The headlines blared that an off-duty Muslim NYPD officer was the victim of a hate crime. A HATE CRIME!!! Putting irony aside, given the fresh mouths of New York’s Finest toward pretty much everyone, the brass got a sudden case of the feelz when it was one of their own.
A Brooklyn man allegedly yelled xenophobic insults at an off-duty Muslim NYPD officer and her teenage son, police sources said.
An NYPD spokesperson told Gothamist that the officer was dropping off her 16-year-old son on Ridge Boulevard and 67th Street in Bay Ridge on Saturday around 6 p.m. After the officer parked her car, she saw a man shoving her son. Police said the man was in his 30s.
She approached the man—but did not identify herself as a police officer—who told her “ISIS [expletive], I will cut your throat, go back to your country!” The suspect fled the scene, and the NYPD Hate Crimes Unit is investigating the incident as a bias crime.
According to the Daily News, Officer Aml Elsokary is a hero.
Officer Elsokary — who proudly wears her hijab on duty in the 90th Precinct — was touted as a hero after she ran into a burning building to save an elderly man and baby girl in April 2014.
Responding to a call about a fire over the police radio, Elsokary and her partner rushed to a smoke-filled building on Scholes St.
After hearing a baby crying on the second floor, Elsokary — a mother-of-five — rushed up the stairs, used her jacket to pry open a scorching-hot doorknob and grabbed the frightened child.
She also scooped up the baby’s spooked grandmother and rushed them to safety.
This doesn’t make any more or less deserving of empathy for some crazed nutjob screaming at her. It does, however, serve to remind us of two important things. First, that cops aren’t merely racist killers, but also human beings who take risks to save others. Yes, there are good cops who do good things. And bad things, too, and good things. Like the rest of humanity.
It further serves to remind us that being Muslim isn’t some inherent evil, not that reasonable people need to be reminded. There are Muslims who are terrorists. There are Muslims who save people’s lives.
But this nutjob, whom she approached without identifying herself as a cop (likely because she was unarmed), screamed “ISIS [expletive], I will cut your throat, go back to your country!” Notably, included in this reaction was the threat to cut her throat, which might well have been taken as a serious threat. Did he have a knife? Did he intend to act imminently, or was this a hyperbolic threat? Was this the exception that met the requirements of the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment?
Little is made of this aspect of the screaming. There is no suggestion that Officer Elsokary took it as a real threat. Perhaps this is because the “suspect fled the scene,” meaning that rather than engage in any physical action toward her, he went the other direction. Whether the word “fled” is a fair characterization, or he merely said what he said, then walked away, is unknown. The story isn’t nearly as good without the image of his fleeing.
What turned this into a big deal is his use of words to attack the officer as if she’s connected to “ISIS” based on her wearing a hijab. Or his screaming that she should “go back to your country,” because Muslims can’t be as American, as New Yorker, as this fine upstanding 110% American nutjob.
Hate speech? Fair enough, despite the absence of any meaningful definition beyond speech that somebody hates to hear. Given the squishiness of this phrase that has become pervasive, this would certainly seem to be hate speech. But that’s not what the NYPD calls it, or the media reporting on it calls it. They call it a “hate crime.”
Crimes are things that are defined in New York’s Penal Law. They have elements and degrees. They carry numbers at the end to designate the seriousness of the offense and the available sentences. They are enacted by the legislature. They are used to prosecute people, who, if convicted, could go to prison because their conduct is deemed of sufficiently blameworthiness that they need to be punished.
The phrases “hate speech” and “hate crimes” have begun to be used interchangeably, with abandon.
Reports of hate crimes have increased drastically over the past year. As of November 13th, 328 hate crimes had been committed in the city in 2016, compared to 250 during the same period in 2015.
There are questions about how many reports are real. But there is a far more serious question about whether these reports conflate hate speech with crimes. If the point is to morally condemn people for speaking words that hurt other people’s feelings, that’s a very separate issue from feeding into the gross misapprehension that hurting people’s feelings with words is a crime.
Want to curse at a cop, give him the finger, say mean things that hurts the cops’ feelings? It’s your right to do so. This doesn’t change when the mean thing you say includes the word ISIS or go back to your country. The contention that your First Amendment right to speak your mind to a cop, to anyone, is valued and worthy of protection, except when that speech touches upon a sacred cow, like being Muslim, wearing a hijab or telling someone who isn’t lily white to go back to their country. Suddenly, the rationale evaporates in a sea of feelings about social justice, and speech that was your right becomes speech for which you should be imprisoned.
If a crime has been committed, then you’ll find it in the penal law, with all the nasty details like elements and mens rea. Crimes are not what people feel they are, or should be, but what the law says they are. You might believe in being gender fluid, but crimes are fixed. We even write them down just to be sure.
Calling speech that hurts feelings a “hate crime” doesn’t make it a crime. What it makes is exceptionally bad journalism that feeds public ignorance and conflation of hate speech and criminal conduct. Don’t you just hate that?
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Of course, “shoving her son” might be a crime. (I leave it to the NY lawyers to look it up.) And maybe it’s because the guy’s filled with hate. But that would be, at most, a hate crime against the kid, not against the heroic member of NY’s finest – not nearly as sexy a headline.
As a New York lawyer, and one who surprisingly doesn’t need to look it up because, well, I’m a New York lawyer and know stuff, there is no crime of shoving her son. The lowest level assault under NY law is Assault 3:
Elements. They’re a thing.
If the shoving of her son was indeed motivated by bias against Muslims, it seems like it would come in under “Aggravated Harassment in the 2nd Degree”, section 240.30[3]:
Indeed, a large fraction (almost half) of hate crimes arrests listed in the NY DOJ’s annual hate crimes report for 2015 fall under that heading.
If only the Court of Appeals hadn’t held that language unconstitutional.
Does that mean that at least 110 people were arrested (per the NY 2015 Hate Crimes Report) in NY state last year under a statute that was voided the year before? That’s a whole new angle on the whole “hate crimes” story.
So it would appear, eh?
Think, Jeff! If shoving were a crime in New York, imagine the pedestrian gridlock in Manhattan alone!
Even attempting to hurt someone is assault here in the Buckeye State. As long as you know you’re trying to.
Revised Code Section 2901.13(A):
(A) No person shall knowingly cause or attempt to cause physical harm to another or to another’s unborn.
The evildoer can get up to 180 days.
You New Yorkers are so soft on crime.
Sorry that your reply button is broken. I got out the toolkit to fix asap. Is a shove (assuming it was a shove, as opposed to some lesser verb) an attempt to cause “physical harm”? We shove each other all the time to get out of the subway when the doors open. Oh wait, you don’t have subways in Cleveland. Never mind.
They have plenty of Cleveland steamers, though. Delivery to NYC must bee cheep.
Jury question.
I grew up in the City. I’ve been on the subway during rush hour. Done (and experienced) my share of shoving. You think it’s never intended to harm?
Of course, it’s all stupid until you have a cop’s kid as the non-victim
I feel for lawyers. “Crime” has a legal meaning and a colloquial meaning, and all of your earnest attempts at persuasion that the legal meaning should be the one everyone uses are doomed to failure. This is a battle you just can’t win; the squishy colloquial meaning will continuously change with the fashion of the day, and continue to dominate in conversation. Scientists have a similar issue with “theory” (a word for which lawyers have their own definition that is WRONG!!!), though it is of much less import in society’s affairs. Maybe we can commiserate, though.
Crime has a colloquial meaning? Says who (besides you)? What would that be?
Merriam-Webster? “Something reprehensible, foolish, or disgraceful”
This is why we can’t have nice things (and why people are made perpetually stupider about law).
Yeah. There oughtta be a civil infraction.
I wouldn’t be quite so harsh with the media given this:
The NYPD Hate Crimes Unit is probing the episode as a bias incident.
If the cops told the journalists they were investigating it as a crime, it’s tough to blame the media for that.
If they’re journalists, they could always ask a question, you know, like journalists used to do, such as, “what crime exactly would this be?” They aren’t required by law to be passive scribes for whatever words pop out of the police spokesperson’s mouth.
Latest version of the story (1:50 this afternoon apparently) identifies the various crimes with which they’ve now charged the alleged shover.
“Cops caught up to Nelson on Sunday, and he was held on $50,000 bail at his arraignment today. He is facing three misdemeanor charges, of harassment based on race, menacing, and acting in a manner injurious to a child, as well as a harassment violation and a felony count of menacing as a hate crime. The felony carries a maximum sentence of four years imprisonment, two of the misdemeanor counts carry a maximum of a year in jail, and the third carries a maximum of three months in jail.”
Can prove any of that? Do any of those charges really apply to what they actually think he did (as opposed to what Gothamist reports)? Does anyone much really care about those things?
Fascinating. Unless they left something huge out of the story, there’s no way they can make out a Menacing 1 charge (which is an E felony, the lowest level under NY law). But $50,000 bail for a top count of an E felony? Because he’s gonna run to the Maldives on an E felony? That’s astoundingly high bail.
It’s good to be a cop.
“The NYPD Hate Crimes Unit is investigating the incident as a bias crime.”
The older I get, the more trouble I have distinguishing between news and works of fiction set in the some kind of dystopian future.
Wait, wait, wait. Officer Elsokary ran into a building to save an “elderly man and baby girl,” but picked up the baby’s “spooked grandmother?” Sounds like crime isn’t the only thing that’s fluid around here. That, or she’s super sexist.