I want to start by honoring the victims of yesterday’s horrific attack in Jersey City, and we feel their loss deeply here in this city. Moshe Deutsch, the son of Abe Deutsch – a well-known community leader in Williamsburg – was brutally murdered in this attack; Leah Ferencz, also originally from Brooklyn; and from Jersey City, Detective Joseph Seals of the Jersey City Police Department, brutally assassinated in the horrible, horrible attack.
We’re here at a very somber moment, we’re here at a very urgent moment for this city but also for this nation. Everyone is here sharing that same mix of sorrow and anger and urgency. I want to thank all the elected officials, the community leaders, the clergy who are present in common cause. We are all going to be working together, we have been working together for years, we are going to be working together even more intensely in the days to come. I want to thank the Executive Director of our Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, Deborah Lauter, who is leading an effort to work with communities all over the city to get at the root causes of the challenge we face.
You’ll hear from Commissioner Shea in a moment. I also want to thank Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison, Chief of Patrol Fausto Pichardo, and the Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counter Terrorism John Miller, everyone at the NYPD who will be involved in the efforts in the coming days to ensure the safety of our entire city and particularly of the Jewish community in this city.
We feel a lot of pain but we have to understand why this is a moment of urgency. This confirms a sad truth – there is a crisis of anti-Semitism gripping this nation, there is a crisis of anti-Semitism in this city. It has continued to take on a more and more violent form all over this country. Now we have seen this extraordinarily, extreme form of violence reach the doorstep of New York City and we have to take that as a warning sign. We have to understand, as I’ve heard from so many members of the Jewish community, that people are now living in constant fear. Members of the Jewish community have told me they no longer feel comfortable wearing anything that is a symbol of their faith for fear of an attack. That is absolutely unacceptable in a free society that anyone should have to feel that way from any faith, any background.
It’s unacceptable in a city that is meant to be for everyone and prides ourselves in respecting all people. It’s a national problem unquestionably but it is here now and we have to recognize that this is a crisis. There has been an uptick in hate crimes in this city directed against the Jewish community, some acts of vandalism and hateful symbolism, but some physical assaults. Until yesterday we had not seen in the New York metropolitan area for many years the level of violence directed at the Jewish community that we saw in Jersey City. And so we have to understand we’ve entered a new reality. No one is happy about it but we have to be honest about it.
What we saw yesterday was a premeditated violent anti-Semitic hate crime. 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. There is still a lot we need to know. The investigation is preliminary and we only have some of the picture of what happened in Jersey City but it is enough to tell us that this was an act of hate and an act of terror.
Anti-Semitism – I don’t have to tell anyone here but it’s worth saying for all New Yorkers – anti-Semitism is not a new phenomenon, it is centuries old. I think at one point we hoped it was in decline, we hoped it had gone away, but it never went away. It just lay dormant in this country and in many other countries. And now it is coming out in the open. History teaches us to take these warning signs seriously. And we in New York City have to lead. We have to show our country what a vigorous response looks like and it will have to go farther than anything we’ve done previously.
So, to the members of the Jewish community of this city, my message is we will keep you safe. We will use the largest and best police force in this nation to protect you but we’re going to have to do a lot more at the community level to engage community members and community leaders of all communities in common cause to root out hate. I’ll say a few more words before turning to Commission Shea regarding the specific actions of the NYPD but I will say very crucially at the outset, that there, at this hour, are no credible and specific threats directed against New York City but that is not sufficiently comforting and that is why we are in a state of high alert.
I directed the NYPD last night to go into that state of high alert and to ensure that hundreds of officers would be assigned to dozens of crucial Jewish community locations around the city. That effort will grow and that effort will be ongoing. Commissioner Shea will go into detail. You will see visible and increased presence throughout the Jewish community for a number of days to come. That’s the first point for people to understand, that presence will be large and consistent over the coming days. It has started already.
Second point is, the NYPD has been building a new unit over the last weeks. We now want to publicly announce this unit. The acronym is R-E-M-E. That stands for Racial and Ethnically Motivated Extremism. The unit is focused on identifying any trends and any signs of racially and ethnically motivated extremism so that it can be acted on before any terror or any bias crime occurs. Commissioner Shea and Deputy Commissioner Miller will go into greater detail. This is a new unit within the NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau. As I said it has been built up over the last weeks. It did not happen as a result of this horrible incident yesterday but this is the time to now talk publicly about the role of this unit and what it will do.
It will directly take on the hate groups that are trying to spread in this country and that pose a threat to so many communities. Last point, as I indicated we will be gathering community leaders across all faiths and backgrounds in common cause and with a sense of urgency to find any signs out there of potential acts of hate, to reach deeper into all our communities. Our Office to Prevent Hate Crimes will work on the long term solutions but right now we need to reach more deeply into our communities to find out where immediate threats exist. We will turn to faith leaders, elected officials, community leaders with a particular focus on Brooklyn where very sadly we’ve seen so much of the hate crime activity in this city.
We’ll have more to say on that in the next few days. But one thing I want to remind anyone who ever even ponders committing an act of hate in any way, if anyone out there is even thinking about committing an act of hate, the NYPD has proven that it will find you, it will prosecute you, and you will suffer the consequences. We have to be very clear we seek to move the people of this city in all the right and positive ways but for those who refuse to respect their fellow New Yorkers, there will be very serious consequences. And hate crimes – to make it very simply, once any crime is committed there will be consequences. Once it is proven it is a hate crime, there will be additional time in prison.
To close before turning to the Commissioner, history has shown us over and over again the danger of silence and no community understands this better than the Jewish community. Silence can be fatal. That means all of us have to speak up against hate, it means we all have to guard against the dangerous trends in our society. We cannot let them grow. But it means something more personal as well. It means confronting hate speech in our lives when we hear it, God forbid even from friends or family members. It means reporting anything that suggests the potential for an act of violence and a bias crime. I want to urge all New Yorkers to remember that phrase that we have lived by and has saved so many lives – if you see something, say something. That message has been heard and felt by New Yorkers for years. We remember in Chelsea, just a few years ago, an everyday New Yorker called in her concern about a package on the street and saved countless fellow New Yorkers when it turned out it was a live bomb.
Well, if you hear the kind of speech that suggests someone might be considering an act of violence, if you hear someone musing out loud about committing violence against the Jewish community or any community, we need you to call that in immediately. If you hear something, say something too. Call 9-1-1 or call 8-8-8-NYC-SAFE. Any and all information is needed. Do not hesitate. If you think you’ve heard something important, don’t hesitate, the NYPD needs to know it. That one phone call might save lives. So, everyone, this is all of our business.
This is a crisis and in a crisis we all ban together and we all take responsibility. I want to conclude by saying there are many people hurting today – our brothers and sisters in Jersey City – and I want to thank you, Commissioner, for the extraordinary support the NYPD provided yesterday to Jersey City in their hour of need. My heart goes out to the people of Jersey City, to Mayor Fulop, and all the people he represents. They are going through a lot of pain. The families who have lost their loved ones, the people who were injured.
But to all New Yorkers, remember today, members of our Jewish community are in pain right now. They are feeling beleaguered and attacked. They just saw something horrific happen on our doorstep. Offer your understanding and support whether you’re a member of the Jewish community or a member of another community. Offer your support today. And to our police officers, they have lost a brother. And one thing that I know from working closely with law enforcement, it doesn’t matter which part of law enforcement or which state our officers come from, whenever an officer is killed all other members of law enforcement feel that pain. So, offer your condolences and support to the members of the NYPD today. With that, I’ll turn to Commissioner Dermot Shea.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea: Good morning. Let me start by saying that every member of the New York City Police Department today, as the Mayor said, mourns our colleagues in Jersey City in the wake of this absolute tragedy, and we stand together as one. By all accounts, Detective Joe Seals, a husband, a married father of five children, was a stellar police officer. Highly skilled at doing his job, getting guns off the street, making the streets of Jersey City safer for all residents, a man truly dedicated to the people he served. And our hearts also go out of course to the families of everyone killed or injured in this prolonged senseless act of violence.
While authorities in Jersey have the lead in this investigation, obviously, I can tell you that from the start the NYPD offered and sent almost immediately specialized resources to Jersey City as this initial job came over as an active shooter. And that occurred shortly after the first reports came in. Some of those resources included members of the Intelligence Bureau, our Aviation Unit – and you can think of the hazard with the weather conditions yesterday – our Emergency Service Unit, men and women that trained with their partners in Jersey City well before this incident.
So this is not a story in a distant newspaper or far off land. These are people that they know and respect prior, too. Almost immediately, here as this was unfolding here in New York, we deployed our Critical Response Units throughout the city to various Jewish locations and that instant response was amplified, as the Mayor said, throughout the night and continues to this point in time initially out of an abundance of caution as the situation unfolded but then with more purpose as the details began to emerge.
Those Counter Terrorism Bureau deployments were maintained overnight. They have been expanded today and they will be in place until we feel it is safe to remove them. But I will tell you that we stand committed to keep members of the Jewish community and all New Yorkers safe from any act of hate. In fact this morning I visited one of our police officers stationed outside on the largest synagogues in the world, Temple Emanu-El, right off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Members of our Community Affairs Bureau are engaged as well. We’ll be in touch with leaders of the Jewish community throughout the day today as they do every day. I’ll reiterate now what we’ve been saying since yesterday.
There is no known nexus at this time between the attack in Jersey City and New York and that as the investigation moves forward we will continue to be in direct contact with authorities in Jersey City and our federal law enforcement partners including the FBI. I will urge everyone however to keep going about your business as usual without fear, that is how we defeat terror, but to always remain vigilant and aware of your surroundings at all times. If there is anything, no matter how slight that you see or hear that makes you uncomfortable in any way, anything that doesn’t look or seem right, tell a police officer, call 9-1-1, call 1-8-8-8-NYC-SAFE. Thank you everyone for this and I say that we denounce this act of senseless violence.
