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The Orange County District Attorney’s office filed felony assault charges Thursday against seven activists involved in a violent melee with KKK members during a February rally.
All of the defendants are part of a group of counter-protesters who showed up at a Klan rally in Pearson Park on Feb. 27, three people were stabbed.
Police initially made 12 arrests in the case, five of who were Klan members, but all charges against the white supremacist group were eventully dropped.
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Police said that dozens of interviews and witness accounts, combined with video and still photos of the event, convinced investigators that the Klan members were acting in self-defense.
However, in an interview with teleSUR English, Orange County Weekly reporter Gabriel San Roman criticized the Anaheim police department for failing to adopt adequate preventative measures that could have helped to prevent the violence from taking place.
Documents requested and obtained by the Weekly show revealed that leading up to the planned event, the Anaheim Police Department had been in contact via email with Charles "Chuck" Donner, an unemployed, San Francisco-based "Exalted Cyclops of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan" of Jewish ancestry who was responsible for the stabbing of three people.
In his correspondence with the city’s police department, Donner provided authorities with the exact time and location of their protest.
“The police had enough intelligence about the Klan’s plans to establish a uniform presence and a much more strategically coherent response to the planned event,” Roman stated.
During the interview, Roman added that he was “not surprised” by the Orange County District Attorney’s decision not to charge Donner in the stabbing of the three counter-protesters, given their prosecutorial strategy of “presenting the counter-protesters as the aggressors.”
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“We will always honor free speech in Anaheim, but we vehemently reject hate and violent confrontation,” Mayor Tom Tait said in a statement following incident.
The Klan was once politically powerful in Anaheim, holding as many as five City Council seats before a 1924 recall effort booted them from office. During the Klan's reign in Anaheim, Roman said, the codeword KIGY (an acronym for "Klansmen I Greet You") was added to street signs.
The Klan demonstrators in February drove to the Anaheim event in a black SUV with custom California license plates bearing that same "KIGY" acronym, he said.
Folllowing the violent clashes, the anti-fascist activists were greeted with an outpouring of local support including a defense fund that raised more than US$25,000 to support the anti-KKK protesters' medical and legal costs.
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