Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing

6. Responding to Neighborhood Hate Crimes

164 > 165 Joneses liked the houses on the east side of town, though, and chose a house on the very edge of the area, hoping they wouldn’t have problems. The Joneses’ fears of bad experiences in their new neighborhood were quickly realized. Within weeks of the family’s move into their new house, the tires on their car were slashed. The next month, the tailgate of their brand-new station wagon was broken. A few weeks after that, as they walked from the house to the car, their son was called a “nigger.” Then, on June 21, 1990, roughly three months after they moved into the house, at about 2:30 a.m., the Joneses were awakened by the sound of footsteps in their yard. Russ Jones looked out of the bedroom window and saw a cross burning. Like other targets of anti-integrationist violence , Laura Jones knew the significance of the burning cross, and it frightened her. “If you’re black and you see a cross burning, you know it’s a threat, and you imagine all the church bombings and lynchings and the rapes that have gone before, not so long ago. A cross burning is a way of saying, ‘We’re going to get you.’”3 Two hours later, at 4:30 a.m., Laura Jones awakened to the noise and glow of another burning cross.4 This time, the cross had been burned in front of the apartment building across the street from the Joneses. A third cross had been burned in front of a nearby apartment building in which several minorities lived. Police later arrested seventeen-year-old Viktora and eighteen-yearold Arthur Miller III. Viktora lived with Miller across the street from the Joneses. According to court records, the previous night, Viktora, Miller, and several other young white men had gathered at Miller’s home discussing how disgusted they felt at the presence of an African American family in the neighborhood. Miller proposed burning a cross, saying, “Let’s go burn some niggers.”5 The men went to the basement and taped together chair legs to form a crude cross. They placed it in the Joneses’ fenced backyard, poured paint thinner on it, and set fire to it. The Mechanics of Dealing with Neighborhood Hate Crime In cases of neighborhood hate crime, as in other crimes, the very first governmental actor that the individual targeted by the harassment encounters is the police. If the targeted person calls 911, dispatch may send a patrol officer from the neighborhood to the scene to speak with 166 > 167 Procedurally, the police response in the Joneses’ case was the average that a target of bias crime can expect when he or she calls the police. In the typical bias crime case to which police are called, after the responding officer—generally a patrol officer from the geographic area in which the crime has occurred—has left the scene, if he or she thinks that it is warranted, he or she may file an incident report describing the crime. Most jurisdictions leave the filing of incident reports up to the discretion of the responding officer. If the officer decides not to file a report, unless there is some follow-up by an agency or the targeted individual, no official investigation will take place. If the report is filed, it will be forwarded to detectives, who then decide whether to investigate the crime. If the incident is deemed worthy of investigation by precinct detectives, they will gather evidence—contact or try to find witnesses, re-interview the individual targeted, and, if they discover the perpetrator , make an arrest. Along with the duties of investigation, in jurisdictions with hate crime statutes, police may also assess incidents and classify them as hate crimes, if warranted. The process of investigating anti-integrationist violence is complicated by three factors. First, harassment of this type is frequently lowlevel crime—harassment or vandalism—and is thus a type of crime that police have little incentive to investigate. Second, even if a department does allocate personnel, such investigations are often time-consuming because perpetrators frequently strike at night, when there are few witnesses . The third and final complicating factor applies to neighborhoods where community members support the actions of the perpetrator and may resist officers’ attempts to investigate such crimes.9 As chapter 2 indicates, while organized opposition to minorities moving into white neighborhoods...