Last week, two men—one Asian, one Jewish—were stabbed in broad daylight in front of a synagogue on the Upper West Side by an assailant who yelled “Allahu Akbar.” The suspect is being charged with attempted murder and hate crimes against both victims. Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the attack, which came just days after he issued yet another extensive denunciation of the world’s only Jewish state.
The attack is part of a troubling pattern. Hate crimes, especially against Jews, have risen sharply since 2019. They jumped 69 percent in 2023, and they continue to climb in 2026. Two weeks ago, two synagogues in Eastern Queens were defaced with feces and motor oil. In early June, a Jewish woman was beaten, choked, and had her hair torn out on the subway after her attacker shouted, “Jews are eating kids. You’re a Jew I smell the kids.” In Brooklyn, an elderly Jewish man was shoved to the ground as the aggressor said, “that’s what Jews deserve.”
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Many are rightly worried about whether this surge is driven by rising racial or religious animus, and by language like Mamdani’s. But deterring future offenses requires remembering that hate crime doesn’t spring only from bias. It grows from the same soil as ordinary, low-level crime.
Hate criminals often commit other crimes. In a 2023 Manhattan Institute report, Charles Fain Lehman found that, according to New York State data, hate-crime offenders are remarkably similar to non-hate-crime offenders across almost every category: age, sex, prior convictions, prior felonies, and rearrest rate.
Nor do many hate crime offenders have distinct motivations. In a 2002 report, Jack McDevitt, Jack Levin, and Susan Bennett identified four kinds of hate crime: thrill-seeking, defensive (guarding turf), retaliatory (revenge for a previous attack), and mission (the drive to eliminate a group). In their study of hate crimes in Boston, thrill-seeking accounted for 66 percent of cases. Defensive crimes made up 25 percent, retaliatory 8 percent, and mission less than 1 percent.
The picture that emerges is not of a committed, racist ideologue, but of someone with a criminal profile who brings hate along to a thrill-seeking crime.
Hate crime’s rise is no mystery when seen in this context. Assaults—felony and misdemeanor combined—make up half of all hate crimes. Felony assault is up 44 percent in New York City since 2019, while misdemeanor assault is up 8 percent. Some of that increase reflects domestic violence and attacks on public-sector workers, as Governor Kathy Hochul has noted. But once we account for the research, it is no surprise that hate crimes are up, too.
Under Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, New York has successfully driven murder down through targeted policing and by keeping the most dangerous offenders off the street. Assault, though, is a more frequent and less concentrated phenomenon. Visible signs of disorder may signal to a would-be offender that an area is fair game for a “thrill-seeking” assault. Declining NYPD staffing may worsen the problem: when foot patrols thin out, casual violence can rise.
That’s a problem for the city’s Jewish community in particular. Jews are roughly 10 percent of New York City’s population but the target of more than half its hate crimes. In 2023, 477 hate crimes took place against Jews, far more than the next highest categories: 183 against blacks, 130 against gay men, and 57 against Asians.
Every one of these is intolerable, and none should be minimized. While hate crimes resemble ordinary crimes in many ways, they are unique because they go beyond the victim. A bias-motivated attack on one person threatens an entire community and risks driving a whole group out of civic life, regardless of criminal intent.
But the right answer is not—in the words of the mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes—“a holistic approach to preventing hate crimes.” The answer is the same one that works for assault: more foot patrols and fewer visible signs of disorder.
If hate crimes make certain parts of New York feel unsafe, we should return to the insight of James Q. Wilson, who was wrestling with precisely this problem: the perception of crime. That perception, Wilson argued, inevitably shaped how much crime there was in a community.
That idea is what Daniel Biederman, founder of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, put into practice to rescue what was then called “Needle Park.” In 1981, Rolling Stone called 42nd Street the “sleaziest block in America.” Biederman turned to Wilson for inspiration. He gave his security chief seven “no’s”: no blaring boomboxes, no cursing, no spitting, no harassing women, no smoking, no feeding pigeons, and no perching children on the balustrades. Then he cleaned the park and planted trees and grass. Today, Bryant Park has no full-time police presence—and it is safe for everyone.
Bryant Park’s lesson was not that boomboxes cause muggings. It was that a place broadcasts what it will tolerate. Some hate crimes surely spring from bias and retaliation. But most occur when disorder goes uncorrected, when a thrill seeker sees room in which he can operate. We need to work to close that space. Foot posts on the corridors where these attacks concentrate, enforcement of small infractions, and same-day removal of graffiti all signal that someone is minding this street.
Hate crimes are different from regular crimes, but the tactics to address them are the same. Aggressive policing and intolerance of disorder will help make New York safe from violence, whether bias-motivated or otherwise.