"Whether mass attacks on students were motivated by racism perhaps has yet to be determined.

But the attacks and their possible racial link are a legitimate, even an important, issue for community debate.

Four Charlottesville High School students and two other teen-agers have been charged in connection with a series of attacks on University of Virginia students between September 2001 and Jan. 25. Injuries ranged from facial scrapes to a badly broken cheekbone. The attacks occurred along streets near the university. More arrests may come.

Not only students live near the university, so do families in several residential neighborhoods. The first controversy was why police did not alert the community to be on the lookout for trouble. News about the series of attacks broke only days before police were ready to make their arrests. In the interim, some permanent residents of university-area neighborhoods felt threatened by the possibility of danger as well as betrayed by the police for not warning them to protect themselves.

University police, however, sent e-mails to students and posted fliers warning them to be careful. The attacks grew as a topic of conversation among students as anxiety also increased. That prompted a backhanded slap from the director of counseling [at] Student Health. 'This kind of anxiety is very directly tied to the stimulus of the media,' Russ Federman told the Cavalier Daily (Attacks heighten students' safety concerns, Feb. 1). Students may suffer increased nervousness, but not use the feeling as a goad toward self-protection.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. One group of critics faults city police for not being more open with information; another suggests open information is just a media-driven phenomenon that creates anxiety.

Now a new controversy has arisen. Several of the suspects said they chose their victims because they were white, police report. One leader of the local African-American community protests that race has wrongly been placed at the center of the debate, given the fact that white youths were also with the groups of attackers.

(The white teens were not seen kicking victims or throwing punches, police say.)

Police Chief Timothy J. Longo says the attacks are not being classified as hate crimes, even though the suspects reported choosing their victims because of race. So far, he says, there is insufficient reason to justify elevating the attacks to this sterner category.

He may have a point. From the outside looking in, we community residents can't tell whether the victims' skin color was just a casual classification - no more noteworthy than, say, singling out the fourth group spotted walking down the street or the first person wearing a red coat.

In other words, the attacks might have been racially motivated, in that skin color determined the victims, but they might not have been racistly motivated - deliberately intended to do harm to persons because of their race.

Determining that subtle difference could be a problem. That's one of the difficulties with classifying hate crimes, by the way - it requires the added ingredient of racist intent, something possibly known only to the perpetrator.

Chief Longo and the police are trying mightily to understand, express and act on these subtleties, and not go beyond them. Under the same careful constraints, the racial implications of the attacks are and should be fair game for community discussion. Whether the attacks were racist and, if so, how we respond to them are important community concerns - for our present and certainly for our future." (Editorial, The Daily Progress, February 6, 2002)