New NYPD Unit Will Target Online Hate Groups

NEW YORK CITY — A new NYPD unit will investigate extremist hate groups online, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced one day after two Brooklyn natives, a cop and three others were killed in a Jersey City kosher deli.

The new Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism unit will focus on preventing violent crimes encouraged by a growing number of online hate groups that "have literally taken a page out of the ISIS handbook," said NYPD Deputy Intelligence and Counterterrorism Commissioner John Miller.

"It is not so much that individual groups are meeting in somebody's basement and plotting violence," Miller said at a City Hall press conference Wednesday.

"Before you get to that point, what you see is the expansion and the networking of this online."

REME, which has been operating for several months, will not replace or encapsulate the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force, which investigates after crimes already committed, Miller said.

Instead REME will expand on, and devote more manpower to, investigative an preemptive work already done by the NYPD, said Miller.

"What we have seen across the country is an increase in hate groups," Miller said. "The idea is to have the intelligence, use the analysis then execute the prevention."

Mayor Bill de Blasio said the unit was not formed in response to the Jersey City attack, but to a growing network of hate groups nationwide and an uptick in hate crimes in New York City.

"It will directly take on the hate groups that are trying to spread in this country and that pose a threat to so many communities," said de Blasio.

"If anyone out there is even thinking of committing an act of hate, the NYPD has proven that it will find you."