New York to clamp down on hate crimes after Muslim officer attacked

New York City officials on Monday vowed to swiftly find and prosecute any and all hate-crime suspects after a man threatened to kill an off-duty policewoman wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf.

“If anybody’s thinking in New York City about engaging in this type of behavior, just rest assured that you will be identified, you will be arrested, you will be charged accordingly,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill told reporters.

Officer Aml Elsokary, a native New Yorker and Muslim, was walking with her teenage son on Saturday in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood, when a man lunged at the boy, accused the pair of being connected to the militant Islamic State group and threatened to cut Elsokary’s throat, police said.

Christopher Nelson was arraigned on Monday on a top count of felony menacing in the second degree as a hate crime, the Kings County District Attorney’s office said.

New York police said crimes targeting Jews, Muslims, gays and other groups had jumped to 43 since the election compared to 20 during the same period last year. More than half the new attacks were anti-Semitic, police said.

Elsokary, with the force for 11 years, is among 900 Muslims on the country’s largest police department. In 2014, she was honored for rescuing a young girl and her grandmother from a burning building.

Read the whole story from Reuters.

Featured image courtesy of The New York Daily News.