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Traffic streams across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. High rents in urban areas are forcing more low-income workers to make long commutes to cities in California and elsewhere.
In hindsight and after much investigation, it is clear that an outcry on social media over accusations of a hate crime in Columbus last weekend were fueled by a rush to judgment based more on emotion than fact.
The same emotion also helped fuel an online donation account that raised more than $110,000 to help a woman who was punched in the nose. That outpouring started within hours of what we now know was a neighborhood brawl, not the hate crime that it was quickly labeled.
Witnesses said the fighting began after a woman drew attention in a Northeast Side apartment complex by apparently hitting a child with a shoe, and then accusing a neighbor of kidnapping that child — and then using a stun gun on the wrongly accused neighbor when the neighbor denied the accusation.
The woman with the stun gun used it while on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. We have the recording. That woman later denied having done it, despite the fact that she can be heard in the recording saying she was going to do it, followed by the snapping and popping sounds that occur when a stun gun is used.
When the boyfriend of the woman who had been hit with the stun gun came to her rescue, others got involved to defend the woman who had fired the stun gun. One of her defenders took a blow to the face amid all of that.
The woman was treated at a hospital and released. In other words, her injuries were not serious enough to keep her in the hospital.
And yet, the local Council on American-Islamic Relations called a news conference, suggested it was a hate crime, called on the police to investigate (they already were investigating) and directed the public to a photo of the woman who had
been punched. Her eyes were closed serenely.
The presentation was akin to shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there is no clear evidence of a fire.
And it caught fire on social media, which caused some Dispatch readers to wonder why we weren’t reporting the incident.
We were doing a lot of reporting, but we weren’t publishing anything, because we had doubts about whether it really happened as the local Council on American-Islamic Relations said it did.
Rushing to hold a news conference with unsubstantiated allegations is irresponsible
for many reasons, first and foremost because they are inflammatory and could literally start riots. It also undermines CAIR’s credibility with the media and the public.
We did not rush to report what its representatives said on Sunday during the news conference because the facts were fuzzy at best.
They said a Somali woman had been beaten by a white man who uttered racist comments. They called it a possible hate crime and demanded action by Columbus police. And then inflamed commentators on Twitter and Facebook, in a high-stakes version of the old “telephone” game, amped up the conversation by injecting “facts” that were not facts.
The armchair prosecutors
had not been at the scene. They had no idea what happened. And yet, they had already convicted a man for throwing a punch — and the police and The Dispatch for not doing anything about it.
Actually, the police had flooded the apartment complex where the brawl occurred with many officers. Witnesses said as many as 20 people had been involved in the brawl. The scene was so chaotic that police said they couldn’t sort out victims from suspects. And nothing that occurred there, in their view, rose above a misdemeanor. So they didn’t charge anyone.
The suggestion that police were doing nothing was simply false.
A Dispatch reporter spent part of Sunday at the news conference and attempted to verify the allegations. When she could not verify them, a group of editors who had been monitoring the situation for several hours decided not to publish anything. It was all too murky, and we had doubts.
A second reporter spent all day Monday sifting through witness statements, listening to 911 tapes and talking with police, CAIR and residents of the apartment complex — including the woman with the stun gun and the woman who had been punched.
Our conclusion, independent of the police investigation, is that it was a neighborhood brawl, not a hate crime.
So we wrote the story that way and put it inside the Metro & State section of the paper. If not for a rush to judgment that led to false claims of a hate crime, we wouldn’t have written about it at all.
My hope is that CAIR and those who are tempted to believe everything they read on social media will learn from this incident, be more discerning and avoid sharing and posting information that could be false and potentially lead to rioting.
I also hope that when you find us silent for a few hours on such an incident that you will know we are working to verify and report facts.