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Amazon said it had temporarily stopped construction of a new fulfillment center in Windsor, Conn., after seven ropes that appeared to be nooses were found on the site since April 27.
The Windsor Police Department said it was investigating what it called “potential hate crime incidents” with the Connecticut State Police and the F.B.I.
Amazon said it had shut down construction on the site until at least Monday while new security measures were being put in place. It said a $100,000 reward had been offered; Amazon said that it had contributed $50,000 and that construction companies and subcontractors working on the site had contributed the other $50,000.
“We continue to be deeply disturbed by the incidents at this construction site,” Brad Griggs, an Amazon representative, said at a news conference on Thursday with Black elected officials and members of the N.A.A.C.P. “Hate, racism and discrimination have no place in our society and certainly are not tolerated in any Amazon workplace.”
in Windsor, a town of about 28,000 people north of Hartford.
“We want to see someone apprehended,” Nuchette Black-Burke, a member of the Windsor Town Council, said at the news conference. “If we need to get a sit-in, a protest, whatever we need to do, we’re going to continue to do it until the folks here realize it’s not acceptable. It’s a hate crime.”
Construction Dive, a news site focused on the construction and building industry, which said that 65 percent of the readers it surveyed last year had witnessed racist incidents on job sites. Those incidents included nooses, graffiti and slurs. Seventy-seven percent of readers said that nothing had been done to address the incidents.
The F.B.I. said it was lending resources and support to the Windsor police.
“The implications of a hanging noose anywhere are unacceptable and will always generate the appropriate investigative response,” David Sundberg, the special agent in charge of the New Haven field office, said in a statement.