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The vast majority of incidents check out, though two hoaxes raised public doubts.

In the days after Donald Trump won the US election, advocacy groups and media outlets, including BuzzFeed News, tracked reported racist and anti-Muslim incidents amid warnings of a rising tide of racial violence across the country.

We had reason to expect them: Trump had just been elected after stomping on norms about public speech on race and religion, threatening to ban Muslims from the US, and calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”

But the story of 2016 is in part the story of people believing what they expect to be true, regardless of the evidence. And there has not been any official data to suggest that hate crimes have surged nationally since the election. ProPublica described the data collection of hate crimes since the election as “deeply flawed.” The Southern Poverty Law Center — which published report titled Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election — noted that “it was not possible to confirm the veracity” of all the 867 “hate incidents” it documented, which were based off submissions to its website and media accounts. Two of the highest-profile incidents were exposed as fabrications: a Muslim woman in New York who claimed she was attacked on the subway, and a student at the University of Michigan who said a man threatened to set her on fire if she did not remove her hijab.

Conservative and right-wing media outlets seized on a post-Trump “hate hoax epidemic” and decried the mainstream media's role in spreading “hate crime hoaxes.”

Since BuzzFeed News was among the outlets cataloguing alleged hate crimes after the election — we reported on 28 allegedly hateful incidents between Nov. 10 to Nov. 15 — we thought it would be useful to review this nonscientific sample of high-profile reports.

We revisited those stories over the last two weeks and found that most occurred as they were reported — disturbing incidents with an explicitly racial, religious, or political edge — though some also clearly involved a haze of confusion and disputes over motive.

• Eleven cases are publicly documented — photographs of graffiti, for instance, or a witness aside from the alleged victim — but unsolved. In eight of those, authorities are still investigating.
• In 11 cases, a person was identified, charged, disciplined, apologized, resigned, or faced some other consequence — though in eight of those, their motives remain in dispute.
• Three of the remaining cases rely on a claim from a single source, without any clear resolution or specific reason to doubt the claim.
• Two were revealed as hoaxes. And in a third case, police said that part of the alleged victim's story didn't check out, and she later told authorities she no longer wanted to pursue the case.

In all, 19 of the incidents referenced Trump or the election.

Some of the incidents had an evident racial or anti-Muslim bias, though in many cases the perpetrators were not charged with hate crimes. (States have different statutes and in some the bar to prosecute an incident as a hate crime is high.)

Other incidents happened as described — and were reasonably initially perceived as political — but the stories are a bit more complicated. A Southern Illinois University student who appeared in front of a Confederate flag in what appeared to be blackface later said it was a cosmetic mask, and the university said “we sometimes find that reports of incidents made via social media and elsewhere are not fully supported by the facts.” The man arrested for scrawling “Black Bitch” on a Philadelphia woman's car is black.

Meanwhile the hoaxes, which were at the center of the conversation in late December, didn't surprise academics and journalists who study extremism and hate crimes.

“People will do things when there's a lot of attention paid to it, and hate crimes aren't any different. What I find interesting is how that is being politicized now,” Brian Levin, a criminology professor and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told BuzzFeed News. Hate crimes, he said, spike after a catalytic event, and in that “cycle of publicity and retaliatory violence” there will be false reports.

As our catalogue shows, there's little evidence of a wave of hoaxes. There has also not been the wave of violent assaults that some anticipated. (The FBI did disrupt one murderous terror plot just before the election, in which Kansas militia members sought to bomb Somali refugees.)

“Unfortunately, the relatively small handful of made-up events threaten to undermine belief in the far many more verified reports of hate and intolerance,” Jere Hester, director of news at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, told BuzzFeed News. Hester spearheaded the development of CUNY's Hate Index — a site that chronicles hate crimes and other acts of intolerance since Trump's win. “The small number of people who concoct incidents stand to gain a disproportionate amount of attention at the expense of the many more real victims,” he said.

Both experts said that hoaxes further victimize genuine victims of hate and induce mistrust of the media.

And while some conservatives tied the hoaxes into the debate over “fake news” — media concoctions built from scratch to go viral on Facebook — there is no evidence journalists reporting the false stories believed they were false. Rather, the hoaxes reveal a longstanding blind spot in crime reporting: It has long been driven — certainly in initial reports — by the legal process, beginning with a police report and an investigation.

A man allegedly punched a woman in the face at a restaurant in New York after she expressed disappointment over Trump’s victory.

Original report: A man having dinner with a woman at Bar Tabac, in Brooklyn, on Nov. 12 allegedly got into an argument with a woman at the table next to him who was disappointed over Trump’s win, the restaurant manager, Jonas Leon, told media outlets. The man allegedly punched the woman in the face in front of children and left, Leon said. The man was not identified and no arrests were made at the time.

Current status: There is an ongoing NYPD investigation into the incident, police told BuzzFeed News on Dec. 27. Leon told BuzzFeed news on Jan. 2 that he was called to the precinct to see pictures of possible suspects, but said that police had not found the right person. “They have nothing,” he said.

Facebook: BarTabacNY

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