Bronx Criminal Court on East 161st Street.
Only 15 percent were convicted of hate crimes
During last year's surge in violent crime against Asian-Americans, then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a campaign to stop hate.
De Blasio's words at the time could not be described as harsh. Speaking at a city hall news conference on Feb. 23 last year, he said: "If you want to commit a hate crime, if you dare to raise your hand to a member of our Asian-American community, you will bear the consequences." ”
New York City has also recently filed a number of high-profile hate crime charges, including the Manhattan District Attorneys' charges against Steven Zajonc. Zarongz was arrested last week on suspicion of a series of attacks against Asian-American women.
But in practice, the consequences of being accused of a hate crime can vary greatly from person to person to region. In many cases, the alleged offenders are young people or mentally ill people who are not subject to criminal law hate crimes.
Even where prosecutors are able to gather evidence and obtain prosecutions, including hate crime charges, plea bargaining often results in those charges being dropped at conviction.
The results of prosecutions in hate crime arrest cases handled between 2015 and 2020, purple represents conviction and blue represents undefeated.
Data obtained from the New York State Criminal Justice Service shows that 65 percent of the 569 hate crime arrests cracked in New York City between 2015 and 2020 were eventually convicted.
But even so, hate crimes are removed in the vast majority of cases. Only 87 cases (15 percent of hate crime arrests) were ultimately convicted of hate crimes.
Among new York City's five district attorneys' offices, the percentage of convictions was far apart, with the highest being Manhattan at 23 percent and the lowest being in the Bronx, at just 1 percent.
Proportion of felony convictions among hate crime felony arrests handled between 2015 and 2020.
In fact, since Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark took the helm of the office in 2016, only one in 92 people arrested for hate crimes will be convicted by 2020.
After prosecutors determined that a theft suspect was targeted to an elderly victim, Clark's office obtained a conviction for another hate crime case and escalated it to a post-arrest hate crime, according to officials from the State Criminal Justice Investigation Service.
Hate crime experts and prosecutors say the numbers highlight the gap between politicians' rhetoric in punishing hate crimes and the difficulty of proving the motivation behind the actions, which is necessary for conviction.
"If you're a politician, if you're a congressman, if you're a representative of a community, you're certainly going to speak in a way that sounds like you're going to protect that community," said Frank Pezzella, an associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College at the City University of New York.
"But protecting the language of the community and the difficulty of justifying the case are two different things."
Patrice O'Shaughnessy, a spokesman for the Bronx District Attorney's Office, noted that cases of juvenile offenders or people with mental health problems are common and that their motivations are not necessarily prejudice or hatred.
"Hate crime cases are a top priority for the District Attorney's Office. Please believe we are taking them seriously," she said.
"So I kicked him"
On an ordinary afternoon in May 2018, Arquelio Negrón-Rosa was waiting outside his bronx apartment for his grandson's school bus when a stranger approached him and asked him for a cigarette.
After being rejected, the man (later identified as Ibrahima Seck) became very angry and referred to Negron-Rosa as a "Puerto Rican bastard".
The stranger kicked Negron-Rosa in the chest, causing the 69-year-old to fall off an entire staircase with a broken head and a permanent dislocation of his right shoulder.
Later in the day, Seck allegedly told a police officer that the victim "shouldn't have talked nonsense — so I kicked him." That's why I hate Puerto Ricans. ”
A few weeks later, Secker was indicted by a Bronx grand jury on 12 counts, including attempted first-degree hate crimes and attempted second-degree hate crimes, court records show.
He pleaded guilty to some lesser charges and agreed to participate in an alcohol abstinence program that would save him from jail if he persisted.
According to the Bronx District Attorney's Office, after he successfully completed his alcohol abstinence program, Seck was allowed to re-defend the lower charges — a secondary assault, not a hate crime — and was conditionally released.
Negron Rosa himself was completely unaware of the verdict, having learned it all from a reporter at THE CITY.
"I mean, imagine: what I've been through, I went to court about six times, talked to lawyers, prosecutors, and then the pandemic..." Negron-Rosa said in Spanish.
"Imagine again that he and other people like him are still wandering the streets," he added. "New York City has to make sure these people don't get away with it." Judges need to lock them up. ”
Aquilio Negron-Rosa, who was beaten and abused by strangers.
Oschonesi noted that Seck eventually pleaded guilty to a felony, but the district attorney's office felt it was more appropriate to treat him for his underlying drug addiction than to throw him in jail.
The spokesperson also said Negron-Rosa had agreed to a two-year intensive alcohol abstinence outpatient treatment plan for Seck.
Negron-Rosa responded that he agreed that Seck should be treated, but he thought Seck would be hospitalized for a long time, not knowing that he was now free.
"I told them he needed help, but no one told me he had been wandering the streets," he said. "Now I'm scared. What would I do if he came to the street where I lived again? ”
"People don't know how difficult it is"
In 2000, New York became the 44th state to pass hate crime laws designed to increase punishment for offenders who select victims based on their perceived characteristics, including race, sex, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.
New York State law states that sentences for hate crimes will be increased by one level, making D-level felonies c-rated, and the possible range of minimum and maximum sentences increases by several years.
There are more than 60 crimes in New York that fall under the category of hate crimes, ranging from simple threats to possessing biological weapons.
In 2019, at a time when hate crimes, primarily against Brooklyn's Hasid Jews, surged, Democrat Speicher underlined the increased penalties that justify harsh punishments for crimes based on prejudice.
In December 2019, after a deadly anti-Semitic shooting in Jersey City, former Mayor De Blasio met with Jewish leaders in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
"I want all community leaders, but I also want to ask the news media to spread the message that when a person's motive for hate turns out to be out of hate, he's going to be sentenced to longer prison terms, with more serious consequences for what he does," Blasio said. ”
Just the same month, however, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was spreading the opposite message — noting that success in such cases is not a sure thing.
"People don't know how difficult it is," he told the Jewish publication Hamodia. "It's an invisible mental activity."
Gonzalez explained that while some people are prone to bias — such as posting neo-Nazi views online — most cases have no conclusive evidence.
Joan Illuzzi, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, said she understands the emotions of elected officials and frightened communities who want perpetrators of hate crimes to face the consequences.
"I agree with that view. But having said that, for an ethical prosecutor, there is a disconnect between emotion and reasonable doubt that can justify the elements of the crime," she said.
According to prosecutors, perpetrators of hate crimes rarely express their prejudices against victims during attacks or post clearly discriminatory language online.
Failure to adequately investigate
Some potential hate crimes never even appear in prosecution statistics.
In May 2019, Fatoumata Camara, a black Muslim immigrant wearing a headscarf, was riding a BX35 bus when a group of teens threw sunflower seeds at her.
According to a complaint later filed by the Civil Complaint Review Board, they made her a series of insults, saying her headscarf was a "stupid headscarf."
When Kamala got out of the car, the group trailed and attacked her, hitting her on the head, breaking her nose, and stealing a bag containing her U.S. passport.
Fatumara Kamala was beaten for no reason.
According to her lawyer, Ahmed Mohamed of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York, police at Substation 42 arrested three attackers at the time.
But Mohammed said Kamala, who had just recovered from the attack, could not identify the person who attacked her from a set of photographs, and police and the Bronx District Attorney's Office had lost interest in pursuing the case.
She later learned that the NYPD had closed its investigation and that the Bronx District Attorney's Office had refused to prosecute any suspects who had been released.
Determined to get justice, Kamara managed to find witnesses herself, even tracking video footage of the attack from surveillance cameras and onlookers. Her lawyer said police investigators had never contacted the men before.
According to Mohammed, it wasn't until Kamala brought her case to the media that the NYPD and the Bronx District Attorney's Office announced that the investigation was still ongoing.
Even so, he said, their interest in the case was short-lived.
"Our office has worked very hard to reach out to the district attorney's office to get an update and try to find out why the person initially arrested was not being prosecuted and why the case didn't progress," Mohammed said. They never seemed to provide any answers. At the end of the day, no one has been held accountable in this case, and this is really just one example of all the problems that arise in a hate crime investigation. ”
Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the Asian-American Alliance, said the Asian-American community also wants more support from elected officials and law enforcement to take complaints seriously.
Her concerns have increased after a fourfold increase in hate crimes against Asian-American victims in New York in 2021.
"Sometimes I'm really angry because I feel like no matter what we talk about, how we prove to people the problems at hand, they can only get brief media attention," Yao said.
Even Mayor Eric Adams said he believes governments and law enforcement have responded inadequately to hate crime complaints in recent years.
Speaking at a news conference last month, Adams said: "I believe that over the years we have been very reluctant to confirm the possibility of hate crimes. Adams cited a recent case in which a 53-year-old South Korean diplomat was attacked in Midtown with a punch in the face and was not initially investigated as a hate crime.
Adams said: "I find it disturbing that it wasn't investigated as a potential hate crime. ”
Source: New York Chinese Information Network
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