Why the San Diego Mosque’s Shooters Continue to Run Loose

*At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque, the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious: “The shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add-on, “it’s not,” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.

The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”

The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt as to why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.

Cain and Vazquez, the alleged mosque killers, are the sort of nut jobs who would be perfectly comfortable with the white nationalist crowd.

However, even when the Cains and Vazquezes 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. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence, their hands are still tied.

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 hate perpetrators are more likely to be convicted and get stiff sentences in state court. That makes good legal and political sense.

Yet, that’s not the only reason for their hands off of the Cains and Vazquez’s. 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. 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 hatred 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.

Clark and Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is The Epstein “Distraction” (Amazon ebook and Middle Passage Press) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GH9RN5ZS. He hosts the weekly news and issues commentary radio show The Hutchinson Report Wednesdays 6 PM PST 9 PM EST at ktymgospel.net

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