A “United Against Hate” event that recently drew roughly 200 people in North Idaho was just a piece of an ongoing campaign, both in Idaho and nationwide, to build community capacity to respond to and prevent hate crimes and incidents.
The gathering at the Coeur d’Alene Casino in Worley — co-sponsored by U.S. Attorney for Idaho Josh Hurwit, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, the FBI and more — came five months after 31 members of the Patriot Front were arrested as they prepared to disrupt a “Pride in the Park” event in Coeur d’Alene by rioting, and at a time when hate crimes in Idaho have been increasing.
“This initiative is particularly timely for Idaho, as we have experienced a series of troubling hate incidents throughout the state in the past several years,” Hurwit said.
United Against Hate is a nationwide initiative launched by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, but the Nov. 17 gathering in North Idaho was among the largest events thus far across the country.
“The underlying goal is to connect communities, especially marginalized communities, to law enforcement and resources,” Hurwit said, “and also to build an understanding of the tools that we have at the federal level and with our state partners to address hate incidents and hate crimes.”
Other major events across the country have included a large civil rights event in the Western District of New York after the Buffalo mass shooting attack in May, in which an 18-year-old white man shot and killed 10 people at a local supermarket in a Black neighborhood and injured three others. The Eastern District of Washington has held events focusing on places of worship.
“I wanted our first large public event to be in North Idaho,” Hurwit said. “We made that decision because we felt and understood from the community that there was an appetite for both an educational program, but also a program that has an underlying spirit of community-building and creating a safer environment for all of us.”
Tony Stewart, co-founder of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations, said, “It was a tremendous boost to we who have been involved in this work for so long, and how one counters hate. I could not be more pleased.”
“They made a real great distinction between when something is protected by the First Amendment, like hate speech, and illegal actions,” Stewart said. “It empowers us to know more information when we’re working with possible victims.”
Kootenai County Prosecutor Stanley Mortensen was among the speakers at the event, and he shared the details on three recent hate crimes his office successfully prosecuted. All involved violations of Idaho’s felony malicious harassment law, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
In one case, three brothers, in a pickup festooned with a dirt swastika, stopped at the home of a local man who is Latino and began harassing him, then left and returned with a gun and a pit bull. All three were convicted; the one with the gun, who as a felon wasn’t permitted to have firearms, went to prison for up to nine years.
In another, an intoxicated Post Falls man began harassing a Latino man who was with friends visiting bars in downtown Coeur d’Alene, and after hurling racial epithets, punched the visitor in the face. The defendant was convicted of malicious harassment and sentenced to up to five years in prison.
In a third case, a Black man had stopped with his family at a rest stop near Coeur d’Alene when the defendant began repeatedly harassing him, telling him to leave, and pulled a large knife. The defendant pleaded guilty to malicious harassment and was sentenced to up to five years in prison.
Mortensen said over the past decade and a half, “my office has prosecuted close to a couple dozen of those cases. … The crimes were racially motivated.”
“There’s a lot that happens that the people just don’t know about,” he said. “We’ve come a long way. Idaho and North Idaho in particular have been infamous for its Aryan Nations past. Truth be told, that received a lot of national attention for a long time, but it was a small number of people that were making a lot of noise. The vast majority of people in Idaho don’t believe that kind of stuff and don’t think like that.”
The Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group that tried to establish a headquarters near Hayden Lake in the late 1970s, launched a hate campaign against local minority residents and set off several bombs in 1986, one of them at the home of the late Rev. Bill Wassmuth, then a local Catholic priest and human rights leader. The community and state mobilized against the group; passed the malicious harassment law; and eventually saw the Aryan Nations bankrupted in a civil lawsuit after its members attacked and harassed a Native American woman and her son as they drove by the group’s compound. The lawsuit cost the group both its compound and its rights to its name; the compound was razed in 2000 and turned into a peace park.
Mortensen said hate incidents or crimes happen from time to time. Of the recent gathering, he said, “I just think it was a great message to send the public that if and when it does happen, we’re going to address it, on a case-by-case basis.”
The event ran for nearly three hours, and Stewart said the large audience paid close attention.
Hurwit told the crowd, “At the Department of Justice, our mission is to enforce the rule of law. That includes a commitment to prosecuting unlawful acts of hate,” the Coeur d’Alene Press reported.
Hurwit noted that hate itself is not illegal, but criminal acts, violence and threats of violence are. And he said when people are unwilling to see or listen to each other, violent rhetoric can lead to actual violence.
“I believe it is possible to avoid this in North Idaho,” he said. “I believe that if we do it here, we can inspire the rest of Idaho. And I believe that Idahoans can inspire the rest of the nation.”
Coeur d’Alene Tribe officials told the crowd that hate was an unknown concept in the tribe’s traditional culture.
Chairman Chief Allan, who shared how his community reacted — including involving the FBI — after a busload of its football players was attacked with rocks after a game in Clark Fork in 2020 — said, “Come on, people, this is 2022, we’re on the verge of 2023, and we’re still talking about this, we as human beings? There’s no place in our world for that.”
A panel including a local Methodist minister, a Coeur d’Alene City Council member and the mayor of Sandpoint shared perspectives and experiences, as did local, federal and state law enforcement officials.
Hurwit said both hate crimes and hate incidents — incidents of hate that don’t rise to the level of a crime that can be prosecuted — all need to be reported.
“Not everything will be able to be prosecuted, but the more we know, the better our ability is to connect the dots between different incidents around the state and around the country,” he said, “so that when a crime is committed, we have a better chance of being able to prosecute it successfully.”
Hurwit said there will be more events around the state as part of the United Against Hate initiative. “That’s our intent,” he said.
Part of the hoped-for outcome is more reporting of hate incidents and hate crimes, he said, along with more discussion and partnerships to counter hate.
“That’s been starting already,” he said, “and I’m really gratified to see that.”