Santa Ana City Council considers proposal to classify attacks on street vendors as hate crimes
Stories of street vendors in the Southland enduring physical and verbal attacks has become increasingly more common, but one Orange County city is cracking down and wants to make those kinds of assaults hate crimes.
"I saw undocumented, Spanish speaking, Central American, Latino, you know, Mexican immigrants getting brutalized in the communities where they're feeding the very people they live next door to," Santa Ana City Councilman Jonathan Ryan Hernandez told CBSLA.
Hernandez, who represents the city's 5th Ward, pushed forward an ordinance at the city council meeting Tuesday that would classify attacks against street vendors as hate crimes.
"You see people being spit on. You see people getting attacked, to the point where they're not even getting robbed anymore," the city councilman said.
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Hernandez also said he's spoken to groups of street vendors across Santa Ana who have recounted attacks, including the ice cream man, or paletero, that he grew up buying ice cream from — 75-year-old Bartolo Huate Pacheco.
Pacheco has sold popsicles near El Salvador Park for more than a decade, but said he was assaulted and robbed before. The paletero said it's happened to him four times, as recently as a year ago and the thief got away with $200.
"That's heartbreaking. You know, he's an elderly man, monolingual and he's working hard and he's in the sun all day," Hernandez said.
Fortunately, for Pacheco, Hernandez, along with an organization, were able to gift the paletero $500 to make up for the money that was stolen from him.
More and more communities have rallied around vendors following these attacks. Last month, a thousand people came out to buy tamales from a vendor who was verbally attacked.
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However, Hernandez believes many of the crimes against street vendors aren't being thoroughly investigated and that the suspects, in many cases, have been getting away. He said he wants vendors in Santa Ana to know the community is fighting for them.
"Whether it's selling fruit or flowers or ice cream, we love and protect you in Santa Ana," he said.
CBSLA did reach out to the Santa Ana Police Department to see if crimes against venders have gone up, but they said they didn't have that data readily available.
By the end of Tuesday evening's city council meeting, members approved moving forward with researching whether an ordinance making attacks against street vendors a hate time would be possible. They will vote again on the matter in 30 days.