Police and other critics of the hastily enacted and sloppy criminal-justice reforms have been warning New Yorkers for months that the scene is being set for mayhem. But neither Governor Andrew Cuomo—who now promises to enact “domestic terrorism” legislation in response to the Monsey attacks—nor the legislature have moved to fix the new bail laws. Mayor Bill de Blasio has introduced a plan to offer incentives like gift cards or baseball tickets to induce offenders to return to court. “In a world where we want speedier trials and we want the justice system to work, if small incentives are part of what actually makes it work, then that’s a smart policy,” said the mayor. The day after the Monsey attack—perpetrated, like almost all the recent anti-Semitic violence in New York, by an African-American—de Blasio blamed President Trump. This echoed his June comments that “the right-wing movement” represents “the violent threat” of contemporary anti-Semitism.
Mayor de Blasio expresses the defeatism and denial that has infected the state’s entire political class regarding public safety. Having accepted the bogus argument that minority communities are disproportionately policed and “criminalized,” our leaders have seemingly surrendered the will to protect the communities—largely these same minority neighborhoods—most ravaged by crime. The only option left is to pursue the debunked logic that policing is driven by implicit racial bias, and that crime is caused by inadequate funding of social programs.
