Curt Flewelling, FISM News
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New York’s controversial bail reform law has only been in effect since January 2020, when then-Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law reforms that made many on both sides of the political aisle nervous.
The chief concern was recidivism, the tendency of convicted criminals to commit more crimes after their release. According to New York Police Department (NYPD) statistics, 10 career criminals, or what police call, “the worst of the worst,” have been proving the validity of those fears.
NYPD has arrested those 10 men a staggering 485 times since Cuomo’s reforms made it impossible to hold criminals not accused of violent felonies.
Staunch proponents of the no-bail policy balk at the notion that the new law has led to a spike in repeat offenses. However, Democrat NYC Mayor Eric Adams is not buying the assertion, calling the New York City criminal justice system “insane,” “dangerous,” and “harmful.”
“As a result of this insane, broken system, our recidivism rates have skyrocketed,” Adams said at a recent NYPD news conference. “And those who say that the predicted wave of recidivism wouldn’t happen, and the studies that claim to show that the rate of arrest for violent felonies has not changed since the reforms were passed, I have one word for you: Wrong. You are wrong.”
Progressive Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been on the hot seat for months for the city’s lawlessness. He is not alone, as he and several of his colleagues across the country find themselves under fire for their soft-on-crime policies. Several liberal prosecutors were elected as a result of a nationwide trend to “reimagine the criminal justice system,” a movement that has been under sharp criticism by Republicans and Democrats alike.
He then pointed to statistics that showed that criminal justice reform measures have backfired and showed how the instance of repeat offenders has nearly tripled in some areas since the existing laws were passed. These reforms include measures that prevent judges from being able to consider whether criminals are a threat to public safety during sentencing.
New York is not the only major city where career criminals are wreaking havoc. Leftist District Attorneys Larry Krasner (Philadelphia), George Gascon (Los Angeles), and freshly recalled Chesa Boudin (San Francisco), have all been under intense scrutiny for their soft-on-crime policies.
The seemingly predictable results of this “catch and release” phenomenon seemed to be foreshadowed by former Attorney General William Barr in a speech in 2019.
“The emergence in some of our large cities of district attorneys that style themselves as ‘social justice’ reformers, who spend their time undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook, and refusing to enforce the law, is demoralizing to law enforcement and dangerous to public safety,” Barr told officers at a New Orleans Fraternal Order of Police Conference.