The California man who wore a Ku Klux Klan hood to a grocery store in lieu of a mask in a disturbing stunt earlier this month will not face any criminal charges for his actions, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department announced Monday night.
The man, who has not been identified by police, was seen wearing the pointed white KKK hood with two holes for his eyes while shopping at a Vons grocery store in Santee, Calif., on May 2, the day after San Diego County ordered people to wear masks in public settings including grocery stores. Store employees asked the man repeatedly to remove the hood until he finally complied at checkout.
In interviews with sheriff’s investigators, the man “expressed frustration with the coronavirus and having people tell him what he can and cannot do,” the sheriff’s office said in its statement.
“He said that wearing the hood was not intended to be a racial statement,” the sheriff’s office said. “In summary, he said, ‘It was a mask and it was stupid.’”
Police faced immediate pressure from groups such as the local NAACP chapter to respond to the incident and launch a full investigation. But after consulting with the U.S. attorney’s office and the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, the sheriff’s department concluded there was “insufficient evidence” to bring criminal charges. Typically, cases involving hateful symbols or speech must involve some type of verbal threat to rise to the level of a crime. After speaking with witnesses, the sheriff’s office apparently found none in this case.
To explain its decision, the sheriff’s department cited a recent U.S. Supreme Court freedom of speech case, Matal v. Tam, in which the court ruled in favor of a band trying to trademark the name “The Slants” while federal trademark authorities claimed the language may be disparaging to people of Asian descent. Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the opinion cited by the sheriff’s department, “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
Still, the sheriff’s department wrote, “this incident should serve as a reminder for anyone contemplating wearing or displaying items so closely associated with hate and human suffering that our society does not hold in high regard those who do so.”
“Santee is a city of families and the community is rightfully disgusted at this man’s despicable behavior,” the sheriff’s department said in its statement.
The city, according to the Los Angeles Times, had such a history of racially motivated attacks or skinhead activity that it previously earned the nickname “Klantee.” Just days after the disturbing incident in the Vons store, another man entered a Food 4 Less store in Santee with a swastika on his face mask.
The back-to-back racist incidents led the mayor of Santee to recommend at a city council meeting this week that the community policing committee focus on “the issue of intolerance in the City of Santee.”
“There is no room in our society for racial prejudice, and these incidents are not indicative of the people of Santee. Citizens of Santee and visitors alike deserve to feel safe,” Mayor John Minto said in a video statement Saturday.
Racial justice groups have viewed the incidents within the larger context of discrimination during the covid-19 crisis, amid emerging reports that police are enforcing social distancing restrictions disproportionately against people of color, and that black men wearing masks have reported being racially profiled or have feared they will be.
“From biased enforcement in beaches and parks to KKK hoods in the grocery store, COVID-19 hasn’t changed racism and discrimination in our society,” the San Diego NAACP chapter wrote on Twitter earlier this month.
As The Washington Post’s Justin Jouvenal and Michael Brice-Saddler reported Sunday, early data, though not comprehensive nationwide, shows that police in some jurisdictions are overwhelmingly issuing citations or arresting black and Hispanic over social distancing violations. As one example, the New York Police Department released figures on Friday showing more than 80 percent of coronavirus-related summonses were issued to black and Hispanic residents.
High-profile violent arrests of black people for social distancing infractions have underscored the concern about inequitable enforcement. In one case, a woman was body-slammed to the floor by officers at a Walmart in Birmingham, Ala., for not wearing a mask and allegedly acting disorderly. In another instance, a woman on a San Diego beach faced scrutiny for walking in an area where unleashed dogs were prohibited from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and was thrown to the ground by officers who later charged her with resisting arrest and public intoxication, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Over this past week, the NAACP San Diego Branch has become greatly concerned about what appears to be racial discrimination by law enforcement in enforcing the social distancing mandate,” the chapter’s president, Francine Maxwell, said in a statement.
The sheriff’s department said Monday night it would continue responding to all racial incidents with the same urgency and would bring charges when it could.
Some in the legal community, such as trial attorney Lisa Bloom, have argued that wearing a KKK hood is a threat in and of itself and should be sufficient for an arrest.
“This KKK hood is a threat of violence to people of color,” she wrote on Twitter at the time of the incident. “POC are already under the strain of disproportionately high COVID deaths. Arrest him.”
