USA Today carried an opinion piece by a different author with a similar title: Hate crime hoaxes, like Jussie Smollett's alleged attack, are more common than y

USA Today carried an opinion piece by a different author with a similar title: Hate crime hoaxes, like Jussie Smollett's alleged attack, are more common than you think https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/22/jussie-smollett-empire-attack-fired-cut-video-chicago-fox-column/2950146002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/22/jussie-smo... Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax https://www.amazon.com/dp/161577783 https://www.amazon.com/dp/161577783 , 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 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922915180 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0922915180 . 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. ... In this context, what hate hoaxers actually do is worsen generally good race relations, and distract attention from real problems. As Chicago’s disgusted top cop, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, pointed out yesterday, skilled police officers spent four weeks tracking down Smollett’s imaginary attackers — in a city that has seen 28 murders as of Feb. 9th, according to The Chicago Tribune https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-homicides-data-tracker-htmlstory.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicag... . We all, media and citizens alike, would be better served to focus on real issues like gun violence and the opiate epidemic than on fairy tales like Jussie’s.