Gov. Kathy Hochul is exploring a ban on the wearing of face masks in New York City’s subway amid concerns that such coverings could shield the identities of those committing hate crimes.
Interviewed on CNN Wednesday night, Ms. Hochul was asked whether she supported Jewish leaders’ call for banning masks. She said she would consider reinstituting a prepandemic ban on wearing masks on the subway.
Ms. Hochul reiterated her position at a news conference in Albany on Thursday, saying that state officials would “not tolerate individuals using masks to evade being responsible for criminal or threatening behavior.”
Her comments came as New York City continues to be the site of steady protests that began after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7 and with antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes increasing. Yet, with state lawmakers having adjourned for the year, it was unclear if she could enact such a prohibition.
“My team is working on a solution, but on the subway, people should not be able to hide behind a mask to commit crimes,” Ms. Hochul said on Thursday.
Can the governor ban masks on the subway?
The governor acknowledged that adopting a mask ban would most likely require legislative action. But the Legislature ended its 2024 session on June 8, and lawmakers are not expected back in Albany until January.
“I think the governor has gotten ahead of herself,” said Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat and the State Senate’s deputy majority leader. “This is not something that has been seriously discussed with the Legislature. I think it’s a very serious proposal with all sorts of ramifications that may be unrelated to what she’s trying to get at.”
Mr. Gianaris added that the increase in antisemitic acts in the city was troubling but that regulating what people wear when the risk of contracting Covid-19 persists was not the solution. He called questioning what people wear on the subway, “fraught with peril.”
Isn’t Covid still a concern?
Ms. Hochul acknowledged there being “legitimate reasons” for people to wear masks on the subway, including their religious beliefs and concerns about getting sick with Covid or the flu. People covering their faces for those reasons would be exempt from a ban, she said.
It was not immediately clear how such a distinction would be enforced, since any rider could conceivably claim a religious or medical need to wear a mask.
Covid cases have risen in the city recently, with the number of daily cases doubling over the past month. The increase has been fueled by two Covid-19 subvariants, LB. 1 and KP. 2, both of which are offshoots of the JN.1 strain that dominated cases in the winter and spring and still accounts about 40 percent of cases circulating.
Although rising, case counts in the city are still well below where they were over the winter and last September. The rising numbers — along with the ubiquitous sneezing and coughing that resound across New York each May, when tree pollen fills the air — may have led some subway riders who had stopped wearing masks to start again.
What precipitated the governor’s comments?
This week, vandals attacked the Brooklyn Heights home of Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, smearing red paint and graffiti across the entryway at her apartment building and hanging a banner that accused her of being a “white-supremacist Zionist.”
The episode followed a demonstration on Monday that began on Wall Street and ended with protesters flooding the Union Square subway station, where an unmasked man asked others on a crowded car to “raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.” Three people were arrested on fare evasion charges, the police said.
Masks were common at protests on college campuses this spring, with many participants saying they were covering their faces because they feared online harassment and other potential consequences of protesting.
Mayor Eric Adams said in a radio interview that protesters who covered their faces were “cowards.” He invoked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., saying that “Dr. King did not hide his face when he marched and for the things he thought were wrong in the country.”
“I think now is the time to go back to the way it was pre-Covid, where you should not be able to wear a mask at protests and our subway,” Mr. Adams said.
Why did New York have a ban on masks?
New York banned masks in 1845 in response to protests in the Hudson Valley after tenant farmers disguised themselves as Native Americans and attacked their landlords. The state’s ban was the oldest in the country until May 2020, when Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, repealed it at the pandemic’s height. Mr. Gianaris said the original ban was a response to “a very different environment than exists today.”
“These instances are horrible and we need to respond to them and respond aggressively, because we cannot tolerate antisemitism,” he said. “But we need to be more precise with our policy restrictions than just a broad ban on people covering their faces.”
Grace Ashford and Joseph Goldstein contributed reporting.