NYC Revs Up Anti-Hate Crime Office As Spike Continues

NEW YORK — New York City has opened a new office to combat hate crimes amid a continued spike in bigoted attacks that has hit Jewish New Yorkers especially hard.

Deborah Lauter started last week as the executive director of the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, a new arm of the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice.

The office is starting its work as the city grapples with a 41 percent increase in hate crimes this year. The NYPD had recorded 290 as of Sunday — more than half of them anti-Semitic — up from 205 in the same period last year.

Lauter's team will work with other city agencies to understand what motivates attackers to act on their hatred and educate targeted New Yorkers about the resources available to them, she said Tuesday.

"Hate does not start with graffiti," said Lauter, who spent about two decades at the Anti-Defamation League before starting her new post. "... It doesn’t start with rocks. It doesn’t start with weapons. It starts with fundamental stereotyping, prejudice, extremist ideology, fear of the other. The good news is that hate is not learned."

The new office opened amid another string of anti-Semitic incidents in the city. Attackers threw rocks at a Jewish father wearing a yarmulke in a Crown Heights on Aug. 27, about two weeks after a group of teens tried to rob three Jewish men in Williamsburg.

Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to open the office this summer after the City Council passed a bill in January mandating its creation. Its launch came more than two months before the law officially takes effect in November.

The office will eventually have about half a dozen staffers in addition to Lauter, said Susan Sommer, the general counsel for the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. The team will "leverage and coordinate" the work that other city agencies are already doing to prevent hate crimes, Sommer said.

"We wish that the city didn’t need an office for the prevention of hate crimes, but sadly, it does," she said.

To Lauter, the polarized political climate is emboldening people to act out on their bigoted beliefs. While she did not pin the blame directly on President Donald Trump, she suggested that inflammatory rhetoric from elected officials is contributing to the problem.

"If you turn on TV today there’s a lot of yelling and screaming and people angry," Lauter said. "What motivates somebody to actually take their hate and act out on it? That’s what we want look at."

Part of the office's work will be encouraging New Yorkers targeted by hate crimes to report them more frequently, Lauter said, so its success will not neccessarily lead to smaller numbers in the crime statistics.

Lauter said her experience as the victim of a hate crime has influenced her work fighting them.

The Ku Klux Klan put pork and shellfish in her mailbox when she was living in Atlanta in the mid-1990s, she said, an apparent effort to intimidate her based on her Jewish faith. She said the perpetrators were never arrested or prosecuted.

"I realized how much it went to my identity and how much fear it raised," Lauter said. "And I realized, if you were just somebody who didn’t really know this area, how frustrating it could be."