Man Admits to Defacing Newspaper with Hate Symbols
Peekskill police have located the suspect who defaced a November copy of The Northern Westchester Examiner with swastikas and the letters KKK.
Although the suspect admitted to writing the racist symbols, the police department maintained criminal charges cannot be brought, restrained by First Amendment protections. If the symbols were written on a building, or other private property, an arrest could have been made, but defacing a newspaper does not meet the same legal criteria, police said.
Despite the restraints from charging a perpetrator with a crime, police decided to investigate, hoping to deter similar incidents in the future.
“These kinds of acts can’t be tolerated in our city,” Detective Sgt. Jack Galusha remarked. “The snowball effect of a seemingly minor act of hate going unchecked could become a major issue. I’m glad to have sharp detectives that rarely forget a face or name.”
Millie Jasper, executive director of the White Plains-based Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center, said that while she commends the Peekskill Police Department for its investigation, she believes there should be consequences.
“We believe that many bias-related incidents are the result of ignorance rather than malice so our overall goal is to educate and sensitize the offender – changing and rechanneling the bigoted and prejudicial attitude that often results in hostile and offensive acts,” Jasper said. “We endeavor to foster tolerance for others, and respect for diversity. To that end, we hope that the judicial system insists that the guilty party be mandated to learn more about the effect hateful words, symbols and actions have on our society. To deface The Northern Westchester Examiner newspaper with hateful symbols – swastikas and KKK signs – without consequence shows the perpetrator that these actions are not only allowed, but encouraged.”
On Nov. 14, the defaced copy of The Northern Westchester Examiner was discovered in a Chase bank at 1025 Brown St. in Peekskill. The branch does have surveillance cameras.
The reader who found the defaced copy at the bank alerted police and the newspaper, prompting the probe. That week’s lead story, in the Nov. 13-Nov. 19 edition of The Northern Westchester Examiner, was about the election to Congress of Yorktown High School graduate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is of Puerto Rican descent.
Incidents of anti-Semitism have spiked across the country, as have crimes more broadly. For example, hate crime incidents targeting Jews and Jewish institutions in the U.S. jumped about 37 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to F.B.I. data.
The local community is not immune. This past Sunday evening, Dec. 8, during the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah, 18-year-old student Gunnar Hassard hung multiple posters with Nazi symbols at the SUNY Purchase campus. Hassard was arraigned earlier this week, charged with Aggravated Harassment in the First Degree, a class E felony.
Examiner Publisher Adam Stone said he wanted to thank the reader who originally alerted Examiner Media and Peekskill police about the defaced newspaper.
“With hate incidents on the rise over the past two years, it’s increasingly important for people of goodwill to refuse any temptation to accept and treat these acts as the new normal,” Stone said. “Let’s hope our political leaders start setting a far better example, calling out explicit hateful speech and dog whistle hate speech at every turn. The hate is a metastasizing cancer, and we desperately need people of good faith from across the spectrum to help rid us of this disease. When these acts are being perpetrated not only by committed neo-Nazis but also generally disturbed people without any preexisting ideology, it can be even more disturbing, knowing it’s a result of something poisonous in the air.”
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