Faking a bomb threat against a synagogue did not constitute a hate crime in New York state, nor did gang assault or first degree murder, prior to a bill that passed the FY25 state budget on April 19 according to the legislation’s sponsors.
The Hate Crimes Modernization Act, introduced by Assemblymember Grace Lee and State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal last fall, added 23 new offenses to the hate crime statute, including three counts of falsifying a report—the typical charge for fake bomb threats.
“When the hate crime statute was established over 20 years ago, since then, we have seen a growing number of hate crimes committed in a diversity of ways I believe that the hate crime statute did not originally imagine,” Lee said in a phone interview.
The legislation specifically addressed the outdated nature of the 2000 Hate Crimes Act, which previously only qualified 66 offenses as potential hate crimes. Lee said the original Hate Crimes Modernization Act added 31 new offenses to the statute, but those were shaved down during the session. First degree murder, first and second degree gang assault, and forcible touching were among those that made the cut.
Hate crimes refer to general offenses motivated by bias against the victim’s identity. And these incidents are up in the city, even without the statute’s expansion, with an 8.1% rise in reports to the NYPD this year. The bill’s sponsors specifically pointed to rises in anti-Asian incidents during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Islamophobic and antisemitic harassment after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel. But the bill also opens the door for Black Americans, who historically underreport hate incidents.
“As we witness an unprecedented rise in bias-motivated crimes against Jewish, Muslim, Asian American, and LGBTQ people, it’s of the utmost importance that New York closes the dozens of loopholes in our hate crime statute to send an urgent message that hatred won’t be tolerated in our state,” Hoylman-Sigal said in a statement.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg championed the bill during the fall, and was specifically baffled by the previous exclusion of gang assault from the statute, despite the inclusion of regular assault. In short, the same biased-based attack could not be charged as a hate crime if multiple people assault the victim instead of a single perpetrator.
“Nothing is more important than protecting New Yorkers, and this legislation represents meaningful change—better equipping us with the necessary tools to hold those accountable who target marginalized communities,” Bragg told the Amsterdam News in an email.
Last month, both Rev. Al Sharpton and Dr. Hazel Dukes signed a letter to State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Steward Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, asking them to support the bill. Dukes told the Amsterdam News that she hoped the legislation would unify New Yorkers.
“New York State is a melting pot, so we have to be cognizant of all the people who have come to this place seeking freedom that other countries don’t give to them [but] we’re not perfect,” she said. “We’re not perfect right now in the United States of America. We still have a lot of work to do.”
To be clear, hate crimes are not the end-all/be-all for justice. Last year, Bragg’s office told the AmNews that they pursued hate crime charges against a man who allegedly hurled anti-Chinese slurs at his victim during a stabbing. Those never stuck, but the defendant was convicted for assault and attempted assault, and sentenced to eight years in state prison. But Lee believes identifying and subsequently prosecuting hate goes beyond the individual.
“Hate crimes have an incredibly corrosive effect on communities, and by failing to recognize hate crimes as failing to hold people accountable to hate crimes, it normalizes acts of hate, and it fails to recognize the experiences of victims,” she said. “Hate crimes not only impact the particular victim, but [have] a ripple effect throughout an entire community. When someone is targeted for their identity, others with the similar identity [will] also feel that impact and it has an incredibly chilling effect.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
Author’s Note: Edits were made in the lede and the paragraph prior to Bragg’s statement for clarity purposes to ensure readers understand the offenses were only not chargeable before the bill’s passing. An editing error claiming “first degree murder, first and second degree gang assault, and forcible touching” were cut from the bill rather than made the cut was corrected.
It seems that a hate crime is a hate crime unless the victim is a Black person. Then the crime is lowered to a lesser charge. The act of calling the police on Black people and falsifying a crime needs to be included in this bill. We have seen this happen multiple times and know that it can have disastrous outcomes for Black people.