Word from the NYPD that hate crimes rose 106 percent in March (vs. March 2016) still isn’t reason to freak out — not if you look at the hard facts.
Of the 128 hate crimes reported this year, only 28 involved physical attacks — including the fatal stabbing of Timothy Caughman by an out-of-towner. The rest are overwhelmingly criminal-mischief cases — mainly graffiti.
Indeed, anti-Semitic hate accounts for nearly the entire rise over 2016 — yet almost all those crimes are reports of graffiti.
And the last names of those arrested in hate crimes so far include Rodriguez, Arana, Sekou, Morales and Vargas: It’s about as multicultural as the city itself.
In short, the facts don’t fit the narrative that so many automatically assume is true — that the election of President Trump has unleashed a host of dark forces.
Indeed, the “narrative” — and the media obsession with it — is a problem in itself.
As Evelyn Gordon noted this week at Commentary, it’s why that Israeli youth started focusing his phone threats on US Jewish community centers.
He’d been making calls to all sorts of places all around the globe, then monitoring the press to see which ones actually got coverage. After Election Day, he suddenly found that these threats started bringing a huge reaction — so he kept it up.
It was, in short, Trump-ophobia that kept the threats coming.
Reason enough, surely, to end the obsession with generating “tide of hate” statistics and stories.