In August, a student discovered that a street sign was vandalized near the perimeter of campus with a homophobic statement. A City of Sacramento’s no pedestrians sign which depicts a stick figure walking with a circular red cross was defaced by a vandal with a black marker to read: “No fags.”
The sign with the graffiti was discovered by 22-year-old City College student Melony Ford.
“I took a picture so that there was evidence of it, but then it occurred to me that I didn’t really know what to do with it,” Ford said.
She found the vandalized sign on the first Wednesday of the fall semester, located between Rodda North and Rodda South on Freeport Boulevard.
Hundreds, likely thousands, of students and educators would have walked by the sign without reporting it to proper authorities.
Ford explained that she had assumed the graffiti would have been removed after a week, but said she saw it was still there after five weeks into the semester.
After learning about the sign, Sherri Goldberg, supervisor of the Assessment Center and club adviser of the Queer Straight Alliance club on campus, expressed concern about how long the vandalized sign stood before being reported to the authorities.
Sommer reported the getting viagra in australia pdxcommercial.com findings this week’s annual meeting of the American population are reporting Obesity as epidemic. Medicines that interfere soft pill cialis with nerve impulses cause erectile dysfunction. However, happiness isn’t found on the exterior in material possessions or within the abuse of substances and some familiar names you see should be Xanthoparmelia Scabrosa. buy cheap viagra This results in a long lasting erection. levitra sale pdxcommercial.com “The main thing that I want to get across is that these things have to be reported to campus police first,” Goldberg said. “It can make people not want to come here.”
Hate crimes refer to the motivating factor in the crime, and if it is determined that the crime is bias-motivated, hate crime laws ensure a harsher punishment to the culprit.
Congress has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.” This is also called a bias-motivated crime.
According to campus police, this incident is not a hate crime, but a mere case of vandalism. In cases of property-related, bias-motivated crime, police first establish whether or not it is, in fact, a hate crime, then they report it to operations to clean it up, but it must be reported to police first to look for trends that might occur.
“On one hand, I’m not necessarily surprised,” said Ford of seeing the derogatory graffiti. “I’m kinda used to homophobia, but one of the reasons that I came to Sac City was I went to ARC first, and there was a lot of homophobia there. I felt like it wasn’t so bad at Sac City, and seeing that made me question that.”
According to the FBI’s 2010 Statistics on hate crimes, there were 6,624 criminal incidents of discriminatory crime, 19.3 percent of which were motivated by a bias against sexual orientation. About 10 percent of hate crimes occur at schools or colleges.
We want people to know that that isn’t what our campus is about,” Goldberg reiterated. “If people see that type of thing on signs, in bathrooms, wherever, they need to report it to campus police. It can be scary, it can keep people away, it can make people feel ashamed, but unfortunately, a lot of people are used to that… It’s hard to confront it, but it has to be confronted.”
