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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Wave of Violence Overwhelms NYC

Contrary to what Bill de Blasio and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggest, criminal behavior is not an economic phenomenon. 

Seth Barron

Shootings in New York City continue to climb. Fifteen people were shot in 15 hours over this past weekend, from Rockaway to the Bronx. A baby was among four people shot at a cookout in Brooklyn on Sunday night; he died from his wounds. The last month has seen a striking rise in shootings and homicides. Over the year to date, murders are up 27 percent over the first half of 2019; over the last four weeks, more than 300 people have been shot in New York City, up from 100 during the same period last year.

Many people, including NYPD brass, have looked at the rise in violent crime and associated it with the extensive criminal-justice reforms enacted over the last few years, especially since the beginning of 2020. Chief of Department Terence Monahan described “a combination of things—bail reform, Covid releases from prison, court shutdown, which has Rikers [Island] at half of where they were”—as contributing to the crime escalation. Reform advocates and much of the media jumped on Monahan’s comments and demanded support for his contention. They hailed the NYPD’s release of a report indicating that only one person released as a result of bail reform has been arrested and charged with a shooting—evidence, as they saw it, that Monahan was blowing smoke in an attempt to discredit the progressive effort to end mass incarceration.

 But an absence of data (for now) specifically linking misguided reforms, decriminalization, and decarceration to the rise in violent crime hardly debunks the connection between them. Most of the shootings have seen no arrests yet, so it’s impossible to know whether the perpetrators were recently released from jail, though dozens of releasees are suspects in shootings. Moreover, with courts largely closed because of the pandemic, over 1,800 people arrested on illegal gun charges have been released to walk the streets.......... To Read More....


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