Hate crimes are on the rise in New York City, according to new data from the NYPD released Tuesday night.
A child as young as three years old were among the targets in the Chasidic section of of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea told ABC News.
Late last month and in early December, three teenage girls approached a 12-year-old boy walking home with his 3-year-old brother in the Clinton Hill neighborhood, and then one of them slapped the toddler across the face before racing away. Two days later they approached an 18-year-old girl walking with a 7-year-old girl to a store in Bed-Stuy. The attacks grabbed the older girl by the jacket and yanked her to the ground.
Five minutes later, they attacked a 9-year-old boy walking on Skillman Street, slapping him on top of his head multiple times before fleeing the scene.
Nothing was said during any of the attacks, all of which were directed at victims wearing “traditional Jewish attire,” police said.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) posed a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators in the recent attacks.
According to the report, by this time a year ago, there were 121 antisemitic incidents in the city – already a high number – but this year to date, there have been a whopping 183 anti-Jewish acts of hate.
Anti-Asian incidents have jumped 361 percent, from 28 this time last year to 129 this year. Anti-LGBT cases are up 193 percent, from 29 victims last year to 85 this year.
“We are given, let’s say, 25 cases that we review. They are made up of all different types of cases and we just go through each one of them,” said Devorah Halberstam of the Hate Crime Review Panel embedded within the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.
Hate crime arrests are up by 100 percent, police noted.