https://www.city-journal.org/article/second-thoughts-in-new-york
When David Soares was elected district attorney in 2004 in Albany County, New York, he enjoyed united support on the left; even the radical Working Families Party had endorsed him. A childhood immigrant from Africa, Soares doesn’t lack for “lived experience.” Over nearly 19 years in office, he’s consistently backed progressive criminal-justice reforms. But Soares is now demoralized, seemingly near tears when he tells me that no one will talk about the victims of violence, who—in Albany, as in New York City—are disproportionately young black men.
As DA, Soares has seen firsthand the role that 2017’s Raise the Age law, which significantly scaled back punishments for 16- and 17-year-old criminal offenders, played in worsening crime. Since that law passed, youth gun crime statewide has doubled—and youth gun victimization has nearly tripled. About 75 percent of violent felony cases now get handled in family court, which returns teens to the streets, where they often commit new crimes or become victims themselves of tit-for-tat gang warfare. “We witnessed the murder of a young man at the hands of another young man that had gone through the family court Raise the Age process . . . a minimum of three times,” Soares told local legislators in July. “This was a system that was never designed to handle or deal with violent—super, super violent—youth.”
Legislators have responded to his alarm with vitriol. Earlier this year, the New York State Senate’s counsel disinvited Soares from testifying at a hearing, worried that he (a black man) would talk about black crime victimization. Agency leaders, journalists, and reform advocates have denounced him for highlighting the concentration of violence in black communities and the role of misguided laws in enabling it.
Perhaps even more disheartening for Soares are calls from prominent leaders, who thank him for speaking out—but refuse to do so themselves. As Soares notes, an unprecedented proportion of New York’s leaders today are African American. Accounting for only about a fifth of New York City’s population, and a smaller percentage of state residents, blacks are now especially overrepresented at the top of its public-safety-related agencies. The lieutenant governor, attorney general, parole board chairman, Senate majority leader, and Assembly speaker and majority leader—all are black. Downstate, Mayor Eric Adams is black, as are the deputy commissioner for public safety, heads of the mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the Department of Probation, the NYPD’s outgoing commissioner and its current second and third in command, the U.S. attorneys for the Southern and Eastern Districts, the district attorneys of Manhattan and the Bronx, the public advocate, and the city council chairwoman. Shouldn’t they feel secure enough to confront the issue?
But for true-believer progressives, who wield tremendous political influence, certain ways of evaluating crime policies are viewed with genuine contempt: pointing to the unintended negative consequences of reforms, stressing the need to use data to evaluate policies, and acknowledging how individual accountability and culture play vital roles in crime prevention.
