Q&A: Hate Crimes Bureau Chief Kelli Muse on Making Brooklyn Safe for All

In 2018, the Brooklyn DA’s Office announced the creation of a dedicated Hate Crimes Bureau to offer the most adequate response to the growing problem of bias-motivated crimes. The Hate Crimes Bureau investigates hate crimes from the early stages and enhances prosecutions whenever appropriate. In this interview, ADA Kelli Muse, Chief of the Hate Crimes Bureau, discusses the Bureau’s role in assisting victims, educating the community and holding perpetrators of hate crimes accountable.

How does the Hate Crimes Bureau determine if a crime was motivated by hate?

We determine if a case should be prosecuted as a hate crime if, through our investigation, we learn that the person intentionally selected a victim in whole or substantial part because of the victim’s race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability, or sexual orientation.

What steps has the DA’s Office taken to help prevent hate crimes in the community?

The Hate Crimes Bureau was created to not only prosecute individuals who commit certain crimes that are motivated in whole or substantial part by bias, but also to educate the community about hate crimes.  In doing so, Assistant District Attorneys have engaged the community at Precinct Council Meetings, religious events, rallies, community board meetings, churches, synagogues, mosques, and schools.  Our goal is to explain what a hate crime is, distinguish between hate crimes and protected hate speech, explain the process when someone believes that a hate crime is committed from the time the incident takes place through disposition and to inform the community of services that are available to victims.

What is your message to those who may be reluctant to report a hate crime?

We believe that a hate crime committed against an individual is a crime committed against the entire community because these acts impact everyone.  Every person in Brooklyn and throughout this country should be free to walk the streets and feel safe regardless of what they look like, their culture, gender, who they worship and who they love. We want everyone to know that The Hate Crimes Bureau is a safe space. We know that, for many reasons, victims are not reporting all hate crimes that take place. Some victims feel intimidated by the police, some may fear immigration consequences and others may fear judgment. We want all our victims to know that their immigration status or sexual orientation does not matter to us when investigating and prosecuting crimes. All of our victims are treated with respect.

What do you enjoy most about the work you’re doing?

The best part about my work as Hate Crimes Bureau Chief is doing work that indelibly affects the community—work that matters. I believe that hate crimes impact the very fabric of who we are as a society. We are all proud of our culture, religion, and who we’ve grown up to be.  We should be able to raise our families free of attacks born out of racism, prejudice, Anti-Semitism, homophobia, and trans-phobia. I enjoy going into schools, synagogues, churches, and community events to educate the public about bias motivated incidents. I like sitting with the community in the community, listening to concerns, and helping to resolve them.  Of course, the most rewarding part of my work is being able to call a victim and telling them that justice has been served.

 

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DA Eric Gonzalez – Inauguration Speech 1/21

I am so thrilled and honored to be standing here today. Growing up, my dream was to serve as an assistant district attorney in the Brooklyn DA’s office. That’s it.  Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that one day I would be sworn in as the District Attorney. I am humbled and honored beyond my ability to express.

I want to thank you all for being here today to share this special moment. I believe, and I know that all of you in this room believe, that we can keep our communities safe while treating people who come into contact with the system – victims, witnesses and people accused of crimes — with fairness and respect. During my campaign for DA, I saw that the clear majority of Brooklynites share this belief.

I want to thank the consultants, staff and volunteers of my campaign for district attorney. They gave their all to a hard-fought campaign that I was so proud of; it was an inclusive campaign focused on safety and justice for all the communities of Brooklyn.

I also want to thank the staff of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. I am so proud of the commitment of every person in the office, to keeping Brooklyn safe and to promoting a fairer system of justice. It is an honor to be your leader, and I look forward to the great things we are going to accomplish together.

To my incredible wife Dagmar, our boys Evan, Dean and Cole, my mother and my mother-in law, both named Carmen! and all of my family — thanks for your endless patience, for keeping me grounded and real. I know that without you and your love and support, I would not be standing here today. Mom–thanks for always believing in me and loving me.  Dagmar–thanks for being my true love and best friend.

I also want to acknowledge, and to remember, one towering figure who isn’t with us today. And that is my friend and mentor, the late Great Ken Thompson. We all imagined that today would be Ken’s day, his second inauguration, and that we would be looking back on his accomplishments, and looking forward to the future. So this is a bittersweet moment for me, and for many of us.

I know that Ken would be so proud of where the Office stands today, of how the staff held together to carry on his legacy of reform. We stand tall today on Ken’s shoulders, and we look forward to a bright future because of the groundwork he laid in the far too short time he held the office of Brooklyn District Attorney.

I was proud to work with Ken on the reforms for which the Brooklyn DA’s office continues to be known around the country:

Our Conviction Review Unit, with 24 wrongful convictions vacated thus far, is the national model.

Our Begin Again program, in which we vacated in a single day nearly 150,000 warrants in Brooklyn, has contributed significantly to reducing the enormous backlog of warrants that have prevented thousands of our fellow New Yorkers from moving forward with their lives.

Our Young Adult Court is one of the most innovative in the country, helping young people get the services they need to avoid further criminal justice involvement.

We have pursued all these reforms while keeping Brooklyn safe.  We closed out 2017 as the safest year in my lifetime, and very possibly in yours:  shootings and homicides hit record lows.  Assaults, robberies, larcenies were all down.

As we consider this tremendous increase in public safety, we must acknowledge the extraordinary work of our partners in law enforcement, the New York City Police Department. The NYPD has shown a willingness and ability to adjust to changing times—all while developing and employing new strategies to reduce crime in our city. Stop and frisks are down, arrests are down, police use of weapons is down, and yet in 2018 we are safer than ever.

I want to thank the great men and women of the NYPD for their dedication and their hard work.

Even with all these tremendous accomplishments, there is more work to be done. I know we can move beyond what we have already achieved and make the Brooklyn DA’s Office the national model of what a progressive prosecutor’s office can be.

That’s why, today, I’m announcing the Brooklyn DA’s Justice 2020 Initiative, which is aimed at keeping Brooklyn safe and strengthening communities’ trust in our criminal justice system by ensuring fairness and equal justice for all.

I intend to make significant progress toward this vision by the end of the year 2020, and this is how I’ll do it:

• My office will promote a justice system predicated on fairness, equity, compassion and fiscal responsibility;
• We will double down on our obligation, as prosecutors, to do justice, not just seek convictions;
• We will work toward outcomes that restore and heal victims and communities, and we will work to reduce racial disparities in our system;
• We will continue to identify and focus on those who do the most harm; the drivers of violent crime, those dangerous individuals will face the full force of the law. We will get them off the streets, and our streets will continue to be safer for it.

In Brooklyn, what we won’t do, however, is be passive in the face of cruel and misguided policies handed down from Washington DC, especially on immigration. Our recently-formed Immigration Unit is being adopted by prosecutors across the country and rightly so — it helps our friends and neighbors in immigrant communities avoid unjust deportation and sends a message to the rest of the country that when it comes to our immigrant communities, doing what’s right and fair doesn’t conflict with our commitment to public safety. Rather, it enhances it! it makes us safer!

We also won’t criminalize poverty by keeping people in jail just because they can’t afford to pay bail. In keeping with my support for, and commitment to, closing Rikers, we are leading the city in reducing reliance on cash bail.

We will continue to find new alternatives to incarceration for people whose issues can be addressed in better ways. We will reduce our reliance on jails and put an end to mass incarceration!

Next week, I will be launching our Brooklyn CLEAR program. Under CLEAR, we will divert people with drug possession cases into treatment and other services before they are charged, so they can avoid getting a criminal record. We will treat drug addiction as a health issue and not a crime.

We want to be able to measure the results of what we do, so we can hold ourselves accountable and continue to improve and to achieve our goals. So we will make better use of data to support and guide innovation in our approach to community safety and alternatives to prosecution. We will do this in collaboration with stakeholders and community partners.

This week I will be announcing the members of the Justice 2020 Launch Committee, whom I will task with making recommendations in keeping with my vision. The committee will be made up of community leaders, criminal justice experts and reformers, service providers, prosecutors and defense attorneys, representatives from the police department, and formerly incarcerated people.

The committee will work over the next few months to produce recommendations that I will share with the public.

I am so excited to begin this part of my journey, and the journey of the office I am honored to now lead.

While it feels like a time of incredible peril for our country, it is also a time of enormous promise. Even as we all share deep concerns about what is happening in Washington and the impact it is having on the most vulnerable among us, we also have, here in Brooklyn, a chance to be a national model of a criminal justice system that keeps us safe, is fair, and earns the respect and the trust of the community we serve. It is my great privilege to be leading this effort, but I cannot do it without all of you.

I want to take a minute to thank all those who helped make this ceremony special…

Brooklyn, thank you so much for putting your trust in me. Thank you for your support, now and in the future. Thank you for having my back and for lifting me up.

Thank you for joining me on this journey toward Justice 2020. I will not let you down!

Eric Gonzalez

Acting District Attorney
Kings County

August 30, 2017

COMMUNITY PARTNER IN JUSTICE NOTIFICATION

Defendant Who Allegedly Shouted Homophobic Slurs
And Menaced Man with Knife in Subway Indicted for Hate Crimes

Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced today that a 72-year-old man has been indicted on charges of menacing as a hate crime, criminal possession of a weapon, and other offenses for allegedly shouting homophobic slurs at a passenger on the A train and following him after he got off at the Nostrand Avenue station.

Arnold Moody, of Flatbush, Brooklyn, was arraigned today in Brooklyn Supreme Court on an indictment in which he is charged with menacing as a hate crime, criminal possession of a weapon, aggravated harassment and related charges.

The Acting District Attorney said that, according to the investigation, on August 9, 2017, at approximately 8:50 a.m., Moody began verbally harassing and threatening the victim who boarded a Manhattan-bound A train at the Broadway Junction subway station in East New York, Brooklyn. The defendant harassed the victim by shouting homophobic slurs, such as “You’re a [expletive deleted], why are you standing like that? I’m going to cut you.”

The defendant continued to hurl verbal insults at the victim, and allegedly followed the victim off the train at Nostrand Avenue while brandishing a knife. Several plainclothes police officers on the subway platform saw the defendant with the knife and quickly arrested him. He is being held on bail of $15,000 bond or $10,000 cash and is due back in court on October 18, 2017.

Acting District Attorney Gonzalez said, “In Brooklyn, everyone regardless of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or religion must be free to walk the streets and ride the subways without fear for their safety. Brooklyn’s beauty and strength lies in its diversity and we will not tolerate hate crimes, of any kind.”

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An indictment is an accusatory instrument and not proof of a defendant’s guilt

 

Read the full press release here.

 

Eric Gonzalez

Acting District Attorney
Kings County

August 22, 2017

COMMUNITY PARTNER IN JUSTICE NOTIFICATION

Nine Alleged Loot Gang Members Charged With
Conspiracy to Commit Murder; 14 People Shot in Seven Incidents

Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced that nine alleged members of the Brownsville- based Loot Gang have been variously charged in a 69-count indictment with conspiracy to commit murder, murder, attempted murder, weapons possession and other charges in connection with seven separate shootings that left one innocent man dead and 13 people injured. Four of those shot were women, all innocent bystanders.

The Acting District Attorney said that, according to the indictment, the defendants, who range in age from 15 to 25, are alleged to be members of the Loot Gang, which operates out of the New York City Housing Authority Ocean Hill Houses in the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville.

The defendants are charged in connection with 10 incidents, including seven shootings and one assault, between November 2015 and August 2016. Fourteen people were shot, including one fatally. One person was beaten. The defendants mostly targeted rival gangs, including, on multiple occasions, shooting at members of True Bosses Only (TBO) in Bushwick, which is TBO territory. In addition to Bushwick, the shootings occurred in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Fort Greene, Canarsie, and Jamaica, Queens. In one instance an innocent 22-year-old man who was a student at John Jay College was shot and killed.

During the course of the conspiracy, the defendants allegedly agreed to commit crimes to maintain their dominance over their claimed geographic area, their social media dominance and superior positioning among budding rap artists.

Furthermore, Loot members allegedly used social media extensively to communicate about getting guns and ammunition and committing acts of violence against rival gangs. Loot used public Facebook postings and music videos posted to YouTube and SoundCloud to antagonize rival gang members, boast about previous acts of violence against rival gangs and show Loot loyalty through hand signs, clothing and lyrics.

It is alleged that at least one shooting, on November 27, 2015, was in retaliation for the shooting death of Armani Hankins, a.k.a., Rocky, in Fort Greene, a month earlier. The victim was allegedly a friend of some of the Loot Gang members, and they released a rap music video entitled “Rockyworld” on YouTube which is a song about retaliation against a gang known as 900 for his death.

Acting District Attorney Gonzalez said, “This indictment underscores our commitment to prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law the violent gang members responsible for most of the senseless shootings in certain pockets of Brooklyn. Our targeted approach to enhancing public safety focuses on the shooters and gang leaders who drive the violence. We simply will not tolerate such lawlessness and bloodshed in our communities, which put hardworking residents at risk.”

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Read the full press release here.

 

Eric Gonzalez

Acting District Attorney
Kings County

August 3, 2017

COMMUNITY PARTNER IN JUSTICE NOTIFICATION

Acting Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez and New York AG Eric Schneiderman Call for
ICE to End Immigration Enforcement Raids in State Courts

Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez and New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today called for the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stop conducting raids in New York courthouses and to recalibrate their priorities so crime victims and witnesses are not targeted for removal proceedings. Instances of arrests and attempted arrests by ICE in courts have spiked approximately five-fold this year compared to 2016 and a growing number of victims have expressed reluctance to move forward with criminal prosecutions due to fear of being deported.
While ICE has designated certain locations such as schools, medical facilities and places of worship as “sensitive locations,” where it does not carry out enforcement actions, it has so far refused to designate courthouses as sensitive locations. The result is that a large segment of New Yorkers are now discouraged from appearing in state courts, including in housing disputes, to obtain orders of protection or to settle important matters such as child custody.

Acting District Attorney Gonzalez said, “The federal authorities claim they are making America safe again, but the truth is that their immigration enforcement policies are making all of us less safe. We encounter more and more victims and eyewitnesses to crime who are fearful of moving forward because of immigration status, and we see arrests by ICE spiking in our courthouses, including Family Court and courts dedicated to helping human trafficking victims and those with mental health issues. We must not allow a large number of our residents to live in the shadows and stop cooperating with law enforcement – but the Trump Administration is now creating this dangerous reality. ICE should treat courthouses as sensitive locations, like it does schools and houses of worship, to allow everyone free access to our justice system and stop the chilling effect felt by victims and witnesses.”

Acting DA Gonzalez has been a leader in prosecutors’ work to protect immigrants, creating a policy this spring to offer non-citizens plea offers that avoid collateral immigration consequences, hiring two immigration attorneys to advise his staff and holding monthly Immigration Forums to educate community members about common scams and how to avoid them. On August 8, 2017 The Brooklyn DA’s Office will hold a symposium for legal professionals on the intersection of criminal law and immigration law.

The Acting District Attorney thanks the New York Immigration Coalition, the Immigrant Defense Project, the Legal Aid Society, Safe Horizon and Sanctuary for Families for their work and advocacy on immigration issues.

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Read the full press release here.

 

Eric Gonzalez

Acting District Attorney
Kings County

July 27, 2017

COMMUNITY PARTNER IN JUSTICE NOTIFICATION

Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan and Queens District Attorneys Announce
Unprecedented Dismissal of Nearly 700,000 Open Summons Warrants

Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, along with Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark, New York County District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown yesterday announced that nearly 700,000 summons warrants that are 10 years or older will be vacated in the next few weeks. The warrants in question were issued for failure to pay a ticket for a minor infraction, subjecting individuals to arrest as well as carrying other negative consequences.

The announcement marks an important step in the work of the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office to clear low-level summons warrants, building upon the Begin Again initiative started by the late DA Ken Thompson in 2015. Begin Again became a model for similar warrant-clearing initiatives by other District Attorney’s Offices around the City.

The dismissal of the warrants poses no risk to public safety as those individuals whose warrants are being dismissed have not been arrested in the past 10 years or their warrants would have been triggered. Furthermore, the warrants stem from summonses issued for minor infractions such as riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, drinking beer in public, disorderly conduct, and being in a park after dark.

There are approximately 1.5 million open summons warrants citywide. These summons warrants, when left unresolved, subject those who have them to an automatic arrest when questioned by police on the street or during a traffic stop. They may also carry a number of negative consequences, including impeding one’s ability to apply for citizenship, to secure employment or obtain public housing, and subject undocumented immigrants to deportation.

Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Gonzalez said, “I have been working in Brooklyn to build trust between law enforcement and the community, and to focus our resources on violent crime. Dismissing these old warrants is an important step in advancing both of these goals. The bulk of these summonses have been issued to mostly poor, black and Latino individuals, many of whom may not even be aware that they have become open warrants that could trigger an arrest for minor infractions dating back many years. Vacating these warrants enhances public safety and promotes fairness.”

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Read the full press release here.

 

Eric Gonzalez

Acting District Attorney
Kings County

July 17, 2017

COMMUNITY PARTNER IN JUSTICE NOTIFICATION

Coney Island Man Indicted for Killing his 16-Month-Old Daughter

Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez today announced that a 19-year-old man from Coney Island has been indicted on murder, assault and other charges for causing the death of his 16-month-old daughter, Nylah Lewis. He was previously charged with assault and charges were upgraded following the child’s death.

The Acting District Attorney said that, according to the investigation, the defendant, Shaquan Taylor, 19, took custody of his daughter Nylah starting on June 16, 2017. On June 18, Father’s Day, he contacted the toddler’s 17-year-old mother via Facebook Messenger and asked her to pick Nylah up from his West 32nd Street home.

The mother found the child unresponsive and told the defendant to call 911, but he refused, the investigation found. The mother took Nylah out of the apartment and the defendant allegedly struck her, handed the child to a bystander and continued to assault the mother, who had an order of protection against him based on a previous incident, according to the indictment. Nylah died five days later at the hospital.

When interviewed by detectives, the defendant claimed that Nylah fell from the bed. Her injuries are allegedly inconsistent with such a fall.

Acting District Attorney Gonzalez said, “This father was supposed to protect his innocent baby daughter but instead he allegedly violently and senselessly took her life and then assaulted her mother when she tried to come to her rescue. I intend to hold him fully accountable for this unspeakable crime.”

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An indictment is only an accusatory instrument and is not proof of a defendant’s guilt.

 

Read the full press release here.