The "knockout game" and "polar bear hunting" explained as racially-motivated crimes

I've seen scattered reports of this for the past month or so.  Here are excerpts from a recent Washington Post article:

One woman was punched in the face as she crested a hill on her bicycle in Northwest Washington. Another was hit in the back of the head as she walked to a bus stop. Neither was robbed, and after one attack, the young men laughed as they made their escape.

D.C. police say the recent attacks in Columbia Heights may be part of a disturbing trend that assailants across the country call the “knockout game.” Youths challenge one another to knock out a random person with a single punch...

The Internet is giving attackers bragging rights far beyond their circle of friends or even their neighborhoods. One particularly brutal video from New Jersey showing a young man hitting a woman from behind, sending her face first to the pavement, has a half-million views on YouTube...

One 10-year-old boy said he recently punched someone on a $20 dare but failed to knock the victim to the ground. “Me and my friends were hanging out and they asked me if I had done one,” the boy said. “And I said I don’t know how to play, so [they] explained it to me.”

A 15-year-old charter school student said that in “Grand Theft Auto,” “you can just run up to people, and you can just like hit them and they’ll just like fall. It looks kind of funny in the game.” She said she wouldn’t do it in real life.

Related incidents:

In New York, a 78-year-old woman strolling in her neighborhood was punched in the head by a stranger and tumbled to the ground. In Washington, a 32-year-old woman was swarmed by teenagers on bikes, and one clocked her in the face. In Jersey City, a 46-year-old man died after someone sucker-punched him and he struck his head on an iron fence.

And some distubing comments appended to the WaPo article:

"It is amazing how the Washington Post can report about this phenomenon without the issue of racial violence coming up one into the discussion. It is a shame that honesty took a back seat to what is really going on here."

"Yep. In the hood, this is called polar bear hunting. The Post knows this but purposefully doesn't report it. Its a rapidly growing hate crime that isn't being acknowledged as such."

I found commentary on "polar bear hunting" by Thomas Sowell: 

The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as “hate crimes.”

Many aspects of these crimes are extremely painful to think about, including the fact that responsible authorities in New York seem to have been caught by surprise, even though this “knockout game” has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry...

The main reason for many people’s surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the “knockout game” or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified “teens” or “young people” against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims — and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own “achievement.”

Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,” the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing “knockout game,” the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic. One of them observed casually, “white girl bleed a lot.”

That phrase — “White Girl Bleed A Lot” — is also the title of a book by Colin Flaherty, which documents both the racial attacks across the nation and the media attempts to cover them up, as well as the local political and police officials who try to say that race had nothing to do with these attacks.

More at the link.