U.S. Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner of Sacramento was the featured guest speaker at Anderson City Hall Friday, Jan. 27, for an outreach program sponsored jointly by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and The Sikh Centre in Anderson.

Wagner is the top law enforcement officer for the U.S. Department of Justice and oversees investigations and prosecutions throughout 34 counties in the Eastern District of California.

The meeting’s purpose was to provide law enforcement officials from throughout the north state, as well as interested members of the public, with education and awareness of the Sikh faith and to offer opportunities for dialogue to address issues faced by some of the nation’s nearly 2.5 million Sikh Americans since 9/11, noted Amarjit Singh, leader of the Sikh Centre, a gurdwara or meeting hall, in Anderson.

“There have been hate crimes, school bullying and violations of constitutional rights and procedures due to misunderstandings arising out of ignorance,” Amarjit Singh said.

Law enforcement and first responder agencies represented included Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, Fire Investigator Mike Birondo of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, California Highway Patrol Capt. Jerry Flavin, Anderson Police Capt. Robert Kirvin and Redding Police Department’s Training Manager and Administrative Sgt. Bill Schueller.

After watching “Common Ground,” a 15-minute training video approved by the U.S. Department of Justice on the Sikh faith the religious practices of its adherents, the symposium opened up for statements and questions from the audience.

A young woman and her elderly father, both Sikhs, spoke of an encounter with a female security guard who noticed a kirpan, a short ceremonial sword or dagger carried in a sheath by orthodox male Sikhs as a symbol of the faith and the adherent’s pledge to defend the faithful and the defenseless from injustice when all other measures fail.

According to the woman, a female security guard told the old man to take his “weapon” to his car.

As the man and his daughter started to leave the building, several city police officers approached and one, identified by the other officers as their superior, demanded in a loud voice that the two should leave, the woman recounted.

When the young woman asked the officer politely but firmly for his name or business card, the officer refused and declared that his name was “Lt. Harassment,” she continued.

The same officer then told the young woman and her father that, “If you don’t like our laws, you can go back to your country!” she said.

Before the young woman left, the woman said she informed the officer that she was born in the United States, was a U.S. citizen, and that her father had lived in the country legally and without incident for the past 24 years.

Other Sikh children have been bullied in schools for wearing cloth turbans and traditional articles of Punjabi clothing from the northern state of India where Sikhism started, Amarjit Singh stated.

On behalf of the offending officers, U.S. Attorney Wagner apologized to the Sikh community and recounted a recent incident near Sacramento where security guards reported “a Muslim man with a knife trying to enter a military base.”

Upon investigation, it turned out to be a Sikh delivery truck driver with a kirpan, Wagner said.

However, the worst incident in recent memory involved the shooting of two elderly Sikh men who were out for a daily walk in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Elk Grove, near Sacramento, he added.

That case is still unsolved, Wagner noted.

“As a general matter, a lot of the conduct that creates insensitivity is not the type of conduct that I can have any type of dealing with. Much of the actions, such as a man in south Florida who is destroying a copy of the Koran, are protected forms of free speech,” said Wagner, who was appointed to his current position late in 2009 by President Barack Obama.

When asked whether the U.S. Department of Justice could get involved in obtaining apologies for those slighted, Wagner responded, “We are not in the business of asking for apologies. We are in the business of putting people in prison. It’s a little bit different sort of dialogue that we end up having with people.”

However, when incidents do rise to the level of a civil rights violation, Wagner said he and the 85 attorneys who work for him are not shy about investigating the incidents.

Wagner, who has spent 20 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said he has prosecuted several cases in Shasta County including a series of death threats at the Women’s Health Center, the burning of two synagogues in Sacramento by the Williams brothers of Happy Valley in 1989 and a cross burning in Anderson.

Unfortunately, hate crimes require “a non-stop effort. It’s not something that gets stopped with just one meeting or one event such as this one,” Wagner commented.

Since hate crimes are “notoriously under reported,” according to Wagner, the U.S. Department of Justice has developed a brochure on when and how to report hate crimes.

“Lately, there has been an upsurge in hate crimes targeting immigrant groups,” noted Wagner, who added that “Hate crimes tend to go in cycles” with a lot of copy-cat criminals seeking media attention once a high-profile hate crime is publicized.

Following the nearly two-hour symposium, community leaders including Anderson Mayor James Yarbrough, former Shasta Lake City Mayor Rod Lindsay, NAACP President Ricky Bennett and others took turns thanking the Sikh community and U.S. Attorney Wagner for conducting the symposium.

“Education is our foremost concern. If we know things about our neighbors, then we understand each other better,” declared Lindsay.

“When we leave here today, we are filled with an energy. We are the ambassadors of understanding for other cultures. We must all stand proud and walk proud, as I routinely tell my grandson,” Lindsay said.

“You won’t know a person or a culture until you have a dialogue with him or her,” Bennett said. “Coming together as we did right here is a wonderful start.”