Editor’s note: This story contains detailed descriptions of threats made to victims based on their race, national origin, sexual orientation or other characteristics protected by Oregon’s hate crime law.
It was supposed to be a carefree Fourth of July 2020. Two families had settled in for what they thought would be a relaxing Oregon summer evening on the beach of Lincoln City – an 80-mile, weekend getaway from their homes in Forest Grove and Hillsboro – when a group of seven men approached.
According to witnesses, the white men walked up to the Black families, raised their hands into the air and exclaimed “Heil, Hitler!” They told the families to “F—- off,” then called them a highly offensive racist slur directed at African Americans. They waved Donald Trump flags in the air, blared music extolling the virtues of Trump and exclaimed “You think you’re privileged because you’re Black!”
One man lit a firework and threw it near one mom – warning “That’s just a warm-up.” Someone in the group mimicked a handgun with his fingers and pretended to shoot. One man also alluded to having a real gun, exclaiming that the group would shoot at police if police shot at them.
More than 15 officers responded to the scene. Like the families, they feared for their safety – writing that the men seemed poised to carry out “an imminent, unprovoked attack,” according to their 68-page report.
The encounter made national headlines and sparked overwhelming public condemnation. But within days, Lincoln County District Attorney Jonathan Cable announced his decision: The men wouldn’t face any hate crime charges.
Whether he made the right call is a matter of fervent debate.
The case illustrates the struggle many Oregon district attorneys face in determining what constitutes a hate crime. Individual prosecutors must interpret the finer, sometimes confounding points of the law and often do in different ways – more so than with many other, more clear-cut offenses such as robbery, kidnapping, assault, car theft and drunken driving.
Critics say some prosecutors err on the side of inaction. And that has led to an uneven landscape across the state, where cases involving similar circumstances may be charged in one county but not another.
Over the past decade, per capita, Multnomah County has filed hate crimes at twice the rate as Washington County; three times the rate as Clackamas and Lane counties; and more than six times the rate as Crook and Wasco counties.
The contrast in conviction rates is even more striking. Douglas County, with 112,000 residents, has convicted only one person of a hate crime in the past decade. Nine small counties – the largest Tillamook, with 27,000 residents – have convicted no one.
The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained a list of all hate crime cases filed in state and federal courts in the past decade – more than 550 in all. Some cases included more than one alleged perpetrator.
In about 45% of closed cases, charges fell flat. Frequently, prosecutors agreed to drop them in plea deals, even though the hate crime charges were the ones many victims most wanted to stick. That’s not because all victims want to see perpetrators in prison — state sentencing guidelines call for probation in most cases, anyway. Many victims just want acknowledgement that bigotry fueled their attacks.
Oregon routinely lets them down. Each year, an untold number of potential hate crimes – possibly hundreds – fall through the cracks. Victims who report their experiences to a confidential state hotline don’t file formal complaints with police. Police agencies fall short in their investigations. Prosecutors misinterpret the law or doubt the strength of their cases — and perpetrators of hate remain unpunished.
Reports triple, prosecutions don’t
On that summer 2020 night in Lincoln City, officers formed a protective barrier by standing between the men and the families – four parents and six children in their teens and 20s – so the families could pack their belongings and leave.
Despite the frightening facts of the case, Cable, the DA, said he did not think he could prove a hate crime.
“Unfortunately using racist or derogatory language is not in itself criminal under Oregon law,” said Cable, who left office in early 2021.
Several district attorneys, however, disagreed with Cable’s assessment of the case. The Oregonian/OregonLive contacted 10 prosecutors from other counties, eliciting a range of opinions. Most said they believed all of the components necessary to prove a hate crime were likely there – chiefly, that they made the families fear that they were about to be seriously harmed because of their race. Some prosecutors felt strongly that the men had.
But a few said even though the men’s behavior was reprehensible, it still might amount to nothing more than constitutionally protected speech. The Oregon Supreme Court has set an extraordinarily high bar for when speech crosses into the criminal, prosecutors say.
Contacted this month, Cable said he now thinks he would have charged a hate crime, based on new information provided by The Oregonian/OregonLive. The police report Cable had relied upon stated the firework wasn’t lit when one of the men threw it, though the families told the news organization it most certainly was.
Differing prosecutorial perspectives aren’t the only reason many hate crime cases never make it to a courtroom. Numerous issues add to the problem:
Like in the Lincoln City case, police reports may be inaccurate or omit crucial information. Or overworked officers don’t always have the time to investigate cases, identify suspects and make arrests.
Sometimes cases fail because police lacked the training to recognize hate crimes for what they are. Or prosecutors don’t think they can convince judges or juries – especially conservative ones in rural parts of Oregon – that the crimes were motivated by bias when perpetrators used hate speech as they lobbed threats, pummeled victims or vandalized their cars and homes.
Many times, police and prosecutors never learn about cases because victims have little faith they will take their reports seriously.
A growing number of victims instead report to the Oregon Department of Justice’s confidential Bias Response Hotline, which compiles an annual tally of hate crimes and offers victims support, but doesn’t forward reports to law enforcement. The deluge in hotline reports has provided an illuminating view into the depth of Oregon’s hate.
At the same time, prosecutions haven’t kept pace. Reports to the hotline have tripled since 2020, while the number of prosecuted incidents has increased by 24%.
State Sen. Lew Frederick, D-Portland, said he has long noticed a reluctance among some police and prosecutors to acknowledge that certain crimes are motivated by hate – and to charge them accordingly.
“It’s tragic, but it comes as no surprise,” Frederick said. “That’s the nature of our culture.”
Oregon’s hotline among first in U.S.
Prosecuting hate crimes is a challenge nationwide, but Oregon is among a smattering of liberal states trying to do more.
“Oregon is at the forefront,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, a deputy research director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a national racial justice watchdog group.
Carroll Rivas acknowledges it’s difficult to compare Oregon to other states because little – if any – study has been done of state-by-state prosecution rates. But she and other experts say Oregon may be more motivated than many states to effect change because of a concerted effort by state leaders and grassroots community groups.
Experts also say particularly egregious hate crimes often spur states into action.
In 2018, one year after a confrontation over a racist tirade on a Portland MAX train ended with Jeremy Christian knifing two men to death, Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum commissioned a hate crimes task force to find ways to better support victims and “bring perpetrators of these vile acts to account.”
In 2019, Rosenblum successfully pushed for the passage of Senate Bill 577, which strengthened the state’s four-decades-old hate crimes law by making it easier for prosecutors to pursue felony charges against many offenders and creating the Bias Response Hotline, one of the first in the nation.
Oregon defines a hate crime – or “bias crime,” as it’s officially known – as any act of assaulting or damaging the property of a victim because of animus over the victim’s race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability. Intentionally instilling a fear of “imminent serious physical injury” or committing offensive acts, like spitting on victims, can constitute hate crimes in Oregon, as well.
Frederick, who was a chief sponsor of the bill, said it also set out to address the state’s dearth in prosecutions by requiring the state to gather data that could help Oregon identify why so many falter. For the first time this July, the state will release the number of hate crime cases police sent to county district attorneys for possible prosecution, the number prosecutors pursued and the number that resulted in convictions in the previous year.
But so far, more than three years after the first provisions of the 2019 bill were implemented, upping the number of prosecutions has been an arduous process. Oregon – a majority white state with a particularly long and lingering history of racism and bigotry – is flush with recent examples of hate crime victims who feel brushed aside.
‘It makes me hurt’
That’s true even in Portland.
A woman who emigrated from Cambodia told The Oregonian/OregonLive she was devastated when Portland police officers disregarded the bigoted undertones of a man who frequented her inner Southeast Portland neighborhood. The man, she said, was laser-focused on her and not her neighbors, who were white.
She said over the course of months in 2022, he tormented her by spray-painting the outside of her apartment and dumping garbage in front of it. Once, he chased her while yelling racist and misogynistic epithets, telling her to go back to Asia and threatening to kill her, she said.
The man was originally charged with misdemeanor menacing for allegedly threatening to seriously hurt the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of being further targeted. It wasn’t until two months later that prosecutors charged him with a felony hate crime.
Jim McCandlish, a pro bono lawyer for the Oregon Chinese Coalition, said that happened only because the coalition – which also advocates for members of other Asian ethnicities – learned of the case. McCandlish and coalition president Hongcheng Zhao knocked on neighbors’ doors, talked to police and then presented their findings to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.
“The case was going nowhere until Hongcheng got involved,” McCandlish said. He believes Portland police, overwhelmed by a surge in shootings and homicides, failed the woman. “It was one of those cases where they throw up their hands and move on to the next murder.”
A Portland police spokesman, Sgt. Kevin Allen, said the Portland Police Bureau places “a significant priority” on allegations of bias crime, and “all PPB members have undergone training on how to investigate it.”
The district attorney’s office declined to comment because the case is pending.
The lack of initial hate crime charges deeply upset the woman. She believes the police ignored the truth – one that many straight, white Oregonians who were born in this country won’t experience.
“A lot of people don’t want hate crimes to be real,” she said. “It’s like the justice system is trying to hide the problem.”
She moved from her apartment and bought a knife and pepper spray, saying her perception of the world has changed. Now she rarely leaves home. She said she’s depressed and seeing a counselor.
“When I talk about it, it makes me sad,” the woman said, explaining why she was sobbing during an interview. “I cannot control my emotions. It makes me hurt.”
Outside of Portland
Victims who live in smaller, rural communities say they think hate crimes committed against them were discounted, too.
Eric Osterberg, an openly gay and Black city administrator in Klamath Falls, a community of 22,000 people, was disappointed when no hate crimes charges were filed against a white man who sat next to him at a city council meeting in 2021. Osterberg said the man clenched a softball-sized rock in his hand, raised it slightly and referred to Osterberg as a gay sinner who was spreading AIDS in the community and must be stoned. According to the police report, the police chief was sitting nearby and intervened by walking the man out of the meeting. Then he let him go.
“Didn’t he just make a threat?” Osterberg recalled thinking. “Aren’t you supposed to arrest people who make threats? Why wasn’t more action taken?’”
Police arrested the man six weeks later – after southern Oregon news outlets published articles critical of the police response. By then, Osterberg had moved away from Oregon.
The Klamath County District Attorney at the time, Eve Costello, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that she didn’t charge a hate crime because the defendant has schizophrenia and she didn’t think she could prove he knew what he was saying.
Osterberg said it appeared the man knew exactly what he was saying because he singled him out of the crowd moments before Osterberg was to make a controversial presentation to the council about valuing diversity.
But Costello pursued only misdemeanor disorderly conduct and menacing charges. Last summer she dropped the entire case without a formal assessment of the man’s mental health – stating any charges would be difficult to prove because of the man’s illness.
“Sometimes this county takes care of things in a slightly different manner than say Washington County or Multnomah County does, where people really don’t know each other,” Costello said, before declining to answer further questions.
The move stunned some prosecutors in other parts of the state, who said they wouldn’t dismiss a case without a mental health assessment or an agreement to get the defendant psychiatric help. People with mental illness may still have the capacity to choose to act on their hateful views, they say. Without an evaluation, there’s no way to know.
Pursuing charges against a defendant with mental illness can result in court-ordered treatment that might stop such hateful encounters from happening again, prosecutors say.
One DA, two views
In yet another uncharged hate crime case, Lamont Taylor felt downtrodden from the moment he dialed 911 to report a white woman had threatened him, a Black man, with a Swiss Army knife while calling him a highly offensive racist slur. The two briefly clashed over social distancing rules at a Monmouth bar in Polk County in summer 2020.
Two white witnesses said although they heard the woman call Taylor that slur, he was “mouthing off” at her and treating her disrespectfully, too. Taylor confirmed that he told the woman to “F— off” in what he called an instinctive response to the racist tirade directed toward him.
“Of course I was upset,” Taylor said. “I was totally shocked when it happened.”
Taylor said police and prosecutors left him feeling like he was somehow at fault – when she pulled the knife on him. He said the woman used a series of racist tropes in her defense – telling police she was fearful Taylor was going to hurt her because he looked angry and is huge – and he took two steps toward her, according to reports. He said he was trying to leave.
Police didn’t arrest her that day.
“If that would have been me with a knife, they would have had me in handcuffs in the back of their car,” he said.
Police ultimately forwarded the case to the Polk County District Attorney’s Office, recommending a felony hate crime charge. But the prosecutor accused the woman only of misdemeanor menacing. Even that, he said the prosecutor told him, would be difficult to prove.
Nine months later, on the eve of trial in 2021, Taylor gave up. He agreed to accept a written apology from the woman and let the prosecutor drop the case entirely.
Taylor said the apology letter didn’t seem sincere. But he didn’t want to be interrogated on the witness stand as the aggressor. He was sure a jury would side with the woman.
“I can’t win,” Taylor said. “People will always look at me the same.”
The case highlights not only why hate crime prosecutions sometimes fail in Oregon, but also how one prosecutor can view the same case differently over time.
The prosecutor who handled the case, District Attorney Aaron Felton, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that when he charged this case in 2020, he believed he needed to show the defendant was motivated entirely by racism to prove a hate crime. But he’s come to understand that’s not true. Bigotry needs to be a reason – but not the only reason – a defendant targeted a victim.
Felton said if he encountered a similar case today, he might very well decide to charge a bias crime.
“I personally have grown in my thinking around the application of the law,” Felton said.
Patchwork of prosecutions
Fay Stetz-Waters, director of civil rights and social justice at the Oregon Department of Justice, said she thinks there are vast differences in prosecution rates across the state because some counties are much more aggressive at investigating reports, filing charges and securing convictions.
“There are 36 counties and 36 different ways to prosecute,” Stetz-Waters said.
Stetz-Waters said she doesn’t believe the number of filed cases and convictions is low or non-existent in some Oregon counties because hate crimes don’t happen there. Rather, she said, it’s an indicator that victims don’t feel as comfortable coming forward and the system could do a better job pursuing allegations.
She said a step toward remedying the problem is to instill confidence that – from the very moment police get a call – they understand the context of the situation they are responding to, allowing them to investigate the incident thoroughly.
The Oregonian/OregonLive found many examples of police reports that lacked key details. For instance, a Medford officer responded to a city-owned plaza last December to find a large decorative menorah pushed over on its side. Its lights were shattered and a man sitting nearby admitted to shoving it. However, the officer didn’t appear to understand that a bias crime may have been committed; he described the menorah as a “Christmas light fixture display” in his police report. Nowhere did the report acknowledge it’s a Jewish symbol.
In December 2022, a man twice vandalized this menorah at Medford's Vogel Plaza.
The officer arrested the man on accusations of vandalism. Several days later, the man returned to the plaza, this time breaking the menorah beyond repair. The Jackson County District Attorney’s Office pursued only vandalism-related charges and the man was sentenced in March to probation.
Medford Police Lt. Rebecca Pietila said the officer described the menorah as a Christmas display because that’s how a witness reported it to police. Pietila said she’s confident her officers – including others who responded and described the vandalized property as a menorah in their police reports – thoroughly investigated the incident. The man is known to police as someone who wants to go to jail, she said.
This fall Stetz-Waters will lead her second training since 2022 of police officers and prosecutors across Oregon in how to recognize hate crimes, ask the right investigative questions and – when appropriate – pursue convictions. Stetz-Waters said police and prosecutors’ willingness to attend the trainings shows they want to improve.
“To be aware of where your shortcomings are is a big step,” Stetz-Waters said.
When contacted by The Oregonian/OregonLive, some police agencies and district attorneys disagreed with the assertion that they’re letting the perpetrators of hate crimes slip through the cracks. Many cases, they said, might never reach them.
None of the more than 900 hate crime reports that victims made to the Department of Justice’s hotline in 2022 were forwarded to police or prosecutors. State law requires that the hotline reports remain confidential. The Department of Justice says it offers victims police contact information, if they say they want it.
A small portion of the hotline complaints may have been too old to prosecute, anyway, because victims occasionally report crimes that occurred more than two or three years ago and the statute of limitations has passed.
“The tidal wave that they are seeing is not translating to any information for us,” said Sgt. Matthew Jacobsen, who oversees bias crimes investigations for the Portland Police Bureau.
Last year, Portland police say they received 53 hate crime reports, a slight decrease from the previous year. Meanwhile, reports of hate crimes made to the hotline from Multnomah County, whose residents mostly live in Portland, more than doubled in the same period, to 380.
No criminal convictions
In the case of the two Black families on the Lincoln City beach, they felt that the police truly cared and stopped the situation from getting even worse. But they said they were deeply disappointed none of the men were charged with hate crimes. The families declined to comment further, saying they wanted to put the ugly episode behind them.
The Lincoln County District Attorney’s Office originally charged all seven men with rioting, disorderly conduct and interfering with police. But prosecutors worked out agreements dismissing those charges in exchange for community service.
The last of the men’s cases was dismissed in December 2022, and none were convicted of any crimes. Two defendants, however, were convicted of violations – similar to traffic tickets – for possessing the illegal fireworks and fined $440.
District Attorney Lanee Danforth, who took office in 2021 after defeating Cable, stands by her office’s handling of the case.
State Rep. David Gomberg, a Democrat who represents Lincoln City, told The Oregonian/OregonLive he was disheartened by the outcome. Clearly, he said, the men had crossed the line into committing a hate crime by threatening the safety of the two families.
“If there wasn’t a physical threat, then why did we need 15 police officers on the beach to protect (them)?” Gomberg asked. “We, legislators, can write all the laws in the world, but we need local authorities to be willing to enforce them.”
With the rising numbers of hate crime reports in Oregon, it’s crucial Lincoln County and the state send “a clear response,” he said.
“We can do better.”
-- Aimee Green; agreen@oregonian.com; @o_aimee. Data visualization specialist Dave Cansler contributed to this story.
This story is the first in an occasional series scrutinizing Oregon’s hate crime law. Future installments will cover when hate crime cases fail and succeed in the Portland area and whether the state’s hate crime law goes far enough.
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