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.

After the initial arrest, the Police Department’s chief of detectives, Dermot Shea, quickly took to Twitter to commend the “great job” accomplished by his colleagues in the hate-crimes unit he oversees and to say that “no matter the face of hate,” New York will exhibit “ZERO tolerance” for it.

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.

The incident occurred within the context of rising anti-Semitic crimes in the city and around the country, which is surely why law enforcement felt compelled to advertise such a negligible victory in the war against prejudice.

There have already been close to 40 such cases in New York this year, a nearly twofold increase over the same period last year. Neither the police department nor community leaders in the affected neighborhoods have determined the reason for the upsurge. Surely the bigotry that has been making more frequent appearances on the American stage since the Trump years is partly to blame.

Whatever the cause, it seems fairly clear that arresting 12-year-olds, especially at a time when criminal justice reform has concentrated on diverting young minorities from the system, cannot be considered a solution. There were many other forms a meaningful consequence could have taken.

When I spoke with local politicians and heads of Jewish groups around the city, none thought the boys should have been taken in. (They were arraigned in family court and remanded to the custody of their families until further proceedings.)

“Do you remember the song from ‘South Pacific,’ ‘you have to be taught to hate?’” asked Toby Ann Stavisky, a state senator representing the relevant district in Queens. “These children were taught to hate, and I’d be very interested to learn where they learned to hate.”

Or perhaps we might also wonder if and where 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.

Just this week during an assembly at Sidwell Friends, the progressive Quaker school in Washington from which Chelsea Clinton and Malia Obama graduated, a student participating in a trivia contest flashed a user name consisting of two swastikas onto a screen visible to the whole auditorium. It was not the first time that swastikas have shown up at the school in recent months.

And in Orange County, Calif., a group of high-school students came under fire for building a swastika out of red, plastic beer cups during a drinking game at a party. Were they bilious members of the alt-right?

When one participant apologized on social media, she said that she considered what she and her friends had done as “a joke’’ and “not a big deal,’’ until photos of the incident went viral and they realized the seriousness of their antics.

The contemporary school environment emphasizes diversity and inclusion to a point unprecedented in history. Children are put in restorative circles and taught to love and respect one another, to make up and never to antagonize, tease, bully or invalidate. But do these conceptualizations stand up to the corrective lessons of history?

New York is one of a number of states in which Holocaust education is mandated, but the general shift toward a greater focus on science, technology and mathematics and away from the humanities, happening across the education system and around the country, has pushed certain subjects and ideas dangerously into the rearview.

Last year a study conducted by Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, for example, interviewed 1,350 American adults and found that 66 percent of millennial respondents could not identify Auschwitz as a concentration camp.

Even if the two boys arrested in Queens are guilty, we may never know whether they understood the weight of their actions, or whether what they were doing was an act born of loathing or stupidity.. We do know that the school where the defacements occurred will conduct a read-aloud of “A Picture Book of Anne Frank,’’ and have students create stenciled murals “around positive messages about diversity and inclusiveness, including around religion,” according to the city’s Department of Education.

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 involve whole communities — children and their parents — coming together to learn about one another’s cultures, habits, histories, tastes, ambitions, doctrines, similarities. The process would be proactive rather than responsive.

The police would keep from reflexively criminalizing ignorance. Officers would do more than hand out fliers and teach communities how to report hate crimes, which is where New York City’s police department places much of its emphasis. It would look at tensions — the broken windows between different groups essentially, so to speak — and try to repair them.

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Ginia Bellafante on Twitter: @GiniaNYT

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