Happy New Year, New York City!

Opened Twitter up to this tweet this morning and wondered, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Starting today any child under the age of 12 will NOT be arrested or prosecuted for crimes in New York unless it is a Homicide Charge. pic.twitter.com/kggCugGe2B

— Daily Loud (@DailyLoud) January 1, 2023

Along with, “When did this happen and what brilliant minds thought this was a good idea?”

It seems the ‘when’ was the first of last year. The ‘who’ should surprise no one. The – here we go – deep thinkers in the stunningly detached-from-reality members of the New York State Legislature passed this monstrosity, which was signed by equally clueless Gov Kathy Hochul.

Children under the age of 12 will no longer face arrest and prosecution for virtually all crimes in New York under a bill signed into law late this week by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The bill signed by Hochul raises the lower age of the state’s jurisdiction for juvenile delinquency, a move that will prevent those under the age of 12 from arrest except in the case of a homicide.

Under the prior law, anyone between the age of 7 and 18 could be charged as a juvenile delinquent in New York, allowing them to be subject to the criminal justice system for many crimes.

…“When you criminalize young folks at an earlier age, they’re subjected to much more trauma,” said Bronx State Senator Jamaal Bailey, who sponsored the legislation. “And our children, as resilient as they are as we’ve seen throughout this (COVD) pandemic, they can only bear so much.”

Under the new law, local social services departments will be required to set up what’s known as a differential response program for those under the age of 12 who may have otherwise been charged as a juvenile delinquent.

Those programs, which are subject to state review, are meant to connect children with proper mental-health care and other services rather than enter them into the juvenile justice system.

So the little miscreants – instead of being picked up and monitored through the criminal justice system – will now be referred, sucked into the maw of, and lost in the vastitude of an overburdened social services leviathan? This is the youthful version of sending a social worker on a 911 call instead of a cop.

County sheriffs are pointing out a problem with the scheme already, besides the fact of there being nowhere near enough social services available to handle the influx of little potential thuglets. The concern they raise seems pretty important to the success of the planned intervention.

…“Speaking to our [social services] commissioner here, she’s taking it very seriously,” said Niagara County Sheriff Michael Filicetti. “She reached out to us to set up a system with all the police agencies, but you can’t get around the fact that this is now an additional duty being placed on social services.”

Filicetti said another concern is the fact that the programs social services would provide are voluntary, which means if the child doesn’t want to participate, he or she wouldn’t have to.

The apprehended kids DON’T HAVE TO PARTICIPATE if they don’t want to?! Literally, they are then getting away with everything just short of murder.

What’s not to love…for MS-13 and your local gangs, or the mob for that matter? Why wouldn’t you use street kids to run your drugs, guns – whatever – because it’s nothing but a WIN-WIN. They get caught, you write off the loss, and they don’t have a record and come right back to you. If they get maimed or killed, they’re a dime a dozen waiting to take their place.

What’s not to love?

…“It’s another weakening, watering down of our criminal justice system,” he said.

Ya think?

…Criminal justice reform advocates say this change has been a long time coming, and that it will help get children the services they need, like mental health care.

But no it won’t if they don’t have to participate. Good Lord – they’ve lost their minds. Especially given the years of failure of their social experiments with youthful offenders, constantly raising the age of “criminal responsibility” and watching the violence explode accordingly. This NY Post article from 2021 is on the deadly results of raising the age from 16 to 18 two years earlier.

…The root of the problem is the state’s Raise the Age law, signed by Gov. Cuomo on April 10, 2017. The legislation, embedded into the state budget that year, increased the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 throughout the state, effective on Oct. 1, 2019.

It intends to offer troubled teens a lifeline out of the criminal justice system before they become adults — but in practice, it results in a “catch and release” system that condemns kids to a deadly cycle of violence.

“It’s kill or be killed out here,” said former Bronx prosecutor turned criminal defense attorney Michael Discioarro.

The state website touting the law says automatically prosecuting 16 and 17 years olds as adults was an “injustice” that “unfairly punished youth and prevented them from receiving the services they need to rehabilitate themselves and re-integrate into their communities.”

But rehabilitation services have not materialized, critics say.

Supervision and oversight promised by the legislation have also been lax.

The law gives thousands of juvenile offenders a slap on the wrist and then spits them back out on the street, often to the care of criminal enterprises. Their cases wend their way through a secretive and labyrinthine legal system — while the teens graduate to greater criminality and violence or face the threat of death themselves.

So this brand-new plan has children being turned over to a social services department that already was overwhelmed by the influx four years ago and is, for all purposes, non-functioning. And the city and liberals in the state just voted these people back in to condemn even younger children to a life of crime – quite possibly compelling them into a life of crime as vassals of the cartels and gangs.

Places like Burundi, Sudan, Nigeria and the Congo must truly be foreign to these “legislators/public servants.” Even something as simplistic as Wiki spells out how child soldiers happen:

Reasons for recruitment by armed groups

Child soldiers are typically recruited because they are seen by armed groups as expendable and cheap to maintain. Other factors include the global proliferation of light automatic weapons, which children can easily handle; the relatively greater willingness of children to fight for non-monetary incentives such as honor, prestige, revenge and duty; and the greater psychological malleability of children relative to adults, which makes them easier to control, deceive and indoctrinate.

And the “risk factors” for recruitment? Does any of this sound remotely familiar? Might these conditions already exist, in the city especially?

·Background poverty including a lack of civilian education or employment opportunities;
·The cultural normalization of war;
·Seeking new friends;
·Revenge (for example, after seeing friends and relatives killed); and
·Expectations that a “warrior” role provides a rite of passage to maturity.

Many times the children recruited remain in the armed forces as they are forced into acts of violence against their own families to ensure they cannot go back to their communities. Other times, children are given drugs to alter their state of mind to facilitate the way their thoughts are shaped by people in command…

This has the potential to truly be disastrous for a generation of children and turn the city into an unbelievable hellhole. Perhaps an unrecoverable one after not too much time passes.

Seriously – who would want to be a cop in New York City Mogadishu?

I’ve never met anyone who wanted to live there, less mind try to keep the peace.