District Attorney Alvin Bragg has built a reputation for being soft on criminals. This isn’t one of those things that came out of nowhere, either. The efforts that built that reputation, however, are also why he’s being blamed for the surge in violent crime New York City has been experiencing.

That blame isn’t without reason, either. After all, when you turn the cell door into a revolving door, you’re asking for something like that to happen.

But now, Bragg is vowing to step up efforts to combat “gun crime” in the city.

Embattled Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom critics have slammed for his soft-on-crime policies, said Monday that his office was urgently addressing a spike in gun crimes.

“We know we’ve seen an uptick in gun crimes and we’re working on that every day, working with our law enforcement partners on tracking the guns that are flowing into our communities as people sit from far away and profit off of our pain,” he said at a Martin Luther King Jr. event hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton‘s National Action Network in Harlem.

During the brief three-minute speech, Bragg emphasized the importance of focusing on public safety and “fairness in the system.”

“Your first civil right is the right to walk safely to your corner store, so as your district attorney I’m working on that every day,” he said.

He added, “We cannot have safety without fairness, and we cannot have fairness without safety.”

The problem with “fairness” is that Bragg seems to think that means not punishing people who break the law.

Now, everyone agrees that not all criminal offenses are equal. Mild vandalism is hardly on par with mass murder, for example. Luckily, we have different punishments for different crimes. For example, no one gets the death penalty for shoplifting, and terrorists don’t get probation.

This is the natural order of things.

Bragg creates the problem because he’s decided not to seek punishment for people who commit certain “lesser” offenses, and he calls that fairness. It’s not.

Oh, it probably seems very fair to the offenders, but it’s not fair to society.

Look, I get that people like Bragg weren’t fans of broken window policing, but you can’t really argue with the results. See, people don’t start off with violent crime. They get started elsewhere.

More than that, though, they tend to also continue to commit many of those other crimes. It’s not like they start with jumping turnstiles and then eventually start knocking off stores and stop jumping subway turnstiles. If you get them for the lesser crime, you take them off the streets for the bigger crimes as well.

But Bragg’s approach acts like none of that matters. It’s a big chunk of why New York has gone from one of the safer major cities in the world to what it is today.

It should be noted that not a single gun control law has been repealed, yet violent crime is raging in the city.

It’s just too bad their DA is completely unequipped and unwilling to do what it takes to address the problem. Instead, he’ll just make vague promises about taking care of it while also prattling on about fairness.

I’d like to ask Mr. Bragg if it’s fair when someone who could have been in jail for something small murders someone’s grandmother because his office opted not to prosecute such a minor crime. Is that the fairness you’re promising?

Or is it you putting politics above the safety of the people of New York?