Mayor To NYPD: Consequence Needed For Brooklyn Attack On Reporter

BOROUGH PARK, BROOKLYN — Mayor Bill de Blasio called for immediate consequences Thursday in the "unacceptable" assault of a reporter who was covering a second night of protests in Borough Park about new coronavirus restrictions.

"Here's a journalist who really cares about doing the work of informing people what's going on and here's a mob of people attacking him — it's just unacceptable," de Blasio said about Jacob Kornbluh, who was beaten up by a mob of protesters at the urging of a local activist Wednesday.

"There clearly need to be consequences for people involved," de Blasio continued. "I don’t know why that hasn’t happened already and it needs to happen."

The call to action came as de Blasio faced a second day of questions from reporters about what has appeared to be a light touch from police monitoring the Borough Park demonstrations, where crowds of Orthodox Jewish community members have set fire to surgical masks, swarmed journalists and beat up perceived enemies of their cause.

The protests first broke out with the news that the city and state would be imposing lockdowns on Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods facing surges in coronavirus cases.

There have been no arrests or summonses either night of protests, the NYPD has told Gothamist, whose reporter has been documenting the demonstrations.

Like Tuesday's demonstration, Wednesday's protest, including the assault on Kornbluh, seemed to be at the behest of Harold "Heshy" Tischler, a controversial activist and City Council candidate.

"...I was just looking at my phone observing the scene when Heshy Tischler recognized me, and directed a crowd to come towards me,” Kornbluh told the Daily Beast.

“Literally hundreds of members of the community tried to beat me up,” he said. “Somebody hit me in the head. I was kicked, dragged, and people were saying I deserved to die... calling me Hitler [and a] Nazi.”

De Blasio said Thursday he had seen the video of Kornbluh's attack and that it was "disgusting."

He blamed what reporters have said is a general lack of enforcement by NYPD officers at the protests, though, on a lack of communication about new coronavirus rules.

The mayor also disagreed with an apparent discrepancy in how officers have handled the Borough Park gatherings and their violent enforcement at Black Lives Matter protests over the summer.

The issues instead were because the NYPD and city lawyers haven't yet nailed down how to deal with large demonstrations given the second wave of restrictions on mass gatherings, de Blasio said.

"I'm instructing the NYPD and the Law Department to get together and come up with a single clear standard to put it out publicly," he said. "I think that should’ve been resolved yesterday. That needs to be resolved today."

Gov. Andrew Cuomo also condemned the attack on Kornbluh, noting he spoke with the reporter. He blamed the protests on the city failing to enforce coronavirus restrictions, which he noted were more restrictive in the past.

"That's why this rule seems harsh because they never followed the first rules and because they were never enforced," he said. "That's why I said to all of you 57 times the local governments have to enforce the rules. They were never enforced in these clusters."