Some old people are vulnerable, perhaps because of physical weakness or because of a trusting nature more typical of earlier times. We commend the programs that have sprung up across the country in recent years, aimed at educating and protecting the elderly.

Locally, the Albany County District Attorney’s Office is working with government and social-service agencies, and with local seniors groups to prevent and reduce crimes against the elderly.

The program, dubbed SALT, which stands for Seniors and Law Enforcement Together, includes forums to educate the elderly about abuses and to empower them, which we’ve covered in the pages of our paper. Crimes against our elders can include neglect and abuse as well as financial exploitation.

We’re reporting this week on the arrest of an Altamont woman who, the district attorney’s office says, was part of a ring that defrauded the elderly. One example from the indictments is of a man being targeted because of his age; the Altamont woman and another woman then took money and a computer from his home supposedly to repair it, but never returned the computer, the indictment says.

We commend local police for being alert to such crimes and we commend the district attorney for prosecuting. David Soares said it’s a priority “to aggressively pursue prosecutions against those who seek to take advantage of our seniors. Whether you are a contractor, home health aide, or anyone looking to exploit our seniors, you will receive our fullest attention.”

The elderly can be their own best protectors by hiring help only if they’ve checked references and by reporting anything that seems awry.

As our Helderberg Seniors columnist Phyllis Johnson advises her readers this week, “No matter what clothes it wears, or smarmy lies it tells, it’s the same nasty beast underneath. I don’t know if today’s permissive world has made it more common, or if improved communications have just made us more aware, but the solution is the same: Speak up!”

So far, so good.

What troubled us about the recent arrests, though, was that many of them were for hate crimes; indeed, the press release labeled the perpetrators a “Hate Crime Ring.”

New York’s hate-crime law differs from federal law because the state’s law — and most states have their own hate-crime laws — includes age as one of the ways victims can be targeted and it includes charges for nonviolent crimes like larceny. Federal law focuses on violent crime and defines hate crimes as “offenses involving actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation tracks hate-crime statistics: In 2010, the nation’s law-enforcement agencies reported 8,208 victims of hate crimes. Nearly half — 48.2 percent, — were for an offender’s bias against race. Nineteen percent were for bias against a religion and another 19 percent were against a particular sexual orientation. Nearly 14 percent were against an ethnicity or national origin, and a fraction of a percent of hate crimes were due to bias against a disability.

Anti-black bias topped racial crimes at 70 percent, and anti-Jewish bias topped religious hate at 67 percent. “Anti-male homosexual bias,” in the FBI’s parlance, topped hate crimes based on sexual orientation at 57 percent, and anti-Hispanic bias at two-thirds topped ethnic hate crimes.

It’s hard to read a long list of numbers, but think of the people behind those statistics and how they have suffered not just from the crime but from the hatred that engendered the crime.

Hate crimes are particularly heinous because they can spread fear in an entire group and can leave deep and lasting psychological scars on a single person. A study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology by Gregory Herek compared gay and lesbian victims of violent hate crimes with gay and lesbian victims of comparable crimes not motivated by anti-gay bias and found those people targeted in the hate crimes suffered higher levels of psychological distress, such as anxiety and depression.

The more severe sentencing that comes with hate crimes is warranted. It can serve as a deterrent to such crimes, thereby protecting vulnerable groups. It can also give the victims a sense of justice, helping to restore their self worth.

Hate crimes are a real and terrible threat, and their numbers are growing; those who perpetrate such crimes should be aggressively prosecuted.

But it dilutes the effect if other crimes are pursued under the name of hate crimes. New York’s law on hate crimes says that such crimes “inflict on victims incalculable physical and emotional damage and tear at the very fabric of free society. Crimes motivated by invidious hatred toward particular groups not only harm individual victims but send a powerful message of intolerance and discrimination to all members of the group to which the victim belongs.”

Did the recently indicted members of the so-called “Hate Crime Ring” feel invidious hatred toward the elderly? We suspect not. Rather, we would suspect they targeted the elderly as easy marks for their scams. Such exploitation, while certainly wrong, is different than “invidious hatred.”

Scamming a person you believe to be an easy mark is different than, say, burning a cross  on someone’s lawn to frighten him out of a neighborhood. The state law goes on, “Hate crimes can and do intimidate and disrupt entire communities and vitiate the civility that is essential to healthy democratic processes.”

It is right and essential to arrest and prosecute people who steal from the elderly. But we should reserve the law on hate crimes for acts that fit the definition.

We understand why the district attorney would want longer sentences for those who steal from the elderly; it can serve as a deterrent. A district attorney serves at the pleasure of the people since it’s an elected post; Soares’s term will be up at the end of 2016. Protecting the elderly is a popular cause and may lead to releases like the recent one on the “Hate Crime Ring.”

But the right way to go about this  — legislators, take heed — is to draft a law to increase penalties for crimes, like petit larceny and grand larceny, against the elderly or disabled. Those who work for the old and ailing, like home health aides, are in a position of trust; if that trust is violated, they should be punished with severe sentences.

Each of us, if we live long enough, will one day be old.  We should, as a society, work to educate and protect the vulnerable elderly among us. But we should not confuse that with the zealous pursuit that is needed to tamp down on the ever-growing number of hate crimes in our midst. Lawmakers have provided the correct tool to pursue the perpetrators of hate crimes. Now, they need to create the right tool to punish those who hurt the elderly. Only then can justice be rightly served.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer