Folks old enough to remember New York in the late eighties and early nineties will recall a city deemed unmanageable, with violent crime out of control and a murder rate tallying over 2,000 a year.
But true to form, the old adage that bad times bring to the fore strong leaders actually came true as a tough-on-crime mayor, Rudy Giuliani, along with his police chief, Bill Bratton, ushered in revolutionary crime-fighting techniques, including stop and frisk and the “broken windows” theory.
They worked marvelously. Over the next decade, New York became the safest city in the nation. The downward murder rate trend continued through the Bloomberg administration with murders sinking to a level almost tenfold below what it had been in the early nineties.
But as the adage continues, good times bring with them a sense of complacency and usher in weak leaders. That leader, Bill deBlasio, worked with then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and progressive Democrats in Albany to implement horrific criminal justice reforms that resulted in a 46% increase in murders from 2019 to 2020.
Their awful new laws resulted in more criminals roaming the streets and more New Yorkers unnecessarily assaulted, raped and murdered.
Bail Reform
Progressives wanted to ensure that not only well-off defendants could receive bail pending their trials. A fair enough goal, but they went way overboard by writing in provisions beyond any other state in the union.
Judges were denied any discretion in keeping incarcerated suspects who were obvious threats to public safety. After intense pressure from DAs and the public, Albany tinkered around the edges, but, to this day, still has not allowed judges to consider the suspect’s dangerous proclivities.
“Raise the Age” Law
In 2018, then-Governor Cuomo was seeking to brandish his progressive credentials as he weighed a presidential run. To cozy up to progressives, he held press conferences touting his “humanitarian” bill that prohibited anyone under 18 to be prosecuted for crimes in the Supreme Criminal Court system. Instead, violent 16- and 17-year-olds would go through the weak Family Court system. It was anything but humane.
Drug lords started having the juvenile perpetrators carry out the most vicious crimes, knowing that, if caught, they’d get a mere slap on the wrist. It resulted in an alarming spike in juveniles dying violent deaths.
According to the Manhattan Institute:
In the first year after RTA was enacted, 48% of 16-year-olds who were arrested once were arrested again. That’s up from 39% the previous year. For felonies, it rose from 26% to 35%; and for violent felonies, from 18% to 27%.[7]
Youth gun crime in the city has also increased by almost 200%. In 2017, 30 identified shooters were under 18. In 2022, as of August, there had already been 85. Youths are also the victims of gun crime about three times as often as they were five years ago, with 36 victims under 18 in August of 2017 and 111 to the same month in 2022
The swarming of tourists and police by gangs of juveniles as young as 12 in a Times Square wilding event this month, shows just how undeterred these young hooligans have become, in large part because of the 18-year-old threshold.
No changes have been made to this awful law.
DA Discovery Reforms
This is one area the governor and the legislature acted on this session. But was it real reform or just window dressing?
The DA reforms are better than nothing, but they didn’t go as far as what the district attorneys’ association wanted.
The horrible reforms in 2019 forced district attorneys to provide nearly all information related to the case within an unreasonably short period. It was so burdensome and unrealistic that it led to a huge spike in cases against violent offenders never being brought in the first place.
New York City’s case-dismissal rate exploded to 62%, from the 42% rate before the extreme 2020 discovery law. The conviction rate dropped to 26% from the former 47% rate.
The courts will now have a bit more discretion to determine if the district attorneys are using good faith and will also require the disclosure of only “relevant” information as opposed to the whole file. It’s still a question as to whether this will be enough to get us back to where we were before the 2019 reforms that led to massive recidivism and in a huge dropping of potential cases against violent criminals.
Crime is starting to go down in New York City in large part because the defund-the-police idiocy is waning and also because a tough new commissioner has brought back broken window policies that crack down on lower-level crimes from turnstile jumping to shoplifting.
But if we want to get back to the good old days of Giuliani and Bloomberg, we need to get rid of these crazy laws that progressives passed back in 2018-2019.
It is about time to:
- End the 18-year-old threshold to be tried as an adult for violent crime.
- Revoke bail reform, at least to the extent that judges are given back discretion to keep violent criminals, who could potentially harm the public, incarcerated pending their trial.
- Further modify the DA reforms so that violent criminals are no longer put back on the street because DAs didn’t have the time or the workforce to meet the new unreasonable evidence requirements.
According to the old adage, we went from good times to bad times, and that should hopefully usher in a strong leader who could possibly bring back the good times. Let’s hope so.