Police look for hate crime suspect who assaulted man on a bicycle

Alright bicycle (and possibly LGBT) community. Print and plaster this guy’s pick all over SE. Then go back and take it down after they find the guy because his mug awfully menacing.

Whats a “hate” crime? Is that when you happen to be thinking mean things about people while doing something already illegal?

Perhaps it was Schwinn hate? I saw this idiotic descriptor “hate crime” last night on the television news.

Find the man who did this an punish him as severely as the law allows. But, get rid of all thought crimes. I lived a block off of Columbia Villa for several years and if I had a fiver for every time I was challenged on the street because I’m white..why, I’d have 15 dollars and three hate crime offenders.

wow, attempted murder for riding an awesome girl’s bike?! those people have some serious issues and need to be purged from society…

I think everybody able to defend themselves needs to get their spare girl’s bike out and adorn it with glitter and lights and ride around Powell and 17th as much as possible…

It’s important to point out that the perpetrators used anti-gay expletives during this assault, which makes it a hate crime.

I completely agree with Bob R.

Bob R. and Rebecca explain it quite simply and to the point .Bravo.

right next to the underpass where transients on bikes spend a majority of their day. maybe ask them?

I have had some complaints about offensive comments and have deleted a few already. Please realize this is a sensitive topic and therefore my threshold for moderation is much lower than other posts. Thanks for being thoughtful and considerate of me and the BikePortland community.

Calling him derogatory terms for homosexual is what makes this a hate crime. I find it absolutely disgusting and I can’t believe there is still gay-bashing going on especially in a so-called progressive city. Maybe Bash Back needs to be revived.

Law enforcement, the courts and the culture we live in is biased against certain groups of people. How many times have I heard “homosexual panic” used as an acceptable defense, or something like ‘if he hadn’t been a homo, I wouldn’t smashed his face in.’

So, I feel that I am a formidable opponent for a single male (without weapons). Two or more guys…. then I just run as fast as I can.

Do any of you carry self protection during late night bike rides? If so, what?

Let’s please user our twitter accounts to get this guy’s picture to everyone we know – use hashtag #pdxbashing – if we can find a stolen bike by twitter we can find a suspect!

Let’s say you witness a man being punched while the assailant yells things like “faggot” and “mexican”. That would be a hate crime. It becomes a police problem when the cops show up and refuse to do anything because the victim has fled. Myself and several neighbors saw the beating. Days later I noticed the assailant lived a block away. The cops would do nothing. To make it worse, one of my close neighbors called it “street justice”. Sadly, Portland is a lot like Indiana and Arizona.

His freckles will be his downfall.

This guy is a sadistic killer. The victim was probably continually beaten well after he was knocked unconscious. A part of his colon was removed, if that tells what the suspect did to him. I’m surprised they haven’t already identified him in police mugshots — he must have an extensive criminal history. He could possibly be part of a hate group with his short style of hair. He’d be good backup against a menacing driver trying to mow down cyclists.

I live one block from where this incident happened. I have distributed 70 flyers throughout the S.E. part of town. Thank you Bike Portland for posting this. $1000 can buy a lot of meth- someone is bound to spill beans on this POS.

Depending on the circumstances, quite possibly, yes.

Whether something classifies as a “hate crime” has less to do with the suspected classification of the victim and more to do with the intent and actions of the perpetrator: Was the perpetrator, through his actions and expressions, attempting to intimidate an entire class of people, beyond an “ordinary” crime?

As I stated before, we draw multiple distinctions of intent when it comes to murder and other crimes, including the lesser crimes of manslaughter or negligent homicide. In all those cases, the victim is dead, but how society views the crime differs significantly based on the intent and actions of the perpetrator.

Look at it another way: If a white guy, seeing a criminal opportunity, mugs a black guy because he thinks the black guy has a lot of cash on him and says “give me your cash” and then beats up the black guy in the commission of the crime, that’s sad and heinous but not a hate crime. On the other hand, if the perpetrator makes statements along the lines of “you and your kind should stay out of this neighborhood” (I’m softening this quite a bit to avoid racial epithets in the comment), that is racial intimidation on another level beyond just a robbery, and yes, that classifies as a hate crime. And it should.

I note again for the record that I seem to find that this kind of intense questioning (and sometimes mischaracterizations) of what “hate crimes” laws actually are seems to mostly come up in the context of discussing crimes against gay people.

Simply said, a hate crime is:

“A crime motivated by racial, religious, gender, sexual orientation, or other prejudice.”

That’s from a website page ‘legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com’. I tried and failed to correctly post a link for that page the other day. I suppose that caused it to fall into ‘comment moderation. From there, for some unexplained reason, it was deleted.

There’s more on that page and elsewhere online about hate crime. Many people probably recognize the name Matthew Sheppard. He was subjected to hate crime, and is referred to at the aforementioned site.

But what about all those people gathered together at Pioneer Square to celebrate being together in peace and lighting the …well, you know…the conifer with all the pretty decorations on it? What the Somali kid was intent upon doing to them certainly seems to have been a hate crime. too. Fortunately, he didn’t succeed, so concluding exactly what he has done is yet to be determined.

Prejudice is the defining element, committing a crime against someone or something for no other reason than the perpetrator doesn’t like them or it.

Oregonion online’s story had a few comments remarking that the location where this crime occurred is a particularly dangerous place to be alone at midnight. The claim in those comments was that convicted felons have been lurking around, squatting, preying on vulnerable people.

FYI, my comments from Dec 5th at 12:15pm and 2:26pm look a bit odd right now because the original comments to which I was replying are no longer present.

People who cannot understand that the hate crimes legislation is not making the speech illegal. It is the motivation for the crimes that the speech makes obvious.

This is America and we still have freedom of speech even if Fox News wants to make it illegal to say happy holidays.

We can still say mean things about gay people if we are ignorant enough to do so.

The problem is if you say mean things about gay people while beating someone up then it will be pretty damned clear that the reason you are beating them up is because they are gay or because you think they are. This is an act of intimidation against an entire class of people.

Also, motivation is a factor that is taken into consideration when prosecuting crimes. Look into the criminal codes if you do not understand this simple fact. If you commit your crime because you are motivated by hatred of a class of people that is an aggravating factor. Thus the additional charges.

And if you can parse my first sentence in that last post to make it make sense you will get extra credit.

“if you value equality and understand that it means applying standards of behavior equally”.
Which is why “hate crimes” are fundamentally flawed practice. Convicting individuals for well established crimes such as murder, assault, etc, is strait-forward. The implementation of hate crimes is vague at best considering that if someone beats a gay/black/Hindu/juggler to death without ever saying a thing about how much he doesn’t like juggling then I guess its not a hate crime. Even if he does happen to say something mean, are you really going to deduce the full context and intricacies of his inner monologue from that? (Camus’ The Stranger, anyone, anyone?) If you, as a victim, happen to not fit into the court’s pre-established special groups then you’re out of luck (Sorry high school freshman, you’re gonna get it). People here seem to have an idea that every single person who commits an illegal act against one of these groups is by default going to own no less than 3 Nazi flags and have a swastika cut into their forehead. Something we should consider is what effect these laws have. Are they meant to prevent these crimes from happening by scaring away the potential perp with higher penalties? I doubt our illiterate Nazi friend is going to stop in mid kick and think to himself “ya know, I’ll go to jail for 5 more years if I do this and say ‘ginger’ so I better stop”. Therefore the laws are simply vindictive and meant to inflict a harsh retribution. Fine if you’re into the whole Old testament kind of thing and you just want to push the problem away somewhere that you don’t have to see it without actually doing something about it. Finally, the whole “punishing the one for the sake of the many” argument is bogus as our Nazi buddy has no clue about any of this high-fallutin philosophizin. He just doesn’t like guys with tight jeans is all, be they gay or just hanging outside of Branx.
In summary: the existing crimes that have existed for hundreds of years seem to work just fine. If you assault someone you should get charged for, I don’t know, assault. “Hate” crimes will, by their nature, be arbitrarilly applied and do little to nothing to make anyone actually safer. These groups may feel some sense of recognition, kind of like seeing your name in the paper, but real development comes through creating supportive communities, inside and out of these specialty groups.
The End

BTW, anyone notice that the posts are completely out of sequence. Spooooky.