Robby Soave, Reason, January 19, 2018

Racially charged graffiti — including a swastika — was found in a men’s bathroom at the University of Maryland last fall and reported to the authorities as a hate crime.

That case is now solved. The perpetrator was Terrell Demonte Alexander, an 18-year-old former university employee. According to The College Fix, Alexander is black — which suggests this incident was a hoax, or at the least an act of intimidation committed by a member of the targeted minority group.

It’s the second such deceptive case at the university in the past few months. Last October, police arrested Ronald Alford, a 52-year-old black former employee, for spray-painting a swastika on campus. {snip}

Meanwhile in Toronto, police have wrapped up their investigation of an anti-Islamic hate crime. An 11-year-old Muslim girl claimed a man cut off her hijab with a pair of scissors, but now the authorities contend that no such thing happened. {snip}

{snip} But in a nontrivial number of cases where the police actually caught the guy, the truth was something else entirely.