By Carol Ness OF THE EXAMINER STAFF It's so easy to feel smug watching Laramie, Wyo., Jasper, Texas, and Sylacauga, Ala., squirm in the hot light of a nation's fury over hate violence. Here in the Bay Area, we know better. Right? Take a look at just a few incidents from the last year: "Faggot, do you want a piece of me?" were the last words 45-year-old Brian Wilmes ever heard, outside the Loading Dock, a gay leather bar in San Francisco's South of Market. Then he was hit with the nighttime rage of a frustrated drunk - one lethal punch. Edgard Mora, 26, of South San Francisco, is about to stand trial on charges of hate-motivated murder. Aboard a 38-Geary Muni bus, an African American mother from Marin City and her three young children came under an escalating barrage of profanities, racial epithets, elbow jabs and shoves by a 32-year-old Chinese woman. In Fremont last year, a man drove his truck up to an Indian woman walking down the street wearing her traditional clothing - and dumped a bucket of feces on her. In Vallejo, 33-year-old Jimmy M., his fiancee and her son will not leave their house untended after a nearly two-year campaign of harassment and intimidation by neighbors who remember Jimmy from when he was a girl. In San Francisco, a 67-year-old Filipina was parking her car when a man in a pickup pulled up, shouted, "You can't park there, you f- - - - -- immigrant, that's an American parking space," and rammed her twice. She was hurt, her car was totaled. Outside a gay dance club South of Market, a van full of young males from the East Bay descended on three men in October. A gun was pulled, a shot squeezed off. No one was killed - but it's the kind of incident that easily could have met a deadly end and often does, when it comes to anti-gay violence. None of these local incidents reached the brutality of the torture-murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay sprite in braces who was pistol-whipped and left to die on the most famous fence in America on Oct. 7, 1998, in Laramie. Or of the decapitation-by-dragging death of James Byrd, for being a black man, by a white supremacist and two buddies in Jasper. Or the kidnapping, castration, clubbing and incineration of Billy Jack Gaither, 39 and gay, in Sylacauga two months ago. But they took their toll, in lives and on human souls. And they erupted from the same explosive combination of prejudice, violence and disrespect for difference that have made threats, intimidation, Beatings and worse against people - because of who they are - an ugly fact of life across America. The victims can be anyone; the perpetrators are more likely your neighbor, some regular Joe with an attitude, than the stereotype of the swastika-covered extremist. And with our rapidly diversifying populations, San Francisco and the Bay Area are as prone to hate violence as places like Laramie - or even more so. The face of hate takes many forms. There is, for instance, Jeremy Orr, 19, who is in San Francisco County Jail: "When I was 15, one time we was in the park and these two faggots, I mean homosexuals, pulled up in a car and lay down on a blanket. Four of us just went over and demolished those guys and demolished their car. We beat 'em up. We broke stuff up. Then we just went over to one guy's house. "Why? They should keep that stuff private. I also did it to look cool with my homies. We was all teenagers." Like most perpetrators of hate violence, Orr never got caught for that gay bashing, or for attacks on Mexicans, blacks, anyone who looked different and crossed the path of the little band of white thugs he hung with in Modesto until he grew up and went to jail - for other kinds of violence. He said he never really was a racist - but in the poor Modesto neighborhood where he grew up, the only choice was to be an offender or a victim. And like most bashers, he thought he came righteously by his prejudice against gays - though he's trying to unlearn that. Unlike most, he's willing to admit what he did, because it's key to his efforts to stop being violent, through the Resolve to Stop the Violence program, RSVP, run by the S.F. Sheriff's Department. Assistant District Attorney Maria Bee, in charge of hate crime prosecution for San Francisco, said only the most seemingly clear-cut cases reach her desk. Even then, Bee said, "Most of them, even if they plead guilty, never really admit that that's why they did it. I've never seen one who says, 'Yeah, I did wrong.' "Instead they say, 'Yeah, I did it, but it wasn't because the guy was black, it's because he pissed me off.' I hear that a lot." About half of hate violence offenders are under 21, 90 percent are male, and most have weak motives for committing the crime, according to Brian Levin, director of the Center on Hate and Extremism at Stockton College in New Jersey, soon to expand to San Bernardino. "Sixty percent are committed for the excitement," he said, citing several studies. Stew, 39, another RSVP participant who didn't want his last name used, admitted to beating up gay men for the sport of it, when he was hanging with the wrong crowd in his Los Angeles neighborhood. "Once in a while I need to do that to get that feeling, the adrenaline, the power - just to know I was dominant over somebody," admitted Stew, who never got caught for those assaults, though other crimes did catch up with him. "Even though (hate homicides) are not common, we certainly are not immune. No one is," said Inspector Sandi Bargioni, head of the San Francisco Police Department's Hate Crimes Unit, considered one of the best in the country. Jennifer Rakowski of Community United Against Violence, which monitors anti-gay incidents in the Bay Area, described a climate of hostility around race and sexual orientation. "It's not that there is a Matthew Shepard case happening weekly in San Francisco," Rakowski said. "But that there are, on a daily basis, incidents of racial-based hatred and homophobic hatred, some of which seem fairly mundane or in the early stages, all the way up to ones that actually involve quite a high level of injury, occasionally including death." Jill Tregor, who as director of San Francisco's Intergroup Clearinghouse is a local linchpin of anti-hate-violence efforts, said: "To me, one of the messages I get when I read interviews with residents of Jasper is, 'We want people to know our town is really not like this.' But the message I get is, 'We're really all just like that.' " Incidents investigated by San Francisco police as possible hate crimes numbered 257 last year, down 61 from 1997 and down more than a third from the peak of 401 reported in 1991. The City has been keeping track since 1989. Statewide, 1,831 bias-motivated crimes were reported in 1997, the last year for which figures are available. That is down a little from 1996, but up a bit from 1995. A constant two-thirds are race-related, with African Americans as victims half the time, according to the attorney general's office. Nationally, the FBI counted 8,049 hate incidents in 1997, down marginally from the year before. Conservative, anti-gay groups like Focus on the Family use the statistics as a club against those who seek more hate-crime laws, pointing out that they're a tiny proportion of the 13.2 million crimes reported to the FBI in 1997. But only a fraction of actual hate-motivated crimes get reported. And many incidents that don't rise to the level of crimes still take a daily toll on the psyches of people victimized because of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion and immigration status. In San Francisco, a new pattern is emerging, Bargioni said. Gay bashings may account for some of the worst violence but have declined in the '90s. And very little hate violence here, unlike Southern California, involves organized gangs or skinhead groups, she said. But neighbor-to-neighbor hostilities are escalating, as people of different races, and gays and lesbians, move into established, homogeneous neighborhoods. "The Sunset, the Avenues, are good examples," she said. "Long-established older couples, who are white and in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, can't accept other kinds of people or gay people moving in, and they begin to act out." People of any race can be the hater or the hated. But Bargioni said white-on-black and black-on-white hostilities make up a majority of racial incidents reported to police in San Francisco - at equal rates. For example: An older African American man is terrorizing his South of Market block, which whites and some gays have colonized as The City gentrifies, Bargioni said. He's harassed, threatened, insulted and assaulted them, despite one arrest and three or four restraining orders. So far, it's not enough for a criminal prosecution. The stabbing of Richard Bailey, an 18-year-old black youth from San Bruno, outside Kezar Pavilion in February, by a group of young men who, according to police, carry on a long Sunset tradition of hanging out in parks drinking and taking on people who don't belong. Kevin Reilly, 20, has been charged with a hate crime. Such intergroup conflict - played out increasingly in neighborhoods and schools - can only be expected to rise along with the population's burgeoning diversity, according to Fred Persily of San Francisco, co-founder of the California hate-violence movement in the mid-1980s and now director of the California Association of Human Relations Organizations. It was Persily who helped coin the term "hate violence" - one he admits doesn't quite capture its complications - as part of a state commission investigating a campaign of terror against a black family who moved into the mostly white Richmond enclave of Tara Hills in the 1980s. "I expect that there will be increases in hate violence and hate crimes and intergroup conflict, particularly in those places where there are demographic shifts that are causing changes in political and economic power," Persily said. "That includes San Francisco and most places in the Bay Area." Hate violence, whether by your neighbor or a stranger on the street, can happen for a lot of reasons. But when it's about an innate trait - a piece of the self - the psychic and emotional damage can run deeper, psychologists have found. That's what puts this kind of violence on one end of the same scale as Matthew Shepard's killing. Listen to Bradley Davis, 24, who was holding hands with another man on Castro Street last month when he drew shouts of "Die faggot, die" and then a solid punch in the face from one in a trio of drunken young men. He was knocked out but, unlike Brian Wilmes, survived with bruises, a black eye and 10 stitches closing a gash in his head. Ten days later, the trauma was just sinking in, the depression and anger and pain intensifying, Davis said. "I'm very, very hurt. I'm scared to be in this city. I didn't do anything to deserve this, but I'm totally blaming myself. I think it's me," said Davis, who is bisexual and arrived from Virginia late last year. The motivations for hate violence against gays, and for the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor conflicts common in the Bay Area, might be different. But they carry an extra dimension beyond everyday muggings and assaults because "they were being attacked for who they are," Said Tricia Stapleton, victim services director in the San Francisco district attorney's office. The message is: Don't be so blatant, don't be next door, don't be. In a study of 2,000 gay men and lesbians in Sacramento, UC-Davis psychologist Gregory Herek found significantly higher levels of depression and stress in victims of anti-gay assaults than among those who'd survived random crimes. And the psychological trauma lasted much longer. The effects can be compounded if police and community agencies don't take such incidents seriously. In addition, said Yale political science Professor Donald Green, "The aim is often to terrorize an entire class of people. And in essence, hate crime pays; it really does that. "If you burn a cross on a person's lawn, you will convince minorities it's an unattractive place to live," Green added. "It takes a very carefully crafted approach to undo the damage of a hate crime." Despite the publicity that white supremacists get, the vast majority of racial hate crimes aren't driven by any hard-bitten ideology, Said Levin, of the Center on Hate and Extremism. UCLA research psychologist Edward Dunbar just completed a review of hate crimes in Florida and found that three-quarters of the perpetrators "just don't like people they construe as different." Many say the charges against them were fabricated - or in some way justified. "I had one perpetrator say, 'I was jumped by a group of blacks, so I went and damaged their house,' " Dunbar recounted. "I asked when it happened, and he said, '25 years ago.' " Perpetrators often think they're the victim, said Dunbar. "They're people who feel they have been taken advantage of by society, that nobody looks out for them," Dunbar said. "Then they seek out people they can act out against and aggress against. " Gay bashers feel especially justified, that they're merely enforcing the attitudes they've learned at home, in school, at church, in society. In her study of 500 community college students in the Bay Area, psychologist Karen Franklin found that 50 percent of the young men admitted hitting, threatening or harassing someone for being gay - and many would do it again. "They didn't see anything wrong with their behavior," said Franklin, a former University of Washington forensic psychologist. That no one had taught them differently amounts to the kind of license that society no longer accords racially motivated crimes. But still, Franklin believes hate is too simple a concept to explain brutal acts like Shepard's murder. "People who do such extreme things usually have extreme things in their lives," she said. "It's not exactly hate. It's more of having grown up in a violent milieu in the first place." No advocate of hate crime laws would disagree. But bias adds an element that directs who is targeted for violence, as Levin put it. It's been more than a decade since Tara Hills spawned the concept of hate crimes. Then, residents of the middle-class subdivision turned on blacks moving in with shotgun blasts through their homes, feces spread on walls, garbage thrown in pools and kids being chased home with baseball bats, Fred Persily remembers. That's still the classic pattern, with racial crimes most often taking place in defense of turf, while gay victims are sought out in their own territory. California passed the first hate crimes law, requiring police to report them and adding penalties. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have moved aggressively against hate crimes, but 16 California counties reported none in 1997 - not because there weren't any, Persily believes, but because there's still official resistance to admitting it. Nineteen states don't have hate crime laws, saying existing penalties are enough. Publicity around the Matthew Shepard case has reignited debate on the need for such laws, with President Clinton coming out for a federal version. But the debate is churning old ground, and several states, including Wyoming, recently voted them down. San Francisco has what's considered a model approach to hate violence, with police, the district attorney's office and community groups, coordinated through Intergroup Clearinghouse, working together to quell problems before they get out of hand. But still, hate violence remains common. "Nobody thought hate crime laws would be a deterrent," Persily contended. The purpose was to raise consciousness as a way of shifting public attitudes toward the problem - the way Mothers Against Drunk Driving has changed the way society views driving under the influence. But that's just starting to work outside the urban cores, with places like Marin County - faced with a series of incidents in Novato - establishing a coalition on hate violence only two years ago. The schools are becoming a bigger focus, with racial and anti-gay harassment escalating even at the elementary level. On April 22, Los Angeles will release statistics showing a 50 percent increase in hate violence in its schools, according to the Human Rights Commission. One thing's for sure. No one wants another Matthew Shepard to have to die to move the debate forward. Said CUAV's Rakowski, "This is not a decade-long problem. It's a long-term struggle."