I have no idea why the Press-Telegram chose to pick up an Associated Press story of Vernon Traversie, a Lakota elder in South Dakota who claims that last year someone at Rapid City Regional Hospital carved and/or burned the letters “KKK” into his stomach while he was an in-patient for heart surgery. But I’m glad they did, because it’s a nice jumping-off for a discussion of an uncomfortable topic: the false reporting of hate crimes.

Under California law, a hate crime is

a criminal act committed, in whole or in part, because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim:

   (1) Disability.

   (2) Gender.

   (3) Nationality.

   (4) Race or ethnicity.

   (5) Religion.

   (6) Sexual orientation.

   (7) Association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics. (California Penal Code Sec. 422.55(a))

Whether or not you support the existence of hate-crime legislation, you would have to be willfully ignorant not to know that hate crimes (as defined above) occur with some regularity. In 2008, for example, the California Attorney General’s office reported that roughly 1,500 hate incidents were reported statewide, with about 350 being prosecuted under the hate-crime statute.

What about the 1,150 or so reports of hate crimes that were not prosecuted as such? There is a variety of reasons why a district attorney may decline to file charges in general or a specific charge in a given case, most of which center around whether the DA deems there to exist enough evidence to make the necessary burden of proof to secure a guilty verdict (or at the very least to get a judge to let the case go to trial). These considerations are often no reflection the verity of victims’ claims. Court is about what you can prove, not about what is true.

But as with most every other type of crime report, a small percentage of hate-crime reports never get prosecuted because they are fabricated, intentionally or otherwise. It’s not a comfortable reality, but it’s one that should not be ignored, because of the potential damage such false reporting can do to genuine claims, which presumably make up the majority of such accusations.

Discussion of such false reporting has been more common regarding rape. In the all-too-recent past false reports of rape may have been nearly non-existent, since rape victims were so stigmatized by society that the mere act of claiming to have been raped was so potentially costly that few would ever consider such a fabrication.

Thankfully, that stigma has lessened greatly. But the one unfortunate consequence of this situational improvement is that there is less deterrence to a woman’s filing a false report of rape (even as such false reports are a minority[i] and genuine rapes remain grossly underreported).

A similar case holds for hate crimes. Once upon a time such characteristic-based crimes (see above) were far more common and yet never reported, since the judicial system was completely indifferent to such criminal motivations. Today our society is far more enlightened about such matters — which leaves more leeway for instances of bogus hate-crime reporting.

Thus we wind our way back to the AP report, wherein we learn the alleged victim is blind, and so he is making his hate-crime claim based on the reports of others who have seen the supposedly offending abbreviation for “Ku Klux Klan,” a hate group, to be sure.

Now, look, I wasn’t in the hospital watching over Mr. Traversie, so I don’t know what’s what. But you scrawl “KKK” into someone’s body while that person’s in your hospital, and you’re probably gonna get caught, and it’s gonna go badly for you when you do. So even if you’re the world’s biggest racist doctor or intern and you detest the non-white-guy on your operating table or in your hospital bed, you’re probably a lot more likely to half-ass your operation or mis-dose the patient’s pain meds — crimes you might realistically expect to get away with — than to leave a scar on your victims that may as well say, “I’m Dr. Racist. Please come arrest me.”

This is mere conjecture, of course, but look at the video and pictures: there is no “KKK”. I’ve got terrible penmanship, no surgical training, and a fear of sharp objects, and yet I could incise “KKK” into someone’s body a lot better and more subtly than that. Mr. Traversie’s torso shows evidence of being cut into and a lot of scarring (some from prior procedures, according even to a Traversie-sympathetic article by the Indian Country Today Media Network); it shows absolutely no evidence of being used as a surface for carnal racist tagging. Rapid City police feel the same way: they’ve investigated the matter and declined to file charges.

Admittedly, one mark on the left side of his abdomen looks like a “K”; a second one on the right side may be seen as a “K” if that’s what your looking for; a third “K” comes into view only via Rorschachian suggestion. But ever notice how many objects (e.g., electrical sockets) “resemble” the eyes/nose/mouth configuration of a face?

Moreover, far more seemingly compelling coincidences come into view all the time. Have you heard the one about the face on Mars? Did you happen to see this picture of cancer cells dividing to “form” a smiley face? And you’re surely familiar with sightings like the Virgin Mary window stain and potato-chip Jesus.

While such beliefs may reveal something disturbing about how ludicrously gullible we humans can be, whenever a matter is confined to personal belief, it’s of no consequence to the rest of us. You see Buddha in a bagel and want to set up a shrine or sell it on eBay, be my guest.

But when it comes to accusing others of truly heinous, hate-motivated actions, actions deserving of imprisonment, going off half-cocked — even in sincerity — is potentially damaging not only to the falsely accused, but to the entire notion of hate crimes, and thus to the subcommunities that hate-crime legislation is designed to help protect. But going off half-cocked what happened when Mr. Traversie’s pastor taking one look at his stomach and told him definitively that this blind man was the victim of a hate crime.

A current case brings the relevance of the issue closer to home, both geographically and because of Long Beach’s prominent LGBT community (which last year suffered a spate of hate crimes). Last week in Parker, CO, a lesbian couple were charged with false reporting of a hate crime. Police allege that last October the couple spray-painted the words “KILL THE GAY” on their own garage door and placed a noose on their front door, then reported the incident to police as a victimization they suffered apparently in retaliation by members of their homeowners’ association over a dispute involving the couple’s dogs.

The women maintain their innocence. And while it seems unlikely, prima facie, that police would turn a hate-crime report on its head in such a fashion unless they had pretty solid evidence for doing so, obviously we are in no position to comment with certainty on what transpired. But of one thing there should be no doubt: any persons who falsely report a hate crime should be vilified not just in the general way we should vilify all who bear false witness against others, but in particular by the subcommunity they claim was persecuted by the offense done to them as individuals.

By definition a hate crime is a crime not merely against an individual, but against an entire subcommunity. By the same token, an abuse of hate-crime reporting is an offense against all concerned. There is plenty of genuine hate crime in the world; there is no cause to fabricate.