A Kingston man who has repeatedly harangued and harassed young black and Asian women, baiting them with sexual slurs — one of his favourites rhymes with klutz — has been sentenced to the equivalent of 18 months of jail for his most recent trespasses.

Matthew D. Schneider, 26, pleaded guilty in Kingston’s Ontario Court of Justice on Friday to two counts of criminal harassment from March and a related violation of the three-year probation he received in November last year for criminally harassing an entirely different stranger.

He was given enhanced credit on 128 days of pretrial custody, which was counted as six months of jail time, and Justice Larry O’Brien sentenced him to a further 360 days behind bars with three years of probation to follow.

While on probation, the judge has ordered Schneider to complete assessments, counselling and programs as directed by his probation officer, including counselling on racial diversity. He’s also barred for those three years from being inside the area of the city bordered by Princess Street, Sir John A. Macdonald Boulevard and the Lake Ontario shoreline, an expansion of his previous restriction — still in effect — which banishes him from those blocks enclosed by Barrie, Ontario, King and Queen streets.

The restriction was requested by assistant Crown attorney Gerard Laarhuis, in an attempt to keep Schneider out of Kingston’s downtown and away from the areas around Queen’s University with its larger population of young Asian and black women.

Not all of his victims have been students, but the latest manifestation of Schneider’s criminal behavioural problem involved two Queen’s University students of Asian ancestry.

Justice O’Brien was told in the first instance, on March 2, that one of the victims emerged from her residence at Princess and Albert streets at 3:30 in the afternoon and had her attention drawn to Schneider, who was on the sidewalk, yelling and talking to himself.

She crossed the street and stood at a bus stop and Schneider crossed over after her and planted himself nearby.

In short order, the woman noticed he was holding a cellphone and realized he was taking pictures of her. She raised her hand to block his shot and walked away, later reporting to Kingston Police that he mumbled something she couldn’t make out.

The following day, the judge was told, the same young woman was walking home with her roommate, also a woman of Asian ancestry. As the two approached their apartment building at 6:55 p.m., they saw Schneider standing across the street with his cellphone out, taking pictures of them. They could see that he was using the flash feature and he yelled across to them that he was going to post the photos on the internet, “on porn sites and Twitter.”

Shaken, they contacted Kingston Police with a description of the stranger, and the police had a strong suspicion about who it might have been.

They’ve had past dealings with Schneider and are aware of his predilection for targeting women of colour with vile racist and sexual comments. And he was living in the area on Regent Street.

He initially denied the accusations and told police that he only liked “foreign girls” and offered to show the officers his phone. They took him up on that offer and found numerous photos of young women.

Laarhuis said the run-in with Schneider upset and frightened both of his victims and left them feeling the area where they were living was unsafe. One of them told Kingston Police they were especially concerned that he might be out of custody and back in their neighbourhood in June when their families were going to be here for graduation.

Schneider’s lawyer, Dan Scully, tried to convince Justice O’Brien to sentence his client to a lesser period of nine months in custody. His latest crimes, but for the fact that it’s the sixth time in three years he’s been before the court for acts of the same stripe, was less aggravated than some of his earlier efforts.

In two previous instances, Schneider humiliated his victims repeatedly, in one case over a period of months, trailing after them spewing words of contempt and derision, undeterred even by the presence of their boyfriends.

Laarhuis, however, urged the six-month maximum available on summary convictions, on each count, and observed that there was “an element of stalking” to Schneider’s actions. “These are not random chance,” he told the judge. “He has clearly racist beliefs and he couples them with sexually aggressive words to young women.” At this point, the Crown prosecutor argued “deterrence and denunciation have to take a front seat.”

Schneider, for his part, claims he doesn’t know why he behaves as he does. He told Justice O’Brien that while out on bail this last time he sought counselling on his own, for the first time, “because I want to find out why I’m doing what I’m doing in the community.”

He suggested that he didn’t intend what he actually communicated. “I’ve never had the intention of scaring them or hurting their feelings,” he told the judge, “but I realize it comes across that way.”

Justice O’Brien, after summarizing the elements of Schneider’s past offences, remarked: “That is the man before me and atrocious conduct that is unbecoming a citizen or frankly a human being. It calls out for; Why? What is driving this madness? People have tried to figure it out.”

Schneider has had several psychiatric assessments in the past several years, most recently after his arrest in March. The psychiatrist who afterward wrote his report noted that he was returned to Quinte Detention Centre one day into his 30-day assessment period because he repeatedly activated Providence Care’s fire alarms and attributed his behaviour to boredom.

Justice O’Brien noted that the same doctor referred to an earlier assessment by a colleague, however, which determined Schneider has some learning disabilities, ADHD and a diagnosis of conduct disorder as a youth, but found no indication he suffers from any form of psychosis.

The psychiatrists believe he has a personality disorder.

“Your conduct needs to be denounced. You need to be deterred,” Justice O’Brien told Schneider in pronouncing sentence. “Other like-minded individuals — and I hope there are none out there — need to be deterred.”

He told Schneider that it was time for him “to pick up the tab for your behaviour.”

syanagisawa@postmedia.com