A lot of big news has broken this past week, and the headlines are important things to look at.

We have all heard about the Jussie Smollett case and the complete 180 that happened, where he became the suspect of a false report and convicted of such charge.

More recently than that, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, was charged with soliciting prostitution Friday.

These are high-profile people committing crimes, and because of the nature of their names’ status, finding news about both is easy and at the forefront everywhere.

In fact, is is so easy to just look at the bigger names of these cases, and others like them, and stop there to make a final judgment about the scenario.

They are the big names caught doing wrong,  so what more is there?

In both cases, there is a lot more for us all to consume and there are very important things that need national discussion.

Starting with the Smollett situation, you need to be caught up if you are not already.

He had accused two people of beating him and yelling homophobic slurs at him.

The police investigation found out he lied and he actually made it up, leading to his conviction for doing so.

But while the major attention is on the fact he was convicted of a crime, a major narrative we still need to discuss is the talk about hate crimes.

Smollett’s intent may not have been to bring up the discussion of hate crimes and racism abroad, but he should not have to.

There are still too many instances of hate crimes that no one seems to worry or talk about, until it happens to a celebrity or on a mass scale.

And this is a narrative that is talked about, on smaller scales about smaller cases, but we as a society need to make sure it is always at the front of national attention.

Whether it is a celebrity or a Muslim man killed in Indiana, which is one of five U.S. states to not have hate crime laws, according to NBC News, it happens and needs to be brought up constantly.

And the same needs to be the case with the deeper background of the Kraft case.

Kraft’s name in the soliciting of prostitutes case in Florida is not the only piece of the puzzle, as there is a bigger ring of sex trafficking that needs to be addressed and known about.

According to USA Today, sex trafficking accounted for 6,081 of the more than 8,500 reported cases of human trafficking in the U.S. in 2017.

So, this problem is not just in Florida and is not being enhanced by big names like Kraft.

Like hate crimes, sex trafficking is a problem everywhere that we need to think about, instead of just reading that a celebrity was a bad boy.

The Editorial Staff can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].