Unite Rochester: Local refugees targeted
- Local refugees say they are being targeted and preyed upon on Rochester's streets
- Their anger is fueled by hundreds of incidents of violent and verbal bullying in recent years
- Police and resettlement groups today say they are largely unaware of the escalating problem
- A major obstacle to the growing dilemma: The refugees typically don't report crimes to police
Bijaya Khadka looks at his father's bloody, swollen face and the rage that has been building for years begins to crest.
"I was very angry, very mad. My father doesn't even speak English," Khadka, 22, says in his heavy Nepali accent.
But his anger didn't begin on the day in April when his father, a 56-year-old refugee from Nepal, was beaten and robbed by three young black men as he walked along Lake Avenue with only a new pair of sandals in his hand and a few dollars in his pocket.
Nor did his fury boil a few years ago when Khadka was struck in the back of his head and his uncle was thrown to the ground, robbed of $60 and two bus passes.
Rather, he says, the violent and misplaced anger he feels toward African Americans has been building for years in this small community of perhaps a few thousand South Asian refugees living in small pockets of northwest Rochester near and in Jones Square. The anger is fueled, he and more than a dozen other residents interviewed say, by hundreds of incidents of robbery and violent and verbal bullying in recent years.
And for Khadka and his brother, the sight of their injured father crystallizes that rage into a single clear, terrible and inappropriate thought — a thought that pays no mind to the many American complexities surrounding race and class:
They wanted to go to war with the black community.
"African-Americans are targeting them, and there is just so much of this they are going to take," said Bill Wischmeyer, an advocate for the refugee community known as "Mr. Bill."
"They're angry. They are ready to explode and it's going to get worse until someone ends up dead."
The violent, racially charged tensions in what was once a mostly black neighborhood have caught the attention of authorities before.
Police and anti-gang groups have intervened in recent years, and agencies only recently familiar with the divide are hoping for a peaceful resolution — especially when the young refugees threatened retaliation with a cache of primitive weapons.
But police and resettlement groups today say they are largely unaware of the escalating problem, and Bhutanese and Nepalese refugees interviewed for the story acknowledged their reluctance to go to the authorities.
Instead, they say, they kept loose documentation of some 300 incidents before a meeting with police two years ago, and hundreds more since, only to see nothing change.
Now, they say, they are preparing to defend themselves — violently, if necessary.
'Not a welcoming place'
Stroll through the Jones Square Park neighborhood — between Dewey and Lake avenues just north of Lyell — and you'll see dozens of Nepalese and Bhutanese refugees sitting at picnic tables when the sun is shining, or on their porches when it isn't.
Visit with them, and each tells a tale of abuse committed against themselves or a family member. Most often, it's both.
Tika Ram, 42, from Nepal, was struck in his forehead where a scar now fades, and his money and identification was taken.
Om Rai, 54, who is from Bhutan and doesn't speak English, was punched in the head and $30 was taken from his pocket.
It's the same for more than a dozen people interviewed randomly in a two-week period last month, including the Monger family, who live on the edge of Jones Square and whose home was burglarized last year by someone who walked boldly into their house while they were home and took their television.
Hours after last month's interview with a reporter, someone broke into their home again and took a television, laptop and mobile phone while they slept.
"Almost every family has had something happen to them, so they end up staying in their houses," said Wischmeyer, who has become an informal adviser for many families in the community. He is not connected with any official resettlement group, and has been critical of some of them in the past in part because of the neighborhoods in which the refugees are placed.
He said he became familiar with the South Asian community when he was an English teacher in Florida. When he moved here he worked with a church that had refugee outreach. He formed the Bhutanese Youth Club of Rochester, and at Grace United Methodist Church helped form a cultural center that is now defunct.
"It's a shame that we take people in from other countries and we're supposed to be one of the most friendly, most modern countries ... but it's not a welcoming place."
Most have come to the U.S. ("the second Heaven") from refugee camps in Nepal.
Khadka and his friends said they were excited when they learned their families were coming here.
"We used to hear, in America, there wouldn't be crime, there wouldn't be crime like this," said Khadka. "But it's totally different. We came here for peace. We came here for a better life and for our futures, but it's totally different than we were told."
Arming for a war
Khadka holds a Nepali knife called a khukuri up for a visitor. The blade is about 16 inches long — sharp, with a handle of wood and bone. In his homeland, it's a rite of passage to receive one, an almost sacred instrument because in good times it's used to sustain life — for chopping branches and leaves to clear land, and in the home for cutting meat and vegetables. In harder times — in times of war — it's a weapon.
At the height of the assaults and robberies against them two years ago, a group of young Nepalese and Bhutanese refugees gathered in Jones Square to make and collect about 20 of the weapons. Clearing fields was the last thing on their minds.
It was then that Wischmeyer met with then-police chief James Sheppard and about 20 of his officers. With him, he brought about 280 names and dates of incidents of abuse, he said, though he acknowledged he no longer keeps track or has those records.
"In talking with them, I told them 'You can come out with a knife, and they will come out with a gun,' " Wischmeyer said. "And the response was 'If we are at war, we expect to lose some people, but we will win.' "
Interviewed recently, the now-retired Sheppard said he remembered the meeting with the refugees, and while he did not recall the list of nearly 300 incidents, he did not question the number.
Sheppard described the immigrants as easy targets for crime because they stand out from the rest of the community because of their lighter complexion and facial features. They often don't report the abuse. They carry cash because they don't use the banking system. And they are peaceful and don't fight back.
"Any time you have an immigrant group come in they stand out, particularly in your depressed neighborhoods," Sheppard said. "They may dress different, they may talk different, they tend not to fight back and so that just made them easy victims, easy to identify and the fact that they didn't call police that just made it happen more often."
Sheppard said the abuse experienced by the refugees is very real, and is similar to that which other groups have experienced.
"There was a time when a lot of Southern blacks were moving from Florida and South Carolina into the Rochester area looking for jobs and they went through the same cycles of discrimination and having to fight back and get a foothold. Then, when they established a foothold, other groups came in whether it was Puerto Ricans or other nationalities and they had to go through the same rites of passage."
Police Lt. David Gebhardt, who was at the meeting two years ago, said police offered safety classes following the meeting to help the refugees make themselves less inviting to criminals and to become more street smart. They also held other outreach events to try to bridge the connection between police and that community.
But a major obstacle that everyone can agree on is this: The refugee community typically doesn't report crimes to police because they either fear retaliation, they don't trust police (sometimes because of conflicts with authority in their homelands) or don't think police take their plight seriously.
"We told them, go ahead and call us, you don't need to wait for an emergency," said Gebhardt recalling one of the meetings they had with the community.
Khadka acknowledged that most incidents — probably at least 75 percent — go unreported. He said he informally keeps some records of incidents, a name and date here and there, but does not have records of the 600 incidents of which he said he's been told.
The abuse will continue, Sheppard said, until something changes.
"Whether the police intercede, or whether they stand up as a community on their own and make changes, (criminals) continue to go to the well until the well is dry."
What can be done?
Wischmeyer and Sheppard said it's likely that the current administration is not fully aware of the problems because the refugees often do not call police.
"They do not go to police because of fear," acknowledged Binod Rai, a friend of Khadka's from Bhutan. "They think if you go to police they will come again and beat you, or kill you."
Sheppard said police could respond — as they did two years ago — by adding foot patrols to refugee neighborhoods and tracking reports, but the incidents must be reported so agencies can get involved.
Gebhardt, who said police today are largely unaware of the escalation, said police will be keeping a close eye on activity in the refugee communities. An outreach event was already scheduled for August in Jones Square to help make some of those community connections.
Sherry Walker-Cowart, president and CEO at Center for Dispute Settlement, said she was unaware of the ongoing problems, but said her group would welcome the challenge of bridging the gap between the communities.
"I think we should be in that somehow," she said. "It's just ignorance, it's people not knowing each other, understanding and all of that. And to create some kind of conversation, we ought to definitely be involved somehow."
Walker-Cowart said the process would begin with some initial conversations with the refugee community and the black community.
"Some of it is naiveté, some of it is prejudice, you know, and prejudice really comes from ignorance. It's just ignorance and people not knowing each other and seeing each other as human and making it a human issue."
Deborah Alligood, who is African-American and has lived on the edge of Jones Park for 24 years, agreed.
She said she has watched the peaceful refugees move in and quickly become targets.
"They just want to live peaceful," said Alligood, who works in the sterile processing center at Rochester General Hospital.
"But you know, a lot of people, they're not that easy, they see people come into our community and our neighborhood and they are not accepting them as such. But I welcome them, that's what we're supposed to do. This is the land for everyone."
No more
Whether the tension between the refugee and African-American communities escalates to a street-level war remains to be seen.
For now, the refugees are hoping their continuing presence in this community will allow them to acclimate better, and that police will start to help them.
"We want to know how to prevent these things from going on," said Rai. "We are peace-loving people, we are hard working people, we are going to work hard over here. We have to establish over here. This is our new country, this is our new home."
Hkadin Lee, refugee outreach coordinator at Lake Avenue Baptist Church, said her group tries to teach refugees that condemning the entire African-American community is wrong but it's difficult to break down those stereotypes when the incidents are so frequent and involve the same group.
"They are getting this stereotype that African-American people are all bad, that's the idea they are getting, which is not true," said Lee, who came from Burma 20 years ago and is a robbery victim, herself. "Not everyone is bad, we have bad people in our own community, we have good people. It just happens that all the incidents that happen, happen in these neighborhood with African-Americans."
Khadka and Rai know that their anger at all blacks is misplaced. There were black people who helped Bijaya's father, Gokul Khadka, at the hospital, who helped stitch up his face and helped his rehabilitation.
"I cannot say everyone is bad. Some people are bad," said Rai. "Some people are very good. How can we create a peaceful environment in our neighborhood? That's what we want to discuss."
In turn, Sheppard understands Bijaya Khadka and Rai's angry reaction, though he calls it "inappropriate."
"They are in an African-American neighborhood and those are the individuals that they know have targeted them, but to stereotype to the extent that that's how you want to respond, that's inappropriate," he said.
Sheppard and Alligood are optimistic the communities can get along in peace.
"There's a lot of ignorance in the world right now, a lot of ignorance," Alligood said, looking out from her porch into Jones Square Park, once used as a training ground for Civil War soldiers and as early baseball fields. "But I think as time goes on, they will be understood, and we'll be peaceful. I think we can get along up in here."
Bijaya Khadka and Rai and many in the refugee community are not so sure.
"Before we came here, we used to hear from people that America, it was like second Heaven, you know?" Bijaya Khadka said. "It's very beautiful, peaceful. We came here with a great expectation. We thought it was going to be very nice for our generation, and especially for our mothers and fathers.
"But now, I am very afraid to walk in the street. It's very different. Very different.
"We won't live like this any more. If police won't do anything, we will.
"Some of us may die, but they will too."
JHAND@DemocratandChronicle.com
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June 22: How diverse is our area's judiciary, and what is being done to make it more diverse?
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Editor's note
Over the past year and a half the Unite Rochester series has explored numerous topics related to the complicated topic of race in Rochester. Today's installment explores a sensitive and potentially volatile situation in the Jones Square neighborhood. Our aim is to alert the community to a sparking flashpoint in hopes that efforts can be made to unite two communities that are currently at odds. The language is at times stark, but is meant to be an honest representation rather than an attempt to give offense — or give credence to inappropriate and incendiary statements.