Police officials said at a Friday briefing that the NYPD will deploy an array of measures including drones, canine units, counter-terorrism specialists and horse-mounted police to secure Sunday’s parade on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan.
“The police is going to respond accordingly and rapidly to anyone who thinks that they’re going to disrupt the parade,” Mayor Eric Adams said at the briefing alongside police officials and Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the parade organizer.
Frequent anti-Israel protests have taken place across the city since Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7 and during the subsequent war. Some of the demonstrations have been peaceful, while others have targeted Jewish institutions, been marked by disruptions to traffic and daily life, or seen clashes between protesters and police.
Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office who is Jewish, said at the briefing that there have been 2,800 protests in the city since October 7, nearly 1,300 of which were related to the Middle East. Antisemitic incidents have surged since the start of the war, according to NYPD data.
Adams and police officials stressed that protesters have the right to demonstrate, within legal limits.
“Those who want to protest peacefully, you have a right to do so,” Adams said. “We want to emphasize that it’s called peaceful protest. That is what we are calling on the people [of] this city to do.” READ MORE
