The College Fix

‘Halloween prank’

Even if you’re caught in a hate-crime hoax, chances are good you won’t be sanctioned beyond being outed as a liar.

Dauntarius Williams won’t face charges for filing a false police report about the n-word graffiti and threat he painted on his own car near Kansas State University, The Kansas City Star reports.

Riley County Police said that because Williams admitted he was behind the graffiti and was “genuinely remorseful,” it would “not be in the best interests” of the community to charge him.

Williams wrote in a statement distributed by police that the graffiti was a “Halloween prank that got out of hand”:

I just want to apologize from the bottom of my heart for the pain and news [sic] I have brought you all.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/927654116729303040

MORE: Fake hate alert at Eastern Michigan University

Police Director Brad Schoen excused Williams’ behavior because he’s a “young man who made a mistake and is now doing his best to own up to it.”

It’s pretty easy to own up to wrongdoing when there’s no downside to it:

Williams had called The Star after the incident and said he was a K-State student and was leaving the university. K-State said it had no record of Williams being a student.

Last Wednesday Riley County Police Department were called to an apartment parking lot on Claflin Road and found a car that had been defaced with racial slurs and threats.

“Go Home Nigger Boy,” was written with yellow paint across the rear windshield of the car. Other racially offensive language — “White’s Only,” “Die,” and “Date your own kind,” was also painted on the windshield and side doors of the car.

https://twitter.com/JustDesmund/status/925743197107650565

MORE: Fake hate in social media threats to minority high schoolers

There was undeniably a cost to Williams’ purported prank.

The Associated Press reported last week that the university was “stepping up police patrols … reviewing the need for additional cameras across campus,” and “making progress on a multicultural student center and hiring two top leadership positions tasked with diversity issues” on its main campus in Manhattan.

Here was Williams’ original story, according to Fox 4 KC, which uncritically called the report a “crime”:

One woman says Williams came into the gas station and asked for some cleaner to wipe off his car.

“Me and a couple other people started wiping it off real quick, just to help him out and definitely made me feel a lot better just being a nice person,” she said.

Read the Star report, AP report and Fox 4 KC report.

MORE: Anatomy of a hate-crime hoax at St. Olaf College

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