Posted on 04/21/2004 3:00:09 AM PDT by KneelBeforeZod
More than 20 hate crime hoaxes have been suspected or confirmed at college campuses nationwide in the past seven years as students draw on the socially conscious atmosphere of a college campus to perpetrate their fraud.
"A person who is a victim of a hate crime can probably expect to get almost universal sympathy on a college campus. Out in the world at large, that's not necessarily true," said Mark Potok, who has researched hate crime for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"But on a college campus, you are very likely to get the support of the administration, the faculty and virtually all the students. It tends to put you in the limelight very quickly."
Last month, a visiting psychology professor at Claremont Colleges told police her car was vandalized and spray-painted with anti-Semitic slurs after a forum denouncing intolerance. Claremont police first called the damage to Kerri Dunn's car a hate crime, but now allege Dunn did it herself.
>>snip<<
In 2002, the last year for which numbers are available, 7,462 hate crimes were reported nationwide; of those, more than 10 percent occurred at schools or colleges, according to the FBI.
For the same year, 2,009 such crimes were reported in California, where 175 occurred at schools or colleges, according to the California Department of Justice.
At least 20 cases of suspected or confirmed hoaxes have occurred since 1997 nationwide -- and many may go unnoticed, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Several researchers also said the liberal atmosphere at many of the nation's colleges creates an environment ripe for deception.
>>snip<<
Sometimes hoaxes are staged for what seem like relatively trivial reasons. A San Francisco State student, Allison Jackson, now 21, reported to police in September that someone wrote a racial slur on a dorm room door.
After being confronted with a handwriting analysis, Jackson said she faked the incident, according to a campus police report, because she wanted "a roommate change" and housing officials were taking too long to respond.
Jackson, who is black, wrote on the door, she told police, "because that was the drastic event that was going to get us moved."
In another San Francisco State incident last September, a black student named Leah Miller, now 19, admitted to scratching another racial epithet on a dorm room door and to writing herself a note with the same wording. She apologized to police, saying she had "tried to be part of something."
>>snip<<
A hearing is scheduled for next month.
Actual or suspected hoaxes can have lingering effects.
At Miami University in Ohio, a display of racist and homophobic fliers six years ago -- a suspected hoax that was never solved -- still bothers President James C. Garland. People come away believing that "racial incidents and race relations are really not an issue, that it's all a trumped-up hoax or manufactured to make political points," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Socially conscious? This author must be kidding!! College campuses are perhaps the most artificial social situations in this country. The fraud is the idea perpetuated by leftist academics that their ideas (including those of what constitutes a hate crime and the idea of 'hate crime' per se) have any validity.
Pardon me while I vomit all over my keyboard.
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