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Most Hate Crime Charges in NYC Get Dropped Before Conviction

March 7, 2022 Yoav Gonen and Claudia Irizarry Aponte, THE CITY
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Logo for THE CITYThis article was originally published on by THE CITY.

Local leaders vow tough consequences for violence against Asians, Jews and other discriminated-against groups. But just 15% result in a hate crime conviction — and just 1% in The Bronx.

During a surge in violent crimes last year aimed particularly at Asian-Americans, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a stop-the-hate campaign to highlight the discriminatory attacks

As he did throughout his eight-year term, de Blasio offered sharp words that day for would-be aggressors who were motivated by bias.

“If you’re even thinking about committing a hate crime, if you dare to raise your hand against a member of our Asian communities, you will suffer the consequences,” he said at a City Hall press conference last Feb. 23.

More recently, high profile hate crime charges include those the Manhattan District Attorney lodged against Steven Zajonc, arrested last week in connection with a string of attacks against Asian women.

But in practice, consequences for being charged with a hate crime can vary considerably, the results of such cases show — with pronounced differences between boroughs. The alleged perpetrators in many cases are young people exempt from the hate crimes penal code or those who have mental illness at the root of their conduct.

And even where prosecutors are able to amass evidence and get indictments that include hate crime charges, plea bargaining often results in those counts getting dropped by the time of conviction.

Data obtained from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services shows that of the 569 hate crime arrests that were resolved in New York City between 2015 and 2020, 65% ended up with convictions.

But even so, the hate crime component was dropped in the vast majority of instances. Only 87 cases, or 15% of hate crime arrests, resulted in a hate crime conviction, bumping up the severity of sentencing for the underlying crime.

Among the city’s five district attorneys, this rate ranged from a high of 23% in Manhattan to just 1% in The Bronx.

In fact, since Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark took control of the office in 2016, through 2020, just a single hate crime arrest out of a total of 92 resulted in a hate crime conviction.

Clark’s office secured one additional hate crime conviction in a case upgraded to a hate crime post-arrest, according to state DCJS officials, after prosecutors determined that a suspected thief had been targeting elderly victims. Her office also secured 42 convictions that excluded the initial hate crime charge, including more than a dozen non-criminal convictions.

In Brooklyn, 30 out of 173 hate crime arrests led to hate crime convictions between 2015 and 2020, while the number was 15 out of 110 in Queens and 3 out of 30 in Staten Island, according to the state data THE CITY obtained via Freedom of Information Law.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio met with Jewish leaders in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in December 2019 following fatal anti-Semitic shootings in Jersey City.
Photo courtesy of NYC Mayor’s Office

‘So I Kicked Him’

On an otherwise ordinary afternoon in May 2018, Arquelio Negrón-Rosa was waiting for his grandson’s school bus outside his Bronx apartment when a stranger approached and asked for a cigarette.

After being rebuffed, the man, later identified as Ibrahima Seck, got angry and called Negrón-Rosa a “Puerto Rican motherf—ker.”

The stranger kicked the then-69-year-old in the chest and sent him tumbling down a flight of cellar stairs — busting Negrón-Rosa’s head open and permanently dislocating his right shoulder.

Later that same day, Seck allegedly told a responding police officer that his victim “shouldn’t be talking crap — so I kicked him. That’s why I hate Puerto Ricans.”

Seck was indicted by a Bronx grand jury several weeks later on 12 counts — including for attempted assault in the first degree as a hate crime and assault in the second degree as a hate crime, court records show.

He pleaded guilty to lesser charges, and agreed to enroll in an alcohol abuse program that would keep him out of jail if he stuck with it.

After he successfully completed the program, Seck was allowed to re-plead to a lower charge — assault in the second degree, not as a hate crime — and was conditionally discharged, according to The Bronx District Attorney’s office.

Just weeks ago, Negrón-Rosa said he was unaware of the outcome of his case until a reporter from THE CITY informed him.

“I mean, imagine: Everything I went through, I went down to the courthouse like six times, spoke to lawyers, the prosecutors, and then with the pandemic…. I had no idea what had even happened,” Negrón-Rosa said in Spanish.

“And to think that he and others like him are out in the streets,” he added. “The city has to make sure these guys aren’t out. The judges need to lock them up.”

‘Destructive to Society’

In 2000, New York became the 44th state to pass laws that were intended to increase the penalties for criminals who select their victim based on a perceived characteristic — including race, gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation.

The state Assembly had been pushing a version of the legislation for 10 years, but it had been held up in the state Senate, where then-mostly conservative legislators objected to the inclusion of sexual orientation as one of the protected classes.

Some of those opposed told the New York Times shortly before the bill passed of concerns that the law was akin to criminalizing someone’s thoughts, and that it placed a greater value on certain types of victims than others.

In October 2000, shortly after he signed the bill, then-Gov. George Pataki, a Republican, said that hate crimes “are so inherently destructive to society that they deserve special consideration under the law.”

New York’s law mandates a longer sentence upon a hate crime conviction by upping the offense one category, so that a class D felony becomes a class C — boosting the possible range of the minimum and maximum sentences by several years.

Additionally, a class A misdemeanor, the top misdemeanor category, becomes a Class E felony — the lowest felony category — when coupled with a hate crime conviction.

For the most serious felonies, a hate crime designation lengthens the mandatory minimum but not the maximum.

More than 60 crimes fall under the hate crime statute in New York, from simple menacing to possession of a biological weapon.

In 2019, amid a surge of hate crimes largely targeting Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, de Blasio, a Democrat, highlighted those enhanced penalties in making a case for harsh punishment for bias-based crimes.

“I want all the community leaders, but I want to ask the news media as well, to spread the word that when someone is motivated by hate and it’s proven, it adds jail time, it adds consequence to what they have done,” de Blasio said.

That same month, however, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was spreading the opposite message — noting successful outcomes in these types of cases are far from a sure thing.

“People have no idea how difficult that really is,” he told the Jewish publication Hamodia. “It’s the invisible operation of someone’s mind.”

Gonzalez explained that while some people make it easy to provie bias — such as by posting neo-Nazi viewpoints online — the majority of cases don’t come with slam-dunk evidence.

“There are other people who hold hostile and prejudiced views — but is that the reason why they committed this crime?” Gonzalez said. “Or was it really because two people got into a road-rage situation, or they share a driveway and they’re neighbors and they fight about, ‘Why do you keep driving your car in the middle of the night, waking my family up?’”

A spokesperson for Gonzalez’s office noted that he created a dedicated Hate Crimes Bureau in 2018, which enhances charges whenever appropriate.

“Protecting everyone in Brooklyn is the DA’s highest priority and it is simply unacceptable that members of certain groups are fearful to walk the streets,” said the spokesperson, Helen Peterson. “The Hate Crimes Bureau is dedicated to investigating and prosecuting crimes that are motivated by a belief or perception regarding the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual orientation of the victim, and we are committed to holding offenders accountable.”

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

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