"At some point during the winter break last month, someone covered the playground of a public school in the Rego Park section of Queens with swastikas and other anti-Semitic sentiments."

"Either poor spellers or unfamiliar with the exact phrasing of the Nazi salute, whoever was responsible inscribed the words 'Hail Hiter' on the ground in chalk. Several days later, two boys were arrested and charged with aggravated harassment. They came from the neighborhood, one that has long been predominantly white and Jewish but grown more diverse in recent years with an influx of Asian immigrants.... In this case the face of hate was the face of two children of color — one black, the other Asian — who were 12 years old.... [Maybe] they learned that it is perfectly fine to express a mischievous, rebellious or playful side through the use of such cruel and divisive imagery. This generation of children has grown up with constant screen time, inundated with an endless stream of images that eventually renders many of those visual signifiers meaningless, where Nazi symbolism is just processed as more cartoonish provocation.... We do not know whether the two boys arrested in Queens understood the weight of their actions, whether what they were doing was an act born of loathing or stupidity.  In big cities where neighborhood demographics are so often changing and gentrification is often compelling those changes, a truly holistic approach to preventing acts of racial and ethnic bias.... would be proactive rather than responsive. The police would keep from reflexively criminalizing ignorance."

From "Two 12-Year-Olds Drew Swastikas on a Playground. Is That a Hate Crime?" (NYT).