Professor: Hate crime hoaxes are more common than people think

Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor at Kentucky State University where he teaches political science. Reilly has a piece at USA Today which is based on a forthcoming book he is writing on hoax hate crimes. His conclusion is that these crimes happen far more often than people think: Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher… -- More....