Mayor, Police Chief Admit Failure to Provide Police in Jewish Neighborhoods

BORO PARK
Mayor Bill de Blasio at a press conference with NYPD officials and Jewish leaders at the 66th Precinct in Boro Park, Sunday. (Reuvain Borchardt/Hamodia)

Following further incidents of antisemitic hate crimes on Shabos, Mayor Bill de Blasio held a meeting with Orthodox leaders and police at the 66th precinct in Boro Park on Sunday.

This meeting followed one that took place last week in City Hall on how to combat the rise of hate crimes against the Jewish community.

In a statement on social media, de Blasio vowed, “Anti-Semitism isn’t just a threat to our Jewish community, it’s an attack on our entire city. Today I joined community leaders in Borough Park to send a message: we won’t turn a blind eye to this hatred. It will be confronted. The perpetrators will be brought to justice. The attacks we saw in Brooklyn last night were unconscionable. They were pure, unbridled anti-Semitism. And we do not need to look too far back in history to know what happens if we let that hatred go unchecked. In the coming days we will see even more NYPD presence in our Jewish communities and outside houses of worship… This is our city. Hatred has no place here.”

At the press conference held after the meeting, de Blasio was pressed by a Hamodia reporter why there was no extra police presence in Jewish communities, something the mayor promised in the meeting on Friday.

De Blasio said that they would look into criticism of slow police response, saying if someone calls 911, they should be able to expect an “immediate, immediate response.”

He continued, “the answer to a situation like this is to put [a] massive [police] presence out and make very very clear to any potential perpetrators that they will be stopped. That didn’t happen the way it needed to, and that’s on all of us and we need to fix it immediately.”

Chief Harrison apologized for the lag in police response time, saying, “I’ll take ownership on that. We had a meeting, each one of our bureau chiefs to make sure that the presence was there. The misunderstanding is, if you have to take officers from other places to make sure if it’s covered … that’s where the mistake was made, and we are corrected it. And you’ll see a big difference, going into the future.”

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