Spike in Possible Hate Incidents Defies Citywide Crime Trends

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The New York Sun

A spike in incidents across the city being investigated as hate crimes has led to a groundswell of anti-hate rallies, denunciations by a number of public officials, and calls for harsher laws for perpetrators of hate crimes.

But it hasn’t led to many arrests.

As the complaints over the past month defy a citywide downward trend in crime, police appear to be having more trouble catching the people responsible. The number of arrests for bias incidents so far this year, 115, is 49% of the number of complaints, now at 233. That’s down from 60% during the same period last year, when police made 126 bias crime arrests out of 209 complaints.

Meanwhile, for all of the violent crimes categories — even the more difficult ones to solve, such as burglaries and grand larceny — the proportion of arrests to the number of complaints has improved this year.

“You’re talking about a difference of 11 arrests,” a spokesman for the New York City Police Department, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said of the hate crime arrests. “It’s not a huge difference.”

He noted that while the police department is taking the incidents very seriously, in the “most diverse city in the world,” 233 hate crime reports over the course of 10 months is “pretty good.”

Still, police officials have acknowledged that the quick succession of complaints — including the first hangman’s nooses reported to police in at least five years — are out of the ordinary. In response, Mayor Bloomberg called together a group of civil rights organizations on Tuesday to discuss how the city should respond.

“It was a brainstorming session to talk about some ideas,” the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, Joel Levy, said. “He’s trying to send a signal.”

A spokesman for the mayor, Jason Post, declined to discuss the details of the meeting.

The complaints have included a noose left hanging on the office doorknob of a Columbia University Teachers College professor; a series of swastikas painted on synagogues; and a letter sent to a black principal at Canarsie High School, Tyona Washington, that contained racist language and a noose.

Most recently, a noose was found swinging from a tree near John Adams High School in Queens on Tuesday, officials said yesterday, bringing the tally of nooses in the city up to five in two weeks.

Some officials, including the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, have attributed the spike to copycats.

Council Member Charles Barron, a vocal civil rights activist, said that assumption is offensive.

“You can’t palm this off to some kind of copycat. You don’t know that,” he said of the noose incidents. “A noose is a deadly weapon. It’s a threat on her life — read our history.”

Mr. Barron, who was blocked from entering Canarsie High School yesterday to discuss the noose with Ms. Washington at what city officials said was her request, has suggested that officials are not taking hate crime complaints seriously enough.

Council Member Simcha Felder has said some community activists in his district have wondered aloud whether the complaint numbers are lower than they should be. They have reported to him that police often avoid classifying incidents that fall into gray areas as possible hate crimes because it means more paperwork, he said. Mr. Felder added, however, that he has confidence that Mr. Kelly is doing his best to respond to the recent incidents.

Other officials and experts say fewer arrests do not necessarily mean police aren’t pulling out all the stops to catch the perpetrators.

Police have now scoured hours of surveillance footage, attempted to extract DNA from strands of rope, and trolled the sewers and raked through the trash.

“Somebody shows up with a spray can, they paint a swastika, and they’re gone. It’s very hard to catch these people,” Mr. Levy, whose organization tracks hate crimes, said.

“Sometimes its obvious who does the crime — if it’s a neighbor,” a policing researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Eugene O’Donnell, said. “Some are virtually unsolvable.” Mr. Browne acknowledged the obstacles presented to police, particularly by the anonymous acts.

“It’s more likely you’ll make an arrest when there’s an identified suspect than when there’s an unsigned message,” he said.

He added, however, that none of the recent cases are closed, including the more difficult ones: “We’ve had success in those, too.”


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