The liberal Detroit Free Press, which would have you believe the entire nation is experiencing an epidemic of racist hate crimes, cannot have enjoyed reporting this story. But when the police make a public statement that their “victim” made the whole thing up, what else could they do ?

The really interesting question is this: Are the “hate crimes” revealed to be hoaxes really the outliers? Or are they almost all hoaxes, and for various reasons only a small fraction of them get revealed as such?

After the incident, the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for the incident to be investigated as a hate crime, saying the “alleged attack is just the latest anti-Muslim incident reported since the election of Donald Trump as president.”

The university at the time called it a hate crime and said the off-campus incident occurred in the 600 block of East William, near State Street.

“Investigators conducted witness interviews and reviewed multiple surveillance videos of the area in question,” the department said. “During the course of the investigation, numerous inconsistencies in the statements provided by the alleged victim were identified. Following a thorough investigation, detectives have determined the incident in question did not occur.”

According to a statement from the Ann Arbor Police Department, detectives worked along with the U-M Division of Public Safety and the FBI to investigate the case, which had been classified as ethnic intimidation.

You remember this, right? In the days after Trump’s election, there was no “hate crime” story too absurd for the media to credulously report. We were treated to charts and graphs purporting to show that white racist intimidation was exploding all across the country.

But it didn’t take long to find out that an awful lot of them were made up out of whole cloth, as has been then pattern with these things in recent years. It turns out “racist graffiti” was painted by the people who reported it. The nasty racist or “homophobic” message written on a waitress’s check turns out to have been written by the waitress herself. And an act of ethnic intimidation never happened at all.

The left was quite up in arms in those post-election days, declaring, “This must stop!” It wasn’t clear there was much of anything to stop, but when you’re in the middle of a social panic you don’t stop to worry too much about that.

By the way, the left’s favorite target of false racism accusations in recent years has been the police. Perhaps wasting their time with false racism accusations against others isn’t quite as bad, but it’s not good. The police have a serious job to do keeping our streets safe, and they don’t need their resources pulled away from that job so they can investigate false claims by political activists trying to get attention.

If the election of Donald Trump had really fueled a massive outbreak or racist incidents, the left wouldn’t need to fabricate incidents. It would be obvious to everyone. But no such thing ever happened. Maybe if the left would focus its energy on touting good policy instead of trying to suggest everyone who doesn’t agree with them is a racist hater, they wouldn’t lose so much.