Progressive lawmakers keep feeding ‘the crime virus’
No less an authority than former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton warns that the Legislature’s failure to truly fix last year’s botched criminal-justice reforms has set the city up for big trouble when the COVID-19 threat recedes.
“As we finally get rid of one virus, there’s going to be a second virus created by the Legislature, which is gonna be the crime virus,” he said Sunday.
As the top cop who began New York City’s decades-long success in driving down crime, and then returned to keep the miracle going under lefty Mayor Bill de Blasio, Bratton deserves a listen. If the Legislature’s leaders refuse to listen, maybe the voters will.
Bratton didn’t mince words: State lawmakers, he said, “put so much garbage in, they basically generate a lot of garbage coming out, and that reform package coming out is more of the same.”
Bratton also slammed de Blasio’s drive to dump dangerous Rikers Island detainees onto city streets amid the pandemic, echoing the worries of all five city district attorneys. Some compassionate releases make sense — but, as the DAs put it, “the city’s jail system is capable of appropriately managing the health needs of the remaining inmates.”
Many inmates are homeless or accused of domestic violence: If released, where do they go — and how does it improve safety?
On NY1 Monday, current Police Commissioner Dermot Shea noted that crimes of “opportunity” have spiked, with felons nabbed breaking into shuttered stores. He pleaded for added penalties for perps exploiting the pandemic.
Good luck getting Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to go for that. When it comes to the “crime virus,” his progressives seem to want to turn the whole state into a giant petri dish.
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