Countless public awareness campaigns pleaded with New Yorkers to wear masks to curb the spread of COVID-19 not too long ago. Now state officials say the contrary is needed to stop the spread of hate.
Black civil rights leadership, including NAACP’s Dr. Hazel Dukes and the National Urban League’s Marc Morial, rallied outside Columbia University on June 27 in support of the prospective ban on masks, pointing to the history of anti-Black hate groups covering their faces to duck accountability.
“Black communities know all too well that individuals who hide their identities with intent to terrorize, intimidate, or harass are a threat to all of our safety and have no place in New York,” Dukes said during the 27 rally. “Reinstating New York’s masking laws will protect New Yorkers from some of the most terrifying periods in our history: when the Klan menaced Black Americans, faces covered, without accountability. We can’t let history repeat itself.”
“In the dark days of Jim Crow, those who carried out racial intimidation and violence felt no need to hide behind masks because they knew there would be no repercussions,” Morial added. “Those who carried out the violence at Charlottesville and on January 6 may have felt there would be no repercussions. They were wrong, but only because we saw their faces.”
But talks of a mask ban stem more directly from the recent pro-Palestinian protests than the history of anti-Black racism. Gov. Kathy Hochul floated the possibility of banning masks on the subway last month, citing a criminal incident involving demonstrators wrapped in keffiyehs—traditional Arabic head scarves frequently worn by movement members—allegedly demanding Zionist passengers to exit the train.
There is already a pending bill in the state legislature to ban masks at protests. Its author, Assemblymember Jeff Dinowitz, pointed to witnessing “more and more protestors openly target Jews, fully masked up, fully hidden” as being when he knew “we had to get our mask laws back on the book” during the rally. A previous statewide mask ban dated back to 1845, but was scrapped during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of course, the rally took place in front of Columbia, where the most prominent anti-Zionist campus protest occurred. But even before the encampment of protestors and occupation of Hamilton Hall this spring, a “doxxing” truck blasted the identities of pro-Palestinian students and faculty on LED screens while calling them the university’s “leading anti-semites.”
Dovetailing the KKK with the pro-Palestinian movement drew outrage from Brooklyn Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, who took to Twitter to lambast comparisons made at the rally. She later told the Amsterdam News that conflating the two “serves to create a flat and simplistic narrative that simply is not true.”
“There is not a comparison to be made here, and it is not appropriate to liken the centuries of
subjugation, bondage, and murder with impunity of Black people with protesters who are exercising their constitutional right to stand up against a genocide,” Nurse said in a phone interview.
Nurse, who was one of the councilmembers to visit the Columbia University encampments, also spoke about the doxxing concerns facing protesters. The proponents promise a mask ban would curtail intimidation against Jewish New Yorkers and assist law enforcement in apprehending protesters who commit illegal acts. However, peaceful demonstrators may opt to cover their faces simply to protect themselves from harassment.
“I’ve been organizing protests in New York City since high school, and I’ve never seen this sort of level of fear about retaliation the way I have in recent months,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “It doesn’t matter if we have the right to protest in theory, if people are terrified that by simply raising their voices they’ll be essentially punished by being kicked out of their school or stripped of their job or a number of other things.”
Assemblymember Brian Cunningham, one of the rally’s speakers, told the Amsterdam News that he sympathizes with the protesters’ concerns about doxxing and condemned attempts to jeopardize their use due to ideological differences, but he pointed to civil rights-era protests when demonstrators proudly showed their faces. Cunningham added that details are still being hammered out on Dinowitz’s pending bill, which he is currently not on, especially regarding public health concerns.
“We are still working through some of the language around health concerns for people who may have health issues after COVID-19 and other respiratory issues,” Cunningham said. “That is a primary concern of mine before signing on to any version of bills—making sure that we account for those particular situations.”
Proponents of mask bans have regularly underscored exemptions for public health and religious reasons, including current language in Dinowitz’s bill sparing “personal protective equipment for the the purpose of ensuring the physical health or safety of the wearer or others during a declared public health emergency.”
Despite exceptions firmly carved out for medical and religious purposes, Cahn questioned how authorities could properly verify an individual’s medical status under a mask ban.
“How do you know who is immunocompromised, who’s not?” Cahn said. “Right now, we’re letting New Yorkers who need these masks stay healthy [and] wear them without having to worry about being harassed or arrested. I’m terrified to think how many people are going to be wrongly detained, wrongly held, wrongly put in a cramped police station or central booking [and] exposed to so many more people and deprived of their mask.”
Cunningham said growing up as a Black man during the era of “stop, question, and frisk” certainly makes him sensitive to policies that lead to unnecessary stops, which he faces to this day.
“There are mechanisms in place that if those things were to occur, we can hold police and other actors accountable for their behaviors,” he said. “What’s not in place right now is protecting people from intimidation—the people who wear masks at protests and also during committing acts of crime.”
The state lawmaker also lends his support to a mask ban due to recent shootings in his Central Brooklyn district involving suspects concealing their identities with masks. Will a ban have any impact on crime-fighting, though? Adam Scott Wandt, associate professor and Deputy Chair for Technology at John Jay College, says yes.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that wearing a mask makes it more difficult for facial recognition in law enforcement to identify somebody,” Wandt said. “There are multiple cases across the U.S. that occur regularly where criminals are wearing masks in order to avoid being recorded. We know without a doubt that criminals are wearing masks to thwart law enforcement.”
According to the NYPD website, facial recognition assisted in identifying “suspects whose images have been captured by cameras at robberies, burglaries, assaults, shootings, and other crimes.” However, the technology is just one tool used by law enforcement, and a fairly new one, said Wandt. And the ethical implications remain somewhat unexplored.
“A lot of people are comfortable with using facial recognition on a one-on-one basis, but not comfortable using facial recognition en masse on the population,” said Wandt. “Does law enforcement get pictures of [a] potential hate crime and run it through facial recognition? Absolutely. Are they using large facial recognition cameras at political rallies to identify everyone who’s there? Hopefully not.”
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.
Places of businesses should be permitted to ask patrons to remove they mask for the camera can’t imagine a jewelry store allowing the usual suspects in the store masked up when you know they intentions is to rob let’s be real places have the right to refuse to allow creatures in who you know are up to know good.