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Swastika and ‘Praise Trump’ Graffiti Found on Manhattan Phone Booth

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By Daniel J. Solomon December 6, 2016

The country’s post-election hate crime wave struck New York once more on Sunday, after the discovery of swastikas and the phrase “Praise Trump” graffitied onto a phone booth located at West 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, according to a Monday report in DNAInfo.

A woman notified police of the vandalism, when she noticed the vandalism on Sunday afternoon. Cops are looking into the incident, though no one had been arrested for the crime as of Monday.

Since the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented a rise in bias incidents, with hundreds 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, swastikas found in the lobby of New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman’s apartment building and similar graffiti discovered in an apartment building in the Hasidic section of Williamsburg and on a No. 1 train in Manhattan.

In response to the incidents, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced the creation of a new unit within the state police to investigate hate crimes, which said he said his administration will not tolerate. “We 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 promised, speaking at a black church in Harlem in November.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at solomon@forward.com 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.

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