Community Involvement Considerably Helps Police to Make Arrests in Hate Crimes

   by Yehudit Garmaise

     Compared to 2019, so far, 2021 has shown a 15% decrease in hate crimes, reported Capt. Timothy Hollywood, the executive director of the Hate Crime Task Force, reported today at an online pre-Yom Tov briefing the NYPD held with more than 300 members of the Jewish community.

     While 2019 saw 145 incidents of anti-Semitic crimes in New York City, the NYPD and community members have gotten that number down to 123 incidents.

     Even the number of swastikas that were painted on Jewish institutions has drastically gone down, Captain Hollywood reported.

     While 2019 saw 115 incidents of swastikas, so far in 2021, that number has more than halved to 53.

     The drastic decrease in anti-Semitic hate crimes, Capt. Hollywood insisted, was thanks to the tremendous assistance the NYPD and the Hate Crime Task Force gets from the Jewish community. 

     Crime stoppers, for instance, considerably assisted the NYPD to stop crime, by helping them by providing and marking relevant video clips.

     “Police and community leaders: remember to change and update your camera systems because they really help us out,” Capt. Hollywood pointed out. “The videos really assist us and help us to speed up our investigations.”

     Last spring, for instance, Capt. Hollywood explained that the NYPD was able to arrest a perpetrator who had been throwing rocks at cars, shuls, and a house.

     As a result the work of his “great team, who pulled and analyzed video,” the NYPD found and arrested the perpetrator.

    Capt. Hollywood also thanked the superintendents of the buildings that were vandalized “and the security personnel who had such a great knowledge of their video equipment capabilities. 

    “They knew night vision, angles, what cameras to look for and everything else, and they really, really assisted us in making arrests.”