Deputy Inspector Gary Marcus, commander of the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force, currently has one of the toughest jobs in the department: Dealing with a troubling spike in bias attacks around the city since last fall.
Hate crimes had dropped in the Big Apple by 20% for the year, according to Marcus, when the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas upon Israel occurred. That event opened a Pandora’s box of hate in New York City; from early October to the end of the year, the NYPD saw 230 hate crimes reported compared to just 161 that same time last year — a 43% uptick.
“We saw a surge in hate crime, reporting, and hate crime perpetration, people actually perpetrated more hate crimes. Those are generally against the Jewish community, the Palestinian community saw an uptick as well as the Muslim community,” Marcus said.
Overall, last year, police received 618 confirmed hate crime reports — with half of all of the incidents involving acts of antisemitism.
“The largest demographic is the Jewish community, 50% of all hate crimes in New York City are perpetrated against Jews,” Marcus said.
Bias based on world events
Marcus reports that hate crimes often reflect the current news cycle, with bias-instances based on world events.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Asian community suffered attacks while when Dylan Mulvaney became the face of Bud Light beer, violence against transgender individuals rose.
Despite the challenges, Marcus reports that about 70% of hate crimes are solved by detectives — but it is not always easy for the task force members to decipher a hate crime from a non-bias crime.
Investigators must look at every aspect of a given offense; rhetoric alone does not always constitute a hate crime. Detectives look into whether a person was targeted or chosen at random. Using a car collision as an example, cops must probe whether the crash happened by chance, or the person may have rammed into it due to bias motivations.
Marcus also pointed out that hate crimes are not judged based on the victim’s race or ethnicity, but what the perpetrator believes a person to be.
In November, Ashish Prashar and his 18-month-old son were targeted by a woman in a Fort Greene playground who, believing him to be Palestinian, hurled verbal abuse at the pair before throwing coffee and a cellphone at them. While Prashar told amNewYork Metro that he is not Palestinian, the attack was still classified a hate crime because his attacker accosted him because of what she thought was his ethnicity.
“We’ll look at their social media, sometimes we’ll see what they’ve posted in the past. We’ll look at past arrests to see if there’s a course of conduct that we can establish, a pattern that this person only targets for example, these types of victims, and we’ll look at the totality — the whole picture and try and bring all those elements together to determine motive,” Marcus said.
Marcus also spoke about the arrests of 26-year-old Mehwish Omer and 25-year-old Stephanie Gonzalez for attacking a 41-year-old Jewish woman on the Upper West Side in November.
“Generally, somebody ripping down a poster on public property is not a hate crime. In this particular case, we did look at what happened next, and what happened next was that confrontation and when the perpetrator targeted the victim’s Star of David, literally the symbol of Judaism around her neck, and chose to rip it off and discard it, that elevated it to in our minds to a hate crime,” Marcus explained. “And then, in this particular case, we had fantastic images that we were able to release to the media immediately.”
Marcus also praised the NYPD’s relationship with the press in order to swiftly get photos of suspects out to the media and help detectives apprehend them.
“That partnership has been tremendous. I mean, we have success story after success story. Within days of images being released to the media, we’re getting tips,” Marcus said. “We have every day New Yorkers out there who read the papers. They look at news, they are not afraid to say something when they see something.”
