City Council speaker Christine Quinn and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly presided over a City Council ceremony honoring members of the NYPD's hate crime unit last week. "Not every New Yorker knows about the hate crime task force...In a way that's a good thing because they haven't experienced hate crime. But in a way, I wish everybody knew what a terrific, elite squad of detectives we have," Quinn said, definitely not tempting fate.
The unit was being honored specifically for the expedient work done in making arrests in two crimes last week: the four teens accused of beating and robbing a Mexican immigrant in Staten Island, and the three teens accused of beating Asian women in five separate attacks. "You literally wouldn't rest until the individuals who committed these horrible crimes were brought to justice," Quinn said, referring to a frantic four-day round-the-clock hunt for the Staten Island attackers.
Lest you think it's all wine, roses and bigots, the ceremony didn't come without some internal controversy: the unit made their big break in the Staten Island case because of a cross-reference in the stop-and-frisk database. The teens in custody had been stopped and questioned by cops months earlier, and though they weren't arrested at the time, their names were kept in the system. Quinn and the Council had asked the NYPD to clear the stop-and-frisk database of citizens who were not charged or convicted of a crime, contending that it violates their civil rights. "I don't think it's something that should continue in a completely open-ended way. Because that list helped them capture those individuals does not mean they could not have captured those individuals in a timely manner had they not had that list," Quinn said.
Kelly disagreed, and remarked that the NYPD devotes more resources to hate crimes than any other police department in the country: "This is an important tool, particularly at a time when we are down 6,000 police officers from where we were in 2001."
