Hate Scratches?
excerpts from Girl Fight by Aina Hunter in the Village Voice, 6/28/05
[On March 30, 2005, 5 or 6 black eighth-graders get into a fight with a group of white tenth-graders from St. Edmund’s Catholic high school on the basketball court in Marine Park, Brooklyn, outside the junior high. When the police come,] the white girls finger the victors to the cops and five black girls are booked for misdemeanor assault. The question of who threw the first punch, and why, is now before Judge Stewart Weinstein, in Kings County Family Court in a trial that is expected to last through the summer.
If the city’s lawyers had followed the lead of the arresting cops and charged the younger kids with misdemeanors, lawyers say they might have pleaded guilty and received the slaps on the wrists reserved for first-time juvenile offenders. However, after pressure from the St. Edmund’s parents—who took turns writing letters and enlisting support from elected officials—the Corporation Counsel attorneys ended up deciding it wasn’t a fight at all, but an attack motivated by deep-seated racism.
Democratic state senator Carl Kruger of Brooklyn was one of several officials to answer the white families’ call. “The parents came to me and—I responded,” Kruger says.
Saying the black girls had called the white ones “honky crackers,” and shouted “black power” and “Martin Luther King,” they charged them under the state hate crimes law—raising what might have been relatively minor counts to alleged felonies that included gang assault. Now the black girls each face a maximum year and a half in juvenile detention. Fearing for the girls’ safety, their parents and lawyers forbid them to talk to the press.
Police concede that their judgment was overruled. NYPD spokesperson Jennara Everleth tells the Voice that “at the initial police investigation it was determined that no racial slurs were used. But later on, Corp Counsel determined—they did their own investigation and they found that there were, I guess.”
Parents may see the fight in black-and-white, but it isn’t clear the kids did. After all, one woman’s daughter and her friends didn’t tell the arresting officers they’d been targeted for their whiteness—that came later. As for the black girls, two of the accused insist that a “Spanish” girl started it. None of the St. Edmund’s girls are Latina, but the black girls think some are. “That Puerto Rican—or whatever she was—that Spanish girl kept running her mouth, talking about ‘Get out of my neighborhood,’ ” says one 13-year-old defendant.
Defense attorney Paul Aronson says that it’s a lot of noise about nothing since the injuries weren’t severe. According to hospital records submitted to the court, black eyes, scratches, and bruises were the extent of it, he says.
That’s contrary to the news accounts. The Brooklyn Skyline ran a lead story slugged “Non-Bias Attack.” Embedded in the dramatic prose—”witnesses say the attackers called their victims ‘white crackers’ during the bloody melee”—was an implied critique of local cops, who had just announced to a seething South Brooklyn town hall meeting that their investigation turned up no racial bias.
The following week the paper printed a slew of mail boiling with invective—much of it from outside New York. A note from the editor said the most “obscene and unprintable” letters were withheld. One example that was printed: “If the police department does not arrest all those involved in this ape-assault, then we as white people our safety is doomed,” wrote Paul DeLaiarro, location not printed. “We do not have the same protection as these sub-humans. You should be ashamed of where you live if you are white and this is your police department.”
The mere mention of the phrase “hate crime” in relation to the case makes many white neighborhood folks roll their eyes. Retired public school guidance counselors Barbara Lewis and Frances Pearce are disgusted by the fuss. “It’s opportunistic for some people to make it a race issue. Kids can be nasty, kids can be horrible. I’m sure words were exchanged, but did it begin because of race? I don’t think so.”
A pale, petite 16-year-old alpha girl was more than certain about that. “Racial things happen here, but that wasn’t racial,” Jackie says. “It’s just the fact that those girls were being bullies and the Catholic girls were showing off.”
July 28th, 2005 at 10:28 am
This is a case of the stupidity of crimes being “hate based”. No one commits a crime against someone they love. All crime is hate. To suggest that someone who beats up someone because they hate black people should get more time then if he beat me up is serious problem with our legal system. That being said: These white girls and their families should be ashamed of trying to abuse the ill conceived law of hate based crimes. If the black girls called them “crackers” or “honkies” during the fight then so what. You don’t fight with someone and commend them on their moral character. You say things in a fight to further enrage the other person. I also feel that if the white girls would have started dropping the N’ word, then it would have been the same thing. Just your average everyday school fight. As if our courts didn’t have enough crap to look over already.
July 30th, 2005 at 1:53 pm
I think you should maybe read all the newspaper articles on this attack. There’s quite a bit you are missing or misrepresenting..