EGN NEWS DESK
NEW YORK — Police within the suburbs of New York City made the primary arrest beneath a brand new native legislation banning face masks, officers introduced Tuesday.
Nassau County Police say officers on Sunday night time responded to stories of a suspicious individual on a avenue close to the Levittown and Hicksville city line, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of Manhattan.
They discovered Wesslin Omar Ramirez Castillo carrying black clothes and a black ski masks that coated his face, aside from his eyes.
The division stated the 18-year-old resident displayed different suspicious conduct, together with trying to hide a big bulge in his waistband and refusing to adjust to the officers’ instructions.
Officers say the bulge turned out to be a 14-inch knife. Ramirez Castillo was positioned beneath arrest with out additional incident, police stated.
He was arraigned Monday in Family Court in Westbury on misdemeanor fees of legal possession of a weapon and obstructing governmental administration, based on Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly’s workplace.
Lt. Scott Skrynecki, a police division spokesperson, stated Ramirez Castillo may also be dealing with a misdemeanor violation of the face masks legislation within the coming days.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who signed the masks ban into legislation earlier this month, stated Sunday’s arrest confirmed the rule is working.
“Our law enforcement officials had been in a position to make use of the masks ban laws in addition to different components to cease and interrogate a person who was carrying a weapon with the intent to have interaction in a theft,” he stated in an emailed assertion. “Passing this legislation gave police one other software to cease this harmful legal.”
Keith Ross, a legal justice professor on the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, stated police didn’t essentially want the brand new legislation to cease and query Ramirez Castillo, nevertheless it helped bolster their justification.
“The legislation provides police, on the very least, cheap suspicion to conduct a cease,” the retired New York City police officer defined by telephone. “Under cheap suspicion, police can forcibly cease an individual in New York state if they’re suspected of committing a felony or a penal legislation misdemeanor, which is the place this new legislation falls.”
But Scott Banks, attorney-in chief on the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, which is representing Ramirez Castillo, challenged that notion.
“There isn’t any foundation to consider that carrying a face masks was supposed to hide identification or legal conduct, and if that was the idea of the cease I consider there’s a foundation to conclude the cease was illegal,” he wrote in an e mail.
Skrynecki declined to remark, including that police and county officers will talk about the incident at a information convention Wednesday.
The New York Civil Liberties Union, which has criticized the brand new legislation, repeated its warning that the masks ban is “ripe for selective enforcement by a police division with a historical past of aggression and discrimination.”
Disability Rights of New York, a gaggle that advocates for individuals with disabilities, filed a authorized problem final week arguing that the masks legislation is unconstitutional and discriminates towards individuals with disabilities.
The federal class motion lawsuit seeks a short lived restraining order and preliminary injunction to instantly cease enforcement of the ban.
The Mask Transparency Act was authorized by the county’s Republican-controlled legislature in response to “antisemitic incidents, typically perpetrated by these in masks” for the reason that Oct. 7 begin of the Israel-Hamas battle.
The legislation makes it a misdemeanor punishable by as much as a yr in jail and a $1,000 high quality for anybody in Nassau to put on a face masking to cover their identification in public. It exempts individuals who put on masks “for well being, security, non secular or cultural functions, or for the peaceable celebration of a vacation or related non secular or cultural occasion for which masks or facial coverings are usually worn.”
