PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania — We will learn eventually if New York’s $1.7 million investment to contend with bias-related incidents will work, but the outbreak in attacks against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn exposes ongoing drawbacks in the system.
Deborah Lauter, who heads the newly created Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, hopes to influence improvements in the current system. She is talking about response training for police officers, encouraging bias crime victims to file police reports and to engage in education.
All well and good, but why weren’t these steps taken by established agencies as a matter of course? It just seems that this new department was created because someone is needed to tell said agencies how to do their jobs in fighting bias crimes.
Lauter was named executive director of the new agency last week after City Council enacted legislation earlier this year to “create strategies to prevent bias incidents and coordinate the response to them with multiple city agencies,” according to The New York Times. Lauter served as an executive for the Anti-Defamation League for 18 years.
The week before, Rabbi Abraham Gopin, 63, was exercising in a Crown Heights park in Brooklyn when someone punched him and tossed a paving stone at him, causing head wounds, bruises, broken teeth and a broken nose, The New York Jewish Week reported.
Two days later, a Jewish delivery truck driver was cut in the face when someone threw a rock through the driver’s side window of the truck as it sat at the corner of Brooklyn Avenue and Prospect Place.
These were among the latest in an eruption of assaults against identifiably Jewish men in Brooklyn, prompting political pressure for Mayor Bill de Blasio to open the new office.
Bias crimes have skyrocketed 41 percent compared with the same time last year, and the sharpest increase has been in anti-Semitic incidents, which have risen 63 percent to 152 incidents through Sept. 1, compared to 93 this time last year, according to the Times.
What happened in this instance is in one sense unique in the rise of anti-Semitic crimes and harassment along with general crimes. We already have mass shootings in synagogues and Jewish community centers, along with churches, schools and shopping centers, and there are offensive anti-Jewish jabs from left-wingers, particularly the two Muslim women in Congress, Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Detroit and Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis.
But attacks on individual Jews have been mostly confined to Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn as well as Rockland County north of the city and Lakewood, N.J. They wear yarmulkes and are often dressed in Orthodox-style garb.
Maybe the mayor felt that creation of the new department duplicates the work of existing agencies as it is budgeted for $1.7 million for the 2020 fiscal year, and then it will drop to $710,000 in subsequent years. De Blasio neither signed nor vetoed the legislation, which became law after 30 days.
Clearly, action must be taken to stem bias crimes, and I cannot say with certainty whether this new department will improve the situation or add another bureaucratic layer wherein existing agencies can implement changes on their own which will have the same impact.
Lauter’s appointment begged questions after the Times and Jewish Week reported on some of her plans. For example, she pointed to her efforts to press for bias crime response training for police officers after she was targeted by white supremacist groups. While living in Atlanta, she reached into her mailbox and pulled out a “disgusting mixture” of pork and shellfish products.
“I knew the significance of that immediately, and it was frightening,” she told The Times.
She said she called the local police and found that the officers she spoke with seemed “wholly unprepared.”
The first question: Why were the officers “unprepared” in the first place? Rape victims raise the same argument when they fear reporting sexual assault to police. Do “New York’s Finest” even have that problem? If the NYPD does, can’t this be rectified with an order by the mayor and/or City Council? Obviously, this problem can be shared with many other police departments nationwide.
For that matter, there are also advocacy groups with long experience in counseling elected officials, police departments and other government agencies.
Similar questions can be posed for the other aforementioned proposals, but that does not mean that creating the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes is a bad idea. Duplicative or not, maybe this department will help reduce the number of bias crimes. So we hope.
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Bruce Ticker is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.