In a USAToday article today, it’s reported that copycat hate crimes are occurring:

On the campus of the University of Maryland, where a third of the students are minorities, a noose is found hanging from a tree in front of a building that houses black organizations.

At the Model Secondary School for the Deaf on the campus of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., seven students, six white and one black, assault a black student and scrawl KKK and swastikas all over him.

The incidents are among at least a dozen racial incidents across the country found in news reports since the case of the “Jena Six.” The six black teens were charged with beating a white student after a series of racial incidents that included white students hanging nooses from a schoolyard tree.

Most of the dozen occurrences in the past two months involved a noose left anonymously at a school or workplace, including nooses found in a Long Island, N.Y., police locker room, at a Pittsburgh bus maintenance garage and at several high schools.

“For a dozen incidents to come to the public’s attention is a lot,” says Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. “I don’t generally see noose incidents in a typical month. We might hear about a handful in a year.”

Several of the recent events are being investigated by police as hate crimes — crimes motivated by prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity.

Yet after that intro, the article gets more dismissive:

Copycat offenses are most often committed by men under 22 who are bored or drunk and looking for attention, Levin says. They generally are not members of hate groups, he says, but they harbor racial animosity or feel threatened by racial groups they think have unfair advantages, such as affirmative action.

“Those prejudices are already there for the most part, and what the Jena incident did was give them a green light on repeating this novelty,” Levin says. “It’s a way of reasserting their importance.”

and

In Winchester, Ky., four teens were charged in August with terroristic threats for taunting a black classmate with drawings of a noose, a Confederate flag and someone being whipped and lynched. The mother of one says her 17-year-old son wasn’t doing it because of Jena.

“I know he meant nothing by it,” says Lois Cotton. “I know he’s not racist. He said he was just joking around. They were passing time in class.”

She says her son didn’t understand the impact of the drawings and has apologized. “I think he understands how serious this thing is,” Cotton says.

But insecurities or understanding-after-the-fact aside, these precisely define why hate crimes need to be treated with zero tolerance. The copycats, often thinking they’re having a little mean fun, are actually creating pilrs of kindling. And all it takes is for one criminally minded hater to set one ablaze, with deadly consequence.

The solution, in every case, should not be slaps on the wrist. Community service compelling the young men to work within the community they targeted - like a black home for seniors or a black daycare center - should definitely be considered. But beyond that, there should be a definite punishment like one would get for a simple battery. Because hate crimes are that, not just a threat.

Hate crimes, especially the use of a noose which is pretty terrorizing, should not be treated with a ‘boys will be boys’ attitude, ever.