New York City is one of the most liberal cities in the country. They’re vehemently anti-gun as well as anti-police. We saw that last year when the people there demanded reforms in the name of social justice.
Well, they got them.
Now, as violent crime spirals out of control, the folks in the Big Apple are thinking they might have made a mistake.
Stray bullets in Times Square and widespread violence in the city are evoking New York’s bleakest days, forcing leaders to fine-tune recent changes to policing and rethink revolving-door policies that send prisoners back to the ZIP codes where they committed crimes.
The debate is playing out amid a mayoral race that could pit a retired police captain against a GOP nominee who’s been a public safety advocate for decades.
The New York Police Benevolent Association and other lobbies say anti-police rhetoric is driving cops and detectives to quit or seek early retirement, weakening their ability to fight the crime wave. But a reversal of New York bail reforms tops their wish list.
They say the bail reforms, enacted at the state level in January 2020 to help defendants who cannot afford release pending trial, are handcuffing judges who want to keep dangerous suspects locked up.
“No one is being held in jail and there’s a tremendous amount of guns on the street,” said Paul DiGiacomo, president of the New York City Detectives’ Endowment Association. “They’ve enacted laws and now they’re not man enough to change them back [to] the way they should be. They made a mistake.”
Brooklyn resident Carmen Lane said she thinks the courts need to get tough again so dangerous people aren’t released onto the streets.
“I think the courts should go back to being the strict people they’re supposed to be. There are too many people dying on the streets,” Ms. Lane told The Washington Times while strolling along Seventh Avenue in Chelsea on a recent weekday.
Basically, it’s a revolving door with criminals. Yeah, they might get arrested, but then they’re back out on the streets almost immediately. Further, they know if they get arrested again, they’ll be back out again.
I get the motivation for bail reform. I mean, we’re supposed to treat people as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. However, this clearly isn’t working.
From someone who would know:
“We haven’t seen this many shootings since the early 2000s,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD police sergeant and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “There’s no more deterrence, the bad guys aren’t afraid of the police anymore, everyone gets bailed out, it’s a revolving door system. We have more rules against the police than they do against criminals.”
Let’s be clear, that’s a recipe for disaster.
When criminals don’t fear the police–and, by extension, punishment–there’s absolutely nothing that will keep them in check. For many people, simply knowing what the law is would be enough, but for many others, they need to fear the punishment. They need to be concerned about the ramifications of their actions if there’s going to be any hope of keeping them in check.
Since there isn’t any fear, they act as if they have nothing to fear. After all, they don’t. They have nothing at all to fear and they know it.
Sure, they’ll eventually end up in prison, assuming police find them again, but that’s months or years down the road. They’re not worrying about that.
In the meantime, how many people have to die before lawmakers recognize their mistake and step up to fix it. No one gets everything right, so own up the error and make the needed repairs to the system before legions more are killed.
