After Hate Crime Wave, Governor Andrew Cuomo Announces New Police Unit
Image by Getty Images
After a spike in bias incidents since the election of Donald Trump, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Sunday that he would be ordering the state police to create a special unit to investigate hate crimes, according to a report in DNAInfo.
“Today I’m directing [state agencies] to put together a special team of trained professionals that will investigate these hate crime incidents all across the state,” he told a crowd at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. [W]e will prosecute, to the fullest extent of the law, the perpetrators of any of this ugliness and divisiveness. Because it’s not happening in this state.”
He connected his actions to the ascendance of President-elect Donald Trump and “ugly political discourse.” “In many ways it’s gotten worse. It’s deepened into a social crisis that challenges our very identity, as a state and as a nation and as a people,” the governor said. “It’s gone beyond politics. It questions our basic American character: Who we are and what we believe.”
Since the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented a rise in bias incidents, with 700 of them occurring in the week after the results were announced. Some of the episodes have taken place even in liberal bastions like New York, including anti-Semitic vandalism against a Brooklyn park named for Beastie Boys star Adam Yauch.
Cuomo has tried to position himself as a defender of minorities and the liberal in the wake of the president-elect’s victory. “As New Yorkers, we have fundamentally different philosophies than what Donald Trump laid out in his campaign,” he wrote last week in a widely shared Facebook post. “So let me be absolutely clear: If anyone feels that they are under attack, I want them to know that the state of New York — the state that has the Statue of Liberty in its harbor — is their refuge.”
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
