‘Hate Has No Place’ — MTA unveils anti-hate crime campaign
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MTA CEO Patrick Foye announces the launch of MTA’s “Hate Has No Place” campaign amid a rash of hate crimes citywide. Photos courtesy of the MTA.
By Jonathan Sperling
Spurred by a 42 percent increase in subway hate crimes, the MTA launched a new public awareness campaign Monday aimed at stamping out bigotry.
The agency’s ‘Hate Has No Place in Our Transportation System’ campaign promotes kindness, respect and solidarity on digital screens across the MTA’s subways, buses and commuter railroads.
The launch coincided with the the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and follows an attack on a transgender woman on a C train in Manhattan. In Queens, multiple swastikas have been found scrawled at bus shelters in Glendale and Astoria, while anti-Semitic flyers have been dumped at a subway station in Ridgewood.
The campaign will run on more than 4,000 digital screens across the subway system, 2,600 screens on buses and 550 screens on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad.
“New York is built on diversity, openness and inclusion,” said MTA CEO Patrick Foye. “Every New Yorker should be able to travel free of harassment and feel safe while riding with the MTA. We want to do what we can to put a halt to these despicable crimes.”
“We hope that our campaign will not only help reduce bias activity but will remind everyone of the core New York values of kindness, respect and solidarity,” Foye added.
The NYPD Transit Bureau investigated 75 hate crimes in 2019, an increase of 42 percent compared to the 53 such crimes investigated in 2018, the MTA said. The number of hate crimes investigated by the MTA Police Department actually declined to 26 on the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North and Staten Island Railway, compared to 27 in 2018.
The spike in subway hate crime investigations follows the upward trend of reported hate crimes outside the city’s transit system. Reported hate crimes across the city surged by more than 40 percent by the middle of last year. In Queens, that included white nationalist vandalism scrawled across the Rockaway Peninsula, an attack on a Hindu priest in Glen Oaks and an attack on two gay men at a Jackson Heights restaurant.
In October 2019, a Manhattan man pleaded guilty to hurling homophobic insults and fracturing the spine of a 20-year-old woman who kissed her friend on the cheek on an E train in Forest Hills.
MTA Police Acting Chief Joseph McGrann said in a statement that hate crime perpetrators will “be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law.”
“We are committed to battling all hate crimes of all natures, regardless of the group being targeted,” McGrann said.
