I was a Portland, Oregon Police Bureau member for more than twenty-eight years. We didn’t call them “hate” crimes there. We had bias crimes, where the targets were the African American and homosexual communities. At first, there were a few incidents, then there were quite a few, and then we began to hear from [the offenders themselves] in terms of their philosophies of racial separatism and racial superiority.

The number of incidents over a period of time grew to about fifty or seventy-five separate instances. We, as a police department, began to tell the mayor and the city council: “We have an emergent problem here, we have seen what has happened in Hayden Lake, Idaho, the headquarters of the Aryan Nation. We have seen what has happened in California. We don’t want that to happen here. This is a beautiful city by the river. We have to do something about this before we have a serious injury or death.”

I can remember quite vividly being in the mayor’s office and his angry response that this could never happen in his city, and that we were exaggerating. It wasn’t too long before the community began to pressure us for some kind of response to these crimes. But nothing much was done. Finally, three skinheads saw an Ethiopian college student come out of his apartment, and they circled the block and confronted him as he was about to get into his car. They jumped out with their baseball bats and they harassed and taunted him. They then used their bats and they killed him on the spot, for no other reason than his skin was black.

We then had a community in shock. How could this happen in the great city of Portland? So we said, “Folks, we have been telling you for at least three years that they are here, that they are going to kill someone, and that we need the community to rise against this hate activity and not regard it as just a police problem: We need to see that it’s a community problem.”

I was determined that that was not going to happen in Billings.