Last Friday, two people riding in the New York City subway system were stabbed, seemingly at random. One of the victims remains in critical condition in the hospital a week later. The police were able to locate and apprehend Donny Ubiera, a career felon with 14 prior arrests. But the truly remarkable part of this awful story is that Ubiera had just been released from jail the previous day. He had been arrested earlier in the week for threatening two police officers with a large knife. But a judge released him on Thursday on “time served” after spending a single night behind bars. At this point, the city’s new Police Commissioner has had enough and she’s speaking out about it. (Free Beacon)

A New York City man was charged with attempted murder after he stabbed two Subway passengers last weekend. The unprovoked attacks occurred just one day after he got out of jail, where he spent a night after he brandished a knife at police.

Donny Ubiera, who has 14 prior arrests that include charges of assault, on Wednesday flashed a large knife at officers in Queens before fleeing the scene. He was later apprehended and charged with criminal possession of a weapon, a misdemeanor. Ubiera on Thursday was let go on “time served,” according to the New York Post. The next day, he stabbed two people on the Subway, leaving them with wounds that required medical attention. One is still in critical care.

“This is nothing if not predictable,” New York Police Department commissioner Keechant Sewell said in a Sunday statement in which she blamed Ubiera’s release on city prosecutors’ soft-on-crime approach to criminal justice.

Commissioner Sewell was quoted as saying, “Your police are doing their job. We keep arresting him.” But obviously just arresting Ubiera over and over again didn’t have the desired effect because he’s never done any serious jail time. Perhaps the high-profile nature of this latest attack will see him locked up for a serious stretch behind bars, but there’s still no guarantee of that.

Normally when we hear a story like this coming out of the Big Apple we expect to see District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s name pop up somewhere. But this case took place in Queens, not Manhattan. That borough is handled by Democratic DA Melinda Katz, and she’s another prosecutor who studies the same playbook as Bragg. She has repeatedly bragged about refusing to prosecute 26 percent of all violation arrests during her first year in office. She also proudly affirms that she has refused to prosecute a number of crimes if such prosecutions would “disproportionately affect communities of color.”

There’s something else that is disproportionately affecting the Black community in New York City that Katz and Bragg never get around to mentioning. That would be the crime wave that has been washing over the city since 2020. In the past three years, the murder rate has risen by 52%. Shootings rose 104%. But the hidden figures under those grim numbers reveal that 65% of the murder victims in that period were Black in a city where Blacks make up only 20% of the population. 74% of the shooting victims were Black. The highest percentage of victims of both felony assault and rape as measured by race were Black.

So it’s arguably true that both Bragg and Katz are putting fewer Black people in jail. But it’s also just as certain that their policies are putting a lot more Black people in the hospital or in the morgue. How are the voters continuing to tolerate this? Far more to the point, how are Black and Hispanic voters continuing to tolerate this? They are the ones paying the price of these soft-on-crime policies, all too often with their lives.

New York State law does not allow for the recall of District Attorneys, but the state constitution does grant the Governor the power to remove a DA who refuses to do their job. If there is enough of an outcry from Governor Kathy Hochul’s core constituencies in the city, she will step in and take action. This is particularly true since she’s in the midst of a reelection bid that still looks far from secure. The minority communities in New York City have it within their power to force a change in this situation. They just need to raise their voices loudly enough.