4A
Friday, September 15, 1995
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
THE ISSUE: GAY BASHING
Community needs to take action against hate crimes
The cycle of hatred is a vicious one, and not even Lawrence is safe from its clenches.
The Lawrence Police Department and parents of local teens need to take responsibility for juveniles who recently have been verbally assaulting patrons of the HideAway, a gay bar near South Park.
WEEKEND NIGHTS
Last Friday about 15 teens, many of whom had just left the teen center, ranging in age from 15 to 17, stood in the park and harassed bar-goers. The Lawrence police managed to disperse the event before it escalated into violence.
Saturday, a crowd of teens gathered at the corner of the park across from the HideAway again.
The incidents have been sporadic, dating as far back as last April, but they have heightened in recent weeks. One employee of the bar reported an incident recently where two teens carrying baseball bats threatened her as she walked through the park on her way to work
The current conflict between the HideAway's managers, the teen center coordinators and the Lawrence Police Department centers on which organization is responsible for the teens and which has the authority to tell the teens to leave the park.
POLICE ACTION
The police have said that they are not responsible for the teens because the park is public property. Isn't that precisely where police should be?
They also said that they couldn't take action until one of the teens violated city or state laws and until someone else was willing to press charges. If there isn't enough man power to continually patrol the South Park area, maybe we should increase the police force in Lawrence. Merely driving through the area and showing a police presence would help
Actions of teenagers should call police and parents into action in order to protect Lawrence citizens.
curb the harassment PARENTAL ACTION
The parents of these teens also should claim responsibility. Police should call the parents of a teen who has been involved in this type of hate crime.
The parents should not turn their heads to this hatred and violence which has manifested itself in the body of their 15 year old. Parents should feel empowered and supported by the community to teach their teens not to hate.
Another possible course of action is to have the teen center hold sensitivity classes and have speakers talk to the teens about hate crimes and about how these actions are unacceptable.
COMMUNITY ACTION
Underneath the issue of responsibility lies the question of where these teens learned to hate. They may have learned to hate from their parents or from their friends.
But this behavior should not be tolerated, and any instances of it should be stopped before someone ends up in the hospital or in the cemetery.
The Lawrence community should not tolerate this type of behavior from any member, let alone some of its youngest.
In order to maintain order and prevent the escalation of hate crimes, the police should step up patrols in the South Park area. After all, the police station is barely a block away.
Parents should not allow their children to play a part in this gay bashing,nor should they be teaching them to hate. Someone needs to be responsible for these teens and in the same turn eradicate hate crime
HEATHER LAWRENZ FOR THE EDPITORIAL BOARD.
Marko Fields / KANSAN
Harassment in city park merits police assistance
In one of the many disturbing scenes in the movie "Kids," a large group of teenagers in a park harasses a gay couple while screaming homophobic epithets and laughing wildly. Last Friday night, I witnessed a chilling reenactment of that scene in real life, right here in River City.
I was at the HideAway, which is a gay bar. It was fairly early in the evening. I noticed that Jim, one of the bar staff, had gone out to the sidewalk and was surrounded by about 15 or 20 kids. I poked my head out and asked him what was going on.
"Oh, the usual," he said, keeping a watchful eye as the teenagers stood in the street laughing, cursing and pointing at the bar. "They do this just about every weekend."
Apparently, kids wander over from the city teen center in South Park, which is right next to the HideAway, to have a laugh at some genuine queer people. I later found out that people also have been threatened while walking through the park on the way to the bar.
Curious, I walked over to stand next to Jim to listen to what the kids were saying. None of it can be printed here. Suffice it to say they were using vile, horrificly homophobic language — stuff for which my momma would have washed my mouth out with soap more quickly than you can say juvenile delinquent. They made obscene gestures. They stood in the middle of North Park Street, making it difficult for cars to pass. They performed exaggerated dances, shaking their collective booty in disapproval.
When one of them grabbed the bumper of a car trying to make its way down the street, Jim turned to me and said, "Would you mind going inside and ask-
To their credit, the police were there almost immediately. Of course, their headquarters is only half a block away. However, after some questioning, the kids were allowed to leave. Loitering, as it turns out, is not against the law — and I guess harassing people and blocking a public street aren't either.
STAFF COLUMNIST
After talking more with frustrated HideAway staff members — including one who said she recently was threatened near the bar by two boys carrying baseball bats — I made some phone calls this week. The woman I spoke with at the teen center said she was frustrated with the lack of police patrols in the park area and police reluctance to ask kids to leave the park, even when they've been kicked out of the teen center for misbehaving.
When I called the police depart
ment, the officer I spoke to was less than cooperative. When I asked him if the department was aware of the problem in South Park, he said that individual officers who had been called to South Park were probably aware of something going on — a less-than-satisfactory response, especially for the people being harassed. The officer said the police had to go to all kinds of bars on weekend nights, so the HideAway situation was nothing unusual.
ing the staff to call the police now?"
"Nothing unusual?" I asked him. "So are you trying to tell me that every bar in town has a problem with large groups of teenagers blocking the streets and harassing patrons as they try to enter?"
I didn't get much of a response there.
The responsibility for making South Park and the surrounding area safe for the people who go there clearly lies with the Lawrence Police Department. The teen center can't be expected to keep kids from leaving the building or to control them after they do.
Stepping up patrols through the area in order to make a more visible police presence is the next logical and necessary step. The police department is located almost directly across the street from South Park and the HideAway — how hard could it be to make the park safer for everybody?
Chris Hampton is a Lawrence graduate student in higher education.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Clinton should fight teen-age smoking
I must take exception to the column of Aug. 29 that took President Clinton to task for proposing to fight teen smoking.
Children face a constant barrage of advertising for cigarettes. On an average day, more than 3,000 teenagers start smoking cigarettes.
In the mid-1980s, R.J. Reynolds experienced a decline in overall sales for the first time since World War II due to older smokers dying and younger smokers quitting. R.J. Reynolds then began its infamous "Joe Camel" ad campaign, boosting sales of cigarettes to youths
KANSAN STAFF
STEPHANIE UTLEY
Business manager
MATT SHAW
Retail sales manager
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
CATHERINE ELLSWORTH
Technology coordinator
But a study by the American Medical Association found that more than 90 percent of six-year-old children associate the "Joe Camel" character with cigarettes and that even at age three, more than 30 percent of children can make the same association.
The complaint that the tobacco industry shouldn't be saddled with a $150-million bill for an anti-smoking campaign on top of their regular ad campaign expenses just doesn't wash. Tobacco companies spend more than $6 billion each year to promote their lethal prod-
from $6 million to $476 million in two years. R.J. Reynolds claims that the "Joe Camel" ad campaign does not target children.
ucts.
The column closes with the plea for "choice." The average age of beginning smokers is 14. How many lifetime, life-altering commitments are 14-year-olds really ready to make? The evidence is clear that tobacco is one of the most highly addictive drugs on the market, and the FDA has begun to act on this. I agree that President Clinton has many very serious problems to struggle with, but I think that perhaps the most winnable, cost-effective war to be waged is against the addiction of children to tobacco.
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He was just a 14-year-old boy from Chicago. A young black boy who had a slight stutter. Sometimes he had to whistle to get the words out.
He wasn't a Black Panther or an inspiring speaker.
He wasn't a great leader or a radical extremist.
"I hear all this stuff about reverse affirmative action and I wonder, 'My God, what are we doing, a uturn?' I pray that what he died for would have more lasting results."
Emmett was beaten and shot in the head, and his lifeless body
A boy's death should be a reminder of our faults
In 1955, he was killed by two men in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.
Be honest, how many people before today even heard of Emmett Till? How many people know what W.E.B. Du Bois really wrote about?
was tied to a cotton gin exhaust fan with barbed wire and tossed into the Tallahatchie River.
Until this summer, I had no idea who Emmett Till was.
"It (Emmett's death) helped to afford advancement on the civil rights movement," she said. "But not everybody has taken advantage of that advancement."
I feel ashamed for not knowing or at least trying to know.
Mamie Till believed her son's death was senseless, but she also thought it was not completely in vain. Now she questions that.
In Mamie Till's words, "Emmett
died a martyr's death."
When Mamie Till, his mother, came to Mississippi to identify the body, his face was so badly mutilated that she had to identify him from the neck down and from what remained of one hazel eye dangling from its socket.
And I wonder if it was. I wouldn't have heard of Emmett if someone hadn't left an article on a desk at work. That's as if her loss didn't exist. That bothers me.
At the dinner table, he asked,
"Was it worth it?"
The two men responsible for Emmett's death were tried. After only one hour and seven minutes of deliberation, the jury found Emmett Till's murderers innocent.
Listening to him, it felt as if maybe it wasn't. It felt so bad to look at his face, when he felt so many African Americans even don't know the name W.E.B. Du Bois. They don't know what he thought or what he believed. And he said that Martin Luther King Jr. had become a catch phrase for people pretending to know something about history.
I thought about how many of those things I took for granted. I'm not totally ignorant of my history, but I don't feel I know as much as I should.
When I interviewed her on Labor Day, she looked back on the whole event.
On Labor Day, I invited myself into the house of one of my professors. I'm a great admirer of the man. He fought many battles to achieve the rewards we have today.
Protests in cities across the country began. And Emmett's death rallied people behind the civil rights movement.
STAFF COLUMNIST
"If suddenly everybody benefited with good jobs and everything needed for success, I still don't think the price my son paid was worth it." she said.
Rufus Coleman is a Dallas sophomore in journalism.
SUBJECT TO CHANGE
By Shawn Trimble
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