On Monday, far-left New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio conceded that the recent high-profile surge in crime in New York City may, in fact, have something to do with New York state’s new deeply controversial “bail reform” law that de Blasio and his fellow leftist Democrats championed prior to its enactment.
“We had, for six years, steady decreases in crime across the board. There’s not a whole lot of other environmental things that have changed recently,” de Blasio said, as reported by the New York Post. “It sort of stands out like a sore thumb that this is the single biggest new thing in the equation and we saw an extraordinary jump.”
“Of course there’s always a possibility this is plain statistical variation, that happens sometimes,” the mayor added, the newspaper noted. “But I think it’s pretty clear that there’s only one new major piece in the equation.”
De Blasio did offer one concrete proposed reform to the “bail reform” law: Offering judges the discretion to impose pretrial detention upon those defendants deemed a bona fide public safety risk. “I think judicial discretion should be clarified so that there are very clear checks and balances, so that we avoid any inkling of bias entering into the process, but I think a system predicated only on the question of flight risk misses the fact that there are some individuals who are just consistently, by their own actions, and by the proof of due process, consistently creat[ing] a threat to their neighbors,” he said.
New York’s new “bail reform” law, which outright eliminates bail for all but the most truly violent criminals, has faced mounting opposition amid a panoply of headlines showcasing the awful caliber of criminal defendants let off into the streets pretrial. In fact, as The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo reported last month, even many Empire State Democrats have been pushing to tweak the pro-criminal law.
“After an onslaught of bad press over the disastrous first week of Democrat-implemented ‘bail reform’ in New York, Democrats are considering changes to the legislation,” Prestigiacomo noted.
“Bail reform, which was reportedly implemented early in New York City by … de Blasio, led to a woman charged with an anti-Semitic attack to be arrested and released three times in five days,” Prestigiacomo continued. “[Tiffany] Harris ‘was nabbed for allegedly slugging three Jewish women and yelling “F-U, Jews!” but let go Saturday with no bail, despite an open assault case. Last month, she got no jail for a felony in another incident,’ [the Post] reported. ‘Nabbed again Sunday in a new attack, she was once more freed, on no bail, Monday.'”
Appearing last month on “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network, I strongly criticized New York’s new criminal-mollycoddling law:
The problem with the Left is the Left speaks about justice and compassion and all these fancy words. They never focus on the people who actually suffer … from their policies. So in the case of border security and amnesty, there is no one who suffers worse from an open border and the human trafficking by drug cartels than the aliens themselves who are trafficked. In the case of “criminal justice reform,” “bail reform,” no one suffers more than victims of crime.
Where is anyone speaking for the victims of crime? But you know what the Left also does, Liz? The Left is amazing at getting the right version of language for their policies. “Bail reform,” it sounds so innocuous, right? What they’re doing is they’re throwing out a system of bail that has existed since at least 13th century England! That is how far back bail goes — cash bail, monetary bail. This is literally a centuries-old phenomenon that they are just throwing out.