Researchers estimate that fewer than 5 percent are members of an organized hate group. Most are young males, either in their teens or early twenties, acting in a group, often immediately after school. In a study of Boston hate-crime prosecutions in the early 1990s, two-thirds of the offenders were categorized as “thrill-seeking”—that is, they were groups of young people “looking for some fun” at the expense of someone they regarded as lower status. The authors of the study found that many of these offenders weren’t even particularly biased toward their victims, but were following the lead of a
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