Following Saturday’s white supremacist demonstration at a LGBTQ-friendly kids’s occasion, the most recent in a sequence of hate teams’ escalating actions, prosecutors are starting to re-fortify civil rights defenses.
The descent of NSC-131 members on a public drag queen story hour for kids and households in Jamaica Plain was “at once a disgrace and a warning,” District Attorney Kevin Hayden stated over the weekend.
Hayden introduced a response Monday morning. The High-Risk Victims Unit will increase to the Civil Rights/High-Risk Victims Unit and acquire two new prosecutors for civil rights instances, in line with a launch from the DA’s workplace.
The transfer, the discharge acknowledged, “is designed to better coordinate and prosecute felony and misdemeanor civil rights and hate crime cases.”
The workplace will proceed to guard free speech “up until the point it turns into threats or violence,” Hayden stated.
The chief of the white supremacist group NSC-131, Christopher Hood, is going through a misdemeanor cost of affray for an altercation at Saturday’s demonstration.
Hayden cited a troubling escalation of white supremacist exercise within the space, itemizing latest stories of hate literature distribution in Danvers, Hamilton, Ipswich and Chatham; the neo-Nazi protest at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in February; the NSC-131 gathering at a St. Patrick’s Day parade in March; the Patriot Front march in downtown Boston on July 2; and homophobic graffiti and dying threats at an LGBTQ-friendly housing challenge in Hyde Park in mid-July.
An Anti-Defamation League report in March discovered Massachusetts had the fourth-highest stage of hate propaganda exercise within the nation in 2021, the DA’s workplace famous.
Hayden additionally warned the upcoming congressional and 2024 presidential elections might stoke additional escalation of this sort.
Rachael Rollins, United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, referred to as for group members to inform regulation enforcement about any considerations relating to white supremacist exercise. Her workplace will announce a “dedicated number for the community to call in the coming weeks,” Rollins tweeted.
“When we see inequity and harm, we look the culprit in their eyes and demand that it stops,” she wrote. “If it doesn’t, we use every means at our disposal — legislatively, through the courts, and with community organizing — to end it. And that is exactly what’s going to happen here.”
Mayor Michelle Wu additionally stated town is taking “a zero tolerance approach to any groups looking to intimidate or harass residents in our city” over the weekend.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”