Brooklyn DA launches hate crimes unit after spike in reports this year
Brooklyn District Attorney Keith Thompson has created a hate crimes unit in response to increased numbers of attacks in the borough based on the victims’ race or religion. The new five-prosecutor unit will have access to tools used for investigating organized crime, such as telephone interception capabilities, GPS transponders for tracking vehicles and computer programs to glean information from social media, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Hate crimes are particularly difficult to prove. The unit’s goal, says Marc Fiedner, the DA’s civil rights bureau chief and head of the hate crimes unit, will be to establish the perpetrator’s “state of mind, their motivation” at the time of the attack.
Reports of hate crimes in Brooklyn from Jan. 1 through Sept. 14 showed a 30 percent increase over the same period last year, while citywide the increase was 17 percent. From 2008 to 2012, Brooklyn was far and away the leader in hate crime reports among the five boroughs with 607; Manhattan was second with 383; followed by Queens with 272; the Bronx with 124; and Staten Island with 113.
Manhattan’s DA created a hate crimes unit in 2010, and Queens launched one in 1987.
The Brooklyn unit has 30 active cases, with one of its first coming Sept. 7, concerning a former Marine who allegedly punched a man as he walked with his wife and child in a park, telling them to “take your family back to Afghanistan.”
Brooklyn has long been a melting pot, with significant concentrations of Arabic-speakers, Hasidic Jews, African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, though the populations of the latter two groups have declined some in recent years. The borough’s Asian and Mexican communities have grown since 2000.
From 2008 through 2012, reported incidents against Jews dropped 47 percent, going from 129 down to 68. During the same period, the number of reported attacks against Muslims increased from six to 18. Reported attacks against African-Americans dropped from 102 in 2008 to 79 in 2012.
Hate crime convictions can lead to more time behind bars: a second-degree assault could bring up to seven years in prison, but if prosecuted as a hate crime, that could stretch to 15 years.
