faggots” (!) He awoke to find EMTs examining him. Police quickly arrested the attackers. Misdemeanor battery charges were brought, and the incident was classified as a hate crime. The outcome was not reported in the LJW. (Cited: LJW article)

(9) Oct. 21, 1999: An unidentified 29-year-old man at Riverfront Park around 10:30 P.M. was harassed by three young males from Tonganoxie. The teens pulled alongside the victim in a pickup truck, yelled at him and followed him to the College Motel. He called 911 from a pay phone, and one of the teens punched him in the face.

About an hour later the three youths were arrested downtown by police. The assailant was issued a municipal citation. (Cited: LJW article) Police categorized the incident as a hate crime. (Cited: LJW article)

(10) Oct. 29, 1999: Two males, both 22, while walking on Massachusetts near 8th St. around 2:30 A.M., were confronted by a group of young men from Nebraska, whose names were not reported. The victims were a KU junior and a Lawrence resident; reportedly neither, in fact, was gay.

One of the Nebraskans yelled, “There are a couple of faggots,” and one of the men responded with “an off-the-cuff retort.” Then, according to police, “the pummeling commenced.” The KU student was

“knocked backward into a concrete planter and held down while two attackers struck his face with their fists.” The other man ran into Teller’s to call police. (Cited: LJW article)

Two of the suspects were interviewed by police at the scene. Police classified the incident as a hate crime. No charges were reported. (Cited: LJW article)

(11) Apr. 11, 2001: A 19-year-old KU student, Craig D. Avery, was cited for misdemeanor criminal damage to property after he wrote “anti-gay remarks” on the door of a dorm room shared by two men (“one homosexual and one bisexual”) in Lewis Hall, where Avery also lived. KUPD issued Avery a municipal citation. (Cited: LJW article)

(12) Sept. 26, 2001: An unnamed 19-year-old male was confronted at 1:45 A.M. in front of Fatso’s on Massachusetts St. about “the way he dressed,” by four men, ages 21, 22, 22 and 26: Nathaniel Taylor, Anthony Fernandez, Jeremiah Lahm, and Don Gaines. At least one of them struck the victim.

Bar employees pulled the victim inside and locked the door, which Taylor, Fernandez and Gaines then began kicking. The four left in a car, but police apprehended them. Taylor and Lahm were cited for interfering with a law-enforcement officer’s duties, the three door-

kickers for criminal damage, and Taylor for assault—all municipal infractions. (Cited: LJW article)

(13) Dec. 6, 2002: Dec. 6, 2002: Jeffrey Medis, a 28-year-old Lawrence man, was attacked around 1:30 A.M. outside The Replay. Five men were investigated: Luke Wells, 22; Nikolaus Eichman; Bill Roe; Marty McSorley; and Ryan McAtee, 21. (Cited: LJW article) Medis' face was seriously injured and he had post-traumatic amnesia.

All but Wells were KU students and members of the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity. They had been drinking at the Red Lyon next door that night. (Cited: LJW article)

Longtime Lawrencian and Replay regular Thomas Simmons, 30, who joined the fray in defense of his friend Medis, was sentenced in Sept. 2003 to six months in jail for two misdemeanor counts of battery and one of disorderly conduct. (Cited: LJW article) No charges were filed against Eichman, Roe, McSorley, or McAtee.

The Simmons jury found it “very infuriating” to learn, after trial in July 2003, that the main witness against Simmons, Luke Wells, had been granted use immunity for his testimony. (Cited: LJW article)

Later Wells was charged with misdemeanor battery for hitting Medis. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced a year later to one year’s probation.

By that time Medis owed about $19,000 in uninsured medical costs and had moved to California. Medis’ civil suit against Wells for more than $75,000 was not settled as of August 2004. (Cited: LJW article)

The Medis case is noteworthy. The authorities asserted this was “not a hate crime,” and the young men involved in the altercation testified they did not know Medis was gay. (Cited: LJW articles 1, 2, and 3)

The Lawrence Journal-World reporter, Dave Ranney, described Medis’ testimony at the Simmons trial this way: “Medis, who makes no effort to conceal his homosexuality, testified that he was wearing heavy eye makeup that night and was wearing a white, frilly jacket that he said made him look like a ‘gay snowball.’” (Cited: LJW article)

Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens

All 13 crimes occurred out of doors, in public, often in the presence of witnesses. They tended to involve alcohol and mostly occurred between midnight and dawn.

The crimes were usually violent (nine of 13 incidents). The responding law-enforcement agency was KUPD half the time and LPD the

other half. Only five of the incidents were officially considered “hate crimes.”

The consequences to perpetrators were criminal charges one-third of the time, with municipal citations issued or administrative sanctions imposed one-third of the time … and no legal consequences the rest of the time.

There were 16 victims (all male) and at least 33 perpetrators (probably all male, and all apparently in their teens or twenties)—an average “perps advantage” of two-to-one.

The Tip o’ the Iceberg

Hate-crime reporting, like all crime-data reporting by the states to the federal government, is voluntary; in 2005, about one-fourth of the nation’s approximately 17,000 local law-enforcement agencies still had not yet chosen to participate in the FBI program.

Victims’ reporting of hate crimes is also voluntary, and minority-

group persons are by far the least likely crime victims to make or pursue any police report, for reasons that are well-documented and easy to understand.

Criminal-justice scholars today universally acknowledge that the FBI’s annual reports of Hate Crime Statistics are virtually worthless. (“Bridging the Information Disconnect in National Bias Crime Reporting: Final Report,” Jack McDevitt, et al., 2002—PDF.)

The FBI’s 2005 report counts about a thousand hate crimes (of all kinds)—in a nation of 300 million. But a more realistic figure might be upwards of 50,000 hate crimes annually. (“Discounting Hate,” SPLC Intelligence Reports, 2001.)

It all depends on who’s counting … and who counts.