Yet Another Bogus Claim of a Campus Racial Attack

We are slow getting this posted, but it’s significant, and we want to record it. From NBC News:

Three university students who claimed they were victims of a racially-motivated attack on a bus in Albany, New York, will now face charges for assault and misleading police about the alleged incident.

The three black, female students at the State University of New York in Albany told authorities they were called racial slurs and “harassed and assaulted” by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women on a city bus just after 1:00 a.m. on Jan. 30, according to a statement from SUNY Albany President Robert J. Jones released at the time.

All three said they were injured during the alleged attack and one of the students was transported to a local hospital with unidentified injuries, according to NBC affiliate WNYT.

But the University Police Department announced plans to charge the women —Ariel Agudio, 20, Alexis Briggs, 20, and Asha Burwell, 20 — on Thursday with assaulting a passenger on the bus and falsely reporting an incident.

Police said in a statement that evidence gathered during their three-week investigation showed the students’ initial claims “that they were victimized, were false” and that the women themselves allegedly assaulted a 19-year-old female passenger.

The charges against the women were supported by interviews with the 35 passengers on board the bus at the time of the incident, security camera footage from the bus and four videos taken by passengers on their mobile phones, according to the police statement.

So we have yet another bogus racial incident. Not only were the black women not victimized, they were the aggressors.

But what was the initial campus reaction?

The three female students reported being “harassed and assaulted” by a group of 10 to 12 white men and women, University President Robert J. Jones said in a statement Saturday, adding that “racial slurs were used by the perpetrators.”

“I am deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident,” Jones said. “There is no place in the UAlbany community for violence, no place for racial intolerance and no place for gender violence.”

[. . .]

On Monday afternoon, many of the hundreds who attended a rally in support of the victims chanted “black girls matter,” WNYT reported.

“It’s heartbreaking to hear something like that is happening in such a fine institution, in such a diverse community in 2016,” Darius Fair, a junior at the school, told the station earlier Monday.

More on the reaction here.

Interpretation

So what we have is another case of a knee jerk, politically correct response to a supposed racial incident. Since blacks are a supposed “marginalized group,” any claims of an offense against blacks are to be taken at face value. Indeed, they are an excuse for a lot of self-righteous hand wringing.

The politically correct atmosphere on college campuses thus victimizes black students. They learn that claims of grievance are rewarded. They learn that they can escape the consequences of their own bad behavior by claiming victimization.

But it only works up to a point. When the claims come under scrutiny of professional investigators outside the university, they get trashed.

This is much like claims of sexual assault. Campus kangaroo courts convict males with evidence that would not pass muster in a real criminal proceeding. Often, these males sue, and universities are forced to settle on terms favorable to the accused. The system outside the hot house atmosphere of the campus produces a very different outcome.

Which is to say, life on politically correct campuses is a poor preparation for the real world.