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For Edawn Coughman, taking a knee was not enough. Instead, the 31-year-old ex-National Football League player has joined actor Jussie Smollett in the Hate Crime Hoax Hall of Shame, faking a racially tinged burglary on his own Gwinnett County, Georgia, business in an insurance fraud scheme.
As WGCL reports, “On Wednesday [Sept. 11], officers were dispatched to the Create and Bake Restaurant and Coughman’s Creamery on the 1900 block of Duluth Highway in unincorporated Lawrenceville.”
“A maintenance worker at the shopping plaza where Coughman’s establishment is located … [had seen] someone burglarizing the restaurant around 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday [9/11] and called the cops,” the Daily News adds.
After a witness told officers that he saw a black Chevy Silverado with no license plate leaving the establishment, police in the area spotted a truck fitting the description and pulled it over. “It turned out Coughman was driving,” the News also tells us. “Officers searched the back of his truck and found several flat-screen TVs that looked suspicious.”
“The brackets were still attached and there was still drywall attached to the brackets, meaning, someone took them off very quickly,” the paper quotes Gwinnett County Police Corporal Michele Pihera as saying.
“When police arrived at the restaurant, they saw the places where TVs were likely ripped off the wall and said racial slurs like ‘monkey’ and the N-word and the phrase ‘MAGA’ were spray-painted on the walls,” the News continues.
“They also found several booth cushions sliced open, broken mirrors and cut wires,” to quote WGCL again. “The surveillance system was also damaged.”
Coughman told officers he’d reported the “burglary” to his insurance company, but didn’t call 911. He also claimed his place was damaged earlier in the day, but this was belied by the paint’s freshness. Completing the picture, police found in his truck a crow bar, which he apparently used to pry open the back door of his business, and cans of black spray paint, and there was black paint on Coughman’s hands.
So not exactly the perfect crime, “Everything lined up for this perfect arrest,” said Pihera. Coughman’s truck was impounded, and he later bonded out of jail.
Coughman has a record, having “been arrested several times for different offenses. Reuters reported that Coughman was arrested for gun possession in Canada, where he also played football,” reports WSB-TV 2.
Unfortunately, there’s also now a long and consistent record of hate hoaxes. In fact, as I reported in May 2016, you
could ask, as [Instapundit’s Glenn] Reynolds did, “WITHOUT FAKE HATE CRIMES, WOULD WE HAVE ANY HATE CRIMES AT ALL?” Consider that the Daily Caller provides a whole page of what it terms “recent race hoaxes.” They include a black student at Saginaw Valley State University who declared on social media, “I’m going to shoot every black person I can on campus”; a claim that the Ku Klux Klan was roaming the University of Missouri; images of swastikas and the words “white power” written in snow at Calvin College; and a black graduate of Kean University who, as the DC writes, “used a school computer to threaten to ‘shoot every black woman and male’ on campus.”
I provided a number of related examples as well in 2014, including a black Red Lobster waitress who wrote the slur “nig***” on a takeout-order receipt and claimed it was written by her white customers, and a lesbian waitress who accused her customers of leaving a note expressing disapproval with her sexuality. (In a similar vein, while speaking to a mainly black audience in 2007, Barack Obama knowingly and falsely claimed that Hurricane Katrina victims were denied adequate federal aid because they were black.)
Such hoaxes are perhaps even more prevalent now in the Trump era, and the New York Post provides 15 examples here.
Why this is happening is obvious. Both hate-crime law and the social codes underlying it incentivize these acts; being a hate-crime victim brings priority treatment by authorities, sympathy, favorable media coverage, 15 minutes of fame, and the chance for leftist ideologues to advance narratives and causes.
So while Coughman is “facing three charges including insurance fraud, making a false report and a tag violation for taking his plate off,” as the News informs, isn’t this a travesty of justice? Reports of “hate crimes” can cause division, discord, racial unrest, and have in the past led to “revenge” attacks on people sharing a group association with the crimes’ assumed perpetrators (e.g., in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin incidents’ wake). Thus, if “hate crimes” bring extra punishment, shouldn’t hate-crime hoaxes also bring it? If one is a special category, shouldn’t the other be as well?
Remember, “hate crime” law is justified based on the idea that these acts affect whole communities. Well, hate-crime hoaxes do the same.
That said, the main reason to oppose “hate crime” law is that it can be an effort at thought control, as it deems that a given act warrants more punishment if certain ideas are expressed through it.
Nonetheless, as with rape hoaxes, faked “hate crimes” will continue plaguing us until we become as serious about miscreants who exploit politically correct standards as we are about people who violate them.
Photo of Edawn Coughman: AP Images
