News

After Hate Crime Wave, Governor Andrew Cuomo Announces New Police Unit

Image by Getty Images

By Daniel J. Solomon November 21, 2016

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

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO