Days after the two-year anniversary of the Unite the Right white supremacist rally that took the life of civil rights activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, Gov. Andrew Cuomo advanced the first statewide Domestic Terrorism Law in the country on Thursday.
The proposed legislation will define hate-fueled murder with the intent to cause mass casualties as domestic terrorism and will carry a penalty equivalent to other forms of terrorism, according to Cuomo on Aug. 15.
“These are Americans committing mass hate crimes against other Americans and it should be recognized for what it is: domestic terrorism,” said Cuomo. “Today, our people are three times likely to suffer a terrorist attack launched by an American than one launched by a foreigner and we must confront it by enacting a new law to fit the crime.”
In the absence of a federal bill, Cuomo hopes that the Hate Crimes Domestic Terrorism Act in New York will serve as a national precedent to punish those who kill in a mass attack on the basis of race, religion, creed or sexual orientation.
Citywide, there have 138 complaints of hate crimes and 44 arrests in the second quarter of 2019 within 54 precincts, according to the NYPD statistics.
In Queens, only four out of 16 precincts had no biased motivated crimes, complaints or arrests, according to the statistics. Those precincts were the 100 in Rockaway Beach, the 106 in Ozone Park, the 108 in Long Island City and the 111 in Bayside.
Some precincts had complaints and no arrests, and other precincts had no complaints but ended up making arrests for hate crimes, according to the stats.
From April to June, there were a combined 26 hate crime complaints in 11 precincts, according to the stats. There were eight arrests in seven precincts.
Citywide, bias-motivated attacks were broken down to anti-lesbian, anti-Islamic, anti-Jewish, anti-LGBT, anti-transgender, anti-gay, anti-foreigner, anti-white, anti-Buddhist, anti-Arab and anti-black in the second quarter of 2019.
In the World’s Borough, there were no bias attacks against those that were Buddhist, white, immigrant or lesbian, according to the stats. However, there were bias-motivated attacks against seven black, six Jewish, five gay, five transgender and three Muslim individuals.
The people arrested in Queens for those crimes varied in race, age and sex, according to the stats. One black, three white and four Asian suspects were arrested for bias-motivated attacks on Jewish, Muslim, gay, transgender and black individuals.
The arrests included five men and four women with ages ranging from 14 to 61, according to the stats.
“We must have no tolerance for this rampage of hateful violence,” said Cuomo.
