Why the Alleged Holocaust Museum Shooter Ran Loose

Here's the hate rap sheet on James Wenneker von Brunn. In 1981, he loudly boasted that he'd take Fed Reserve members hostage, a boast he tried to act on. In 1999, he penned a book with the inflammatory, violence inciting title, "Kill the Best Gentiles." In 2003, he sketched a fawning portrait of William Turner, the guru of executed Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. In between there were long stints spent hobnobbing with a pack of outlandish, violent prone, Neo Nazi groups. Von Brunn's punishment for the telephone book thick list of hate threats was to serve six and a half years out of an 11-year sentence in a federal pen. It took two years after he was sentenced before he did the time.

The question then is how could a guy who made absolutely no effort to hide his intent to wreak murder and mayhem on Jews and blacks and had a personal track record of acting out the lunacy run loose for so long? One answer is that von Brunn and the thousands of others that rant, rail, and spew hate in speeches, on websites, in videos and in their fringe, kooky publications are simply exercising their first amendment right; a right that can't be abridged no matter how scary they sound. von Bunn has that right.

The other answer is that even when the von Brunns are known tracked, monitored and surveilled and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. The FBI and local law enforcement agencies long knew about von Brunn's propensity for violence. But even if he had committed a violent act in his home state of Maryland he still might not have been prosecuted under state and especially federal hate crime statutes.

Federal prosecutors are loath to step on the toes of police and prosecutors in criminal cases no matter how badly the crime is tainted by race, gender or religious hatred. Federal prosecutors flatly say that the hate perpetrators are more likely to be convicted and get stiff sentences in state court. That makes good legal and political sense.

But that's not the only reason for their hands off of the von Brunns. Except in the highest profile cases, they see these prosecutions as no-win cases with little political gain, and the risk of making enemies of local police, DAs, and state officials. The rare time that the feds cracked down on civil rights violence was during the 1960s civil rights battles. The wave of violence then stirred national and international revulsion and forced then President Lyndon Johnson to order more civil rights prosecutions.

The only exceptions to the set in stone rule that prosecutors stay out of state cases occurs when a hate crime triggers a major riot, generates mass protests or attracts major press attention. The Rodney King beating case in Los Angles in 1992 is still the best example of how it took a mass civil upheaval to move the feds to go full blast after a conviction of the police that beat King, and then only after a failed prosecution in state court. The King case is also an example of how criminal cases with clear civil rights abuses become highly politicized and racially divisive.
Hate crimes may be horrific but they are largely seen as common crimes and are treated as such. Few state prosecutors will chance inflaming racial passions and hatreds by slapping a hate crime tag on a case.

There's also the belief that hate crimes are mostly a thing of the past. When they do occur, they are isolated acts committed by a handful of quacks, and unreconstructed bigots, and that state authorities vigorously report and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes.

When Congress passed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, it compelled the FBI to collect figures on hate violence. However, it did not compel police agencies to report them. Record keeping on hate crimes is still left up to the discretion of local police chiefs and city officials. Many police departments still refuse to report hate crimes, or to label crimes in which gays, Jews, and minorities are targeted because of race, religion, or sexual preference as hate crimes. Still other police departments don't bother compiling them because they regard hate crimes as a politically loaded minefield that can tarnish their image and create even more political friction. The official indifference by many police agencies to hate crimes prevents federal officials, even if they wanted to more aggressively enforce civil rights laws, from accurately gauging the magnitude of civil rights violence.

Civil rights leaders are dumbfounded at the apparent refusal of many federal prosecutors to recognize what are obvious hate acts. When prosecutors, however, try to sort out whether a crime is a hate motivated crime or just plain crime it's anything but obvious. That's just enough space for the von Brunns of America to crawl through and run loose.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, "The Hutchinson Report" can be heard weekly in Los Angeles Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com

Comments

[cobraxus]

as we saw with the DHS report the rightwing goes ballistic(no pun intended)when anyone threatens to infringe upon their rights which extend right up to killing someone whose politics they disagree with.they've been getting away with this crap for too long.

[Portnoy]

There are those that are openly calling for the overthrow of a democratically elected president, inciting violence against health care providers, calling on citizens to neglect their constitutional responsibility to pay taxes, openly calling for our leaders to fail, attacking comedianes, contemplating states withdrawing from the union, denying citizens the right to health care and more... There is a word for this: its called sedition. For the good of this country and the future of our world, we need to act now to stop this before it gets worse. Free Speech aside, you can not yell FIRE in a crowded theater without being held accountable for the result. Even when no one is hurt, your actions are STILL hel accountable for the POSSIBLE result of harm. We need to uphold this standard and apply it to those that are instigating this violence.

[euripedes923]

"Hate crimes" should be referred to as "thought crimes."
Dead is dead is dead. I don't care if you kill me because you don't like my gender, race or sexual preference. I'm still dead. Let's just arrest and prosecute people for the ugliness of what they've done without the bs of attempting to somehow add penalty to what they might have been thinking when the did it.

[dwamikayla]

What I want to know is ... how did this guy manage to saunter into a Federal museum WITH A RIFLE without anyone noticing before he entered the building?!?!?! It's not as if an 88-year-old could've sprinted past the public without anyone noticing!

[AlphabetSoup03824]

No keeblerelves, all crime are NOT hate crimes.

For instance, if a woman were to offer me money to knock off her husband so that she could collect the life insurance on him and if I were to then carry out the dastardly deed then neither the woman nor I would be acting out of hate. Instead we would both be guilty of a "greed crime", which is far more conventional and far more frequent than hate crimes are.

There is a difference between the two. Crimes done for personal gain are not in the same category as crimes done out of hate.

[Namtillaku]

I'll add that hate crimes are terrorism, targeting types of people such as; Catholics, or African Americans, or Jews because they are part of that group, terrorizes the rest. It's why we have a hate crime law.

[showmescience]

"Muhammad had been under investigation by an FBI-led terrorism task force since he returned to the United States from Yemen last year, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press."

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/06/ap_recruiter_shootings_060109/

So, what do we do with Muhammed? Should he be tried for a hate crime? Or do hate crimes not apply when they are commited against white males in the Army and motivated by hatred for America and Christianity?

You're bleeding hypocrisy, Mr. Hutchinson.

[Namtillaku]

It's not a crime to hate the U.S., or the Army. It IS a crime to act violently for their religious views. You wouldn't know hypocrisy if it bit you right where you live, your hate.

[chaya]

"White males in the Army"?????? What?????

You appear to have forgotten that the US does not have a "white male" Army. There are some white males. The rest are black, Hispanic, Arabic, Jewish, Indian, and Asian males, as well as female versions of all the above. Your argument is completely ridiculous.

[CanisLatrans]

One of the wounded soldiers was Black, actually...

[arthuride]

Hate crimes are not new. They have been a part of the story of man since it was first chiseled in stone and painted on cave walls. The noxiously nefarious reality of it is the warped thinking that such actions are sanctioned by some god/goddess or commanded by some religious writing of a few who work the gullibility of their followers. Thus Pope Urban II called for the extermination of Jews, Moslems, and even fellow Christians at Claremont in 1095, a pattern repeated by other religious leaders, such as Martin Luther, who, in his Address to the German Nobility, called upon the barons to "kill, stab, slay, in secret or in public" those he felt threatened his emerging church. We have the savagery of radical Islam today and its theological students (Taliban) throwing acid in the eyes of girls wanting an education, while Israel bombards the Gaza in its own pogrom against those who would stop its stealing more land. The difference here and von Brunn is that von Brunn was a single actor in this scenario of carnage, while others had gangs to back them updetermined to foist its values on others as they stifled dissent--like the Mormons and black and white evangelical churches funneled millions of dollars into the odious opportunistic Proposition 8 in California. von Brunn and Prop 8 are cut from the same cloth: irrational loathing and contempt of others, and both have their supporters to the detriment of freedom and democracy.

[keeblerelves]

All crimes are hate crimes but is all hate criminal?