New NYPD Unit Will Track Hate Groups to Prevent Attacks

New York – A new unit in the NYPD will focus on tracking hate groups as a means of preventing the sort of attacks that happened in Jersey City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday.
The establishment of the Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism, or REME, unit comes amid a record spike in anti-Semitism, with the Anti-Defamation League saying it rose nearly 100 percent over the past year. In addition, the mayor called on prosecutors to pursue more severe penalties for those convicted of hate crimes.

Police Commissioner Dermot Shea says that work on the new unit has been going on for the past few weeks. Yet, de Blasio placed it in the context of the rampage Tuesday in Jersey City, which borders New York City, in which two Jews, a Hispanic worker and a police officer were killed by two hate-fueled radicals. The two perpetrators, a man and a woman, were killed in a shootout with police

.“What we saw yesterday was a premeditated, violent, anti-Semitic hate crime,” de Blasio said at a City Hall press conference. “In other words, you can say it was an act of terror — because it was premeditated, because it was violent, because it was directed at the Jewish community. This was an act of hate, and an act of terror.”

REME will be part of the NYPD’s intelligence division and will focus on tracking hate groups. It will have 25 officers attached to it and will operate separately from the NYPD’s hate crimes unit, which investigates hate crimes after they occur. The officers will monitor extremist websites and chat groups such as Gab and 4chan, said John Miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.
“Many of these groups have literally taken a page out of the ISIS handbook in terms of propaganda,” Miller said.

It comes as hate crimes targeting Jews increased by 22 percent, something Police Commissioner Dermot Shea as an “escalation.”
“We see swastikas being drawn. We see a brick thrown through a window. We see a woman walking with her kids, walking down the block and having her wig ripped off her head,” Shea said. “There’s a common theme here: It’s ignorance and it’s hate.”