Since the election of President Trump, there has been an increase in hate crimes and hate incidents. As such, it is important to be aware of what is happening in our communities to our new American neighbors. Every month, we publish a list of hate incidents that occurred in order to track hate crimes in our community as well as to document this moment in history and inform the community.
In the month of April, there were 13 hate crimes reported in New York State, a slight decrease from March 2017. Here are the crimes which occurred in the metropolitan area:
- 4/4/17 – Butcher Joe Ottomanelli, of Ottomanelli & Sons Meat Market, gave an African-American man a noose and insinuated that he should use it to kill himself in Manhattan.
- 4/10/17 – A gay couple in Brooklyn were called slurs, chased, and physically assaulted with a brick.
- 4/13/17 – A man on a motorcycle handed out anti-Semitic cartoons to passersby during Passover in Williamsburg.
- 4/16/17 – Four drunk taxi patrons verbally and physically assaulted a Sikh taxi driver, including stealing his turban, in Manhattan.
- 4/18/17 – Racist graffiti was spray-painted on a telephone pole and a swastika was drawn on a tree in front of a home in Rockville Centre.
- 4/24/17 – A post-it with a swastika on it was left on a business in Huntington.
- 4/27/17 – A man set several Jewish religious texts on fire inside a bus owned by a Jewish school in Williamsburg.
- 4/28/17 – A woman shouted anti-Muslim slurs at another woman in the Bronx.
- 4/29/17 – A man beat and yelled anti-Asian and anti-gay slurs at a 28-year-old victim in Crown Heights.
Anti-Semitic bias incidents have risen by 70 percent on Long Island in the last three months when compared to the same time frame in 2016, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
These are only the bias incidents and hate crimes reported, although there are likely many that go unreported. Each month, Long Island Wins reaches out to both the Nassau and Suffolk County Police Departments for statistics on hate crimes and bias incidents for each county. So far only the Suffolk County Police Department has honored our requests for reports or statistics.
