UNITE DIVERSE COMMUNITIES TO FIGHT HATE CRIMES.

Byline: Gil Garcetti and Carla Arranaga

AS President Clinton calls the national Hate Crimes Summit to order, we in Los Angeles have much to learn and much to share from our own experience.

Los Angeles County is among the world's most diverse places, with almost 10 million people speaking more than 50 languages and representing hundreds of ethnic backgrounds.

Our society also is in flux. Neighborhood demographics shift constantly, and cultures scrape against each other in changing patterns. It comes as no surprise that there is escalating friction among these groups, resulting in a significant increase in reported hate crimes.

In 1996, the FBI documented 1,751 hate crimes in California, more than in any other state. For that same year, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission documented 995 hate crimes in Los Angeles County alone - a 25 percent increase over 1995.

The war against hate crimes is a major priority of the District Attorney's Office. In 1993, we established a Hate Crimes Unit - one of the first in the country - to provide vertical prosecution of hate crimes throughout Los Angeles County.

With vertical prosecution, specially trained prosecutors handle each case from beginning to end, thereby ensuring vigorous prosecution and a sensitivity to victims in these difficult cases.

In the first eight months of 1997 alone, our hate crimes prosecutors handled 81 felony cases, involving assaults and murders that occurred because of the race, religion, gender or sexual orientation of the victim.

We recently filed one of this county's first special-circumstance murder cases against skinheads who are charged with killing an African-American solely because of his race.

In addition to vertical prosecution, our hate crimes prosecutors have established a protocol governing our evaluation and prosecution of hate crimes cases, participated in peace officer and community training, developed better methods of documenting and tracking hate crimes, and fostered improved relations with various disenfranchised groups.

Los Angeles has been particularly innovative in creating law enforcement and community-based targeted coalitions to address hate crime ``hot spots.'' These are specific geographical cluster areas with especially pronounced racial violence - typically, areas undergoing the stress of visible and significant demographic changes.

In Hawaiian Gardens, for instance, the Latino Los Loquitos gang has waged a campaign of terror - threats, criminal assaults, arson and homicide - aimed at coercing African-American residents to move out.

To combat this surge of violence, our Hate Crimes Unit is a member of a task force composed of individuals from the local City Council, police departments, human relations commission, schools, and parole and probation departments. We are combining prevention, education and suppression in a response tailored to the specific issues in Hawaiian Gardens.

Similarly, we have had significant success prosecuting and dismantling white supremacist groups in the Antelope Valley through an innovative task force composed of officials from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, local community leaders and our office. This task force shares intelligence on active skinhead groups and prosecutes offenders via either state or federal statutes, whichever best apply.

To date, both the federal and local arms of the task force have accounted for numerous successful prosecutions.

We in Los Angeles are proud that we are increasingly working together in the fight against hate crimes. We are trying to blur the lines between federal and local government and law enforcement and neighborhoods in the fight against hate crimes.

Breaking down these traditional walls is not always easy, but well worth the effort. Maybe it is the best message that we can take to President Clinton's conference.