Rozic bill equips cops with skills to combat hate crimes

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Assemblymember Nily Rozic’s bill was designed to help law enforcement better recognize hate crimes was signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo Monday. AP Photo/Mike Groll, File.

Assemblymember Nily Rozic’s bill was designed to help law enforcement better recognize hate crimes was signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo Monday. AP Photo/Mike Groll, File.

By Jonathan Sperling

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a new law Monday that establishes a hate crimes recognition training program for local police amid an increase in hate crimes across the city and state.

The bill, sponsored by Queens Assemblymember Nily Rozic, directs the Municipal Police Training Council to work with the New York State Division of Human Rights and Hate Crimes Task Force to help cops better recognize and respond to reported hate crimes, which have seen a 41 percent rise in New York City compared to this time last year.

Rozic, whose district includes parts of Eastern Queens, told the Eagle that the legislation “sends a strong message about hate not having a place in any of our communities.”

“We know that hate crimes have been on the rise, both across the state but specifically here in Queens,” Rozic said. “Year after year, we’ve seen attacks on all of our neighbors and I think that it’s really important that police departments across the city and state begin to understand hate crimes, report them, and make them feel safer.”

Rozic herself was the target of a hate crime in 2017, when she received anti-Semitic hate mail containing common white nationalistic phrases addressed to her district office. At the time, Rozic was advocating for Donald J. Trump State Park, located on the border of Westchester County and Putnam County, to be renamed Heather D. Heyer State Park in honor of Heather Heyer, who was killed when a neo-Nazi infamously drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Rozic noted that Queens has seen an uptick in hate crimes since President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, especially against religious and racial minorities. As the Eagle prepared to publish this article on Monday, it was alerted to the presence of anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh graffiti that had been scrawled on an Astoria bus shelter. Last summer, police arrested a man for allegedly assaulting a transgender woman with pepper spray as she walked in Jackson Heights. In August, a vandal scattered anti-Semitic flyers throughout a Ridgewood subway station.

The NYPD “does a great job” in terms of cross-communicating hate crime reports, Rozic said, but police departments across the rest of the state have not had the same experience dealing with hate crimes. The issue is compounded by the fact that fewer than half victims report hate crimes to the police.

“Ultimately you can’t really address the problem if you don’t know what the problem is,” Rozic said. “I think that this really equips local law enforcement to have a better understanding as to what’s going on.”