The New Black View
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Nobody was seriously hurt, but the video of officers being pummeled has prompted waves of public outrage. Some of that fury has been directed at prosecutors and the court system after several of those arrested were freed from jail while awaiting trial. Pressed for details to back up the claim of a crime wave, however, police and city officials said they couldn’t provide them because the city doesn’t track crime trends by the nationality of suspects.Alexa Avilés, the head of the City Council’s committee on immigration, accused the mayor and the NYPD of playing into “the same old Trumpian fear mongering and the systematic scapegoating of a diverse and vulnerable group of people.
Federal immigration authorities don’t have a presence in the city’s jail system. City resources aren’t supposed to be used to assist in the detention and deportation process. Responding to public criticism, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has said his office was still working to ensure that all the men were correctly identified. One of the men arrested was not prosecuted because of insufficient evidence of his involvement, a spokesperson for Bragg said.