What does it take to get sent to jail in New York City?
By Bob McManus
New York Post
October 15, 2019
Does Tony Johnson, the Brooklyn 17-year-old who stands charged as a gang-banging crime tsunami, represent the future of New York?
Johnson now sits in a “secure youth facility” — whatever that means these days — having been busted on a 34-count street-crime indictment, turned loose by a soft-hearted, low-bail-setting judge and then, police say, getting right back to doing what he does best: brutalizing his neighbors.
His depredations seem to have ended with a particularly loathsome sexual assault on a 12-year-old girl in the basement of a Brooklyn housing project — but who knows for sure; the cops likely missed a mugging or two, and maybe worse.
Indeed, all that’s certain is that — thanks to New York’s new Raise the Age law — Johnson can’t be tried as an adult no matter how precocious his crimes.
So thank you, Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
It’s easy to criticize the judge here — the prosecution had asked for $225,000 bail and Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Craig Walker knocked that down to $6,000 — and surely some blame accrues.
But this is de Blasioville circa 2019, where the zeitgeist has it that the only thing worse than crime is locking up criminals; where Congress member AOC is a guiding light of the No New Jails movement — and where the top municipal priority seems not to be schools, infrastructure or public hospitals, but rather shuttering Rikers Island.
And as for bail, well, it’s a town where the latest thing in do-goodery is dredging up dough to spring low-lifes, no questions asked. (Randy Santos, the accused Bowery mass murderer, was twice bailed by nonprofit organizations that exist pretty much solely to do that sort of thing; Santos’ victims could well be protesting today, if they weren’t dead.)
It’s only going to get worse.
The problem extends far beyond de Blasioville: Cuomo and the increasingly hard-left state Legislature in Albany this year went right to the heart of the pre-trial detention issue, mandating release without bail of suspects charged with a mind-bending array of charges, including intrinsically violent offenses.
Starting Jan. 1, for example, those charged with criminally negligent homicide, manslaughter, a wide range of drug-dealing offenses, weapons possession on school grounds, resisting arrest — even assault on a person less than 11 years old — will be shooed right back out on to the street.
Thus, those judges who do take seriously their responsibility to protect public safety (there really are a few in New York, you know) will be denied the bail-setting flexibility needed to do so.
Whence this insanity, and why?
All politicians pander, and you can learn a lot by studying who they pander to. And why they do it.
New York is a city in profound demographic flux. Its median age is 35 and 4.5 million of its 8-plus million residents are foreign born — which is to say, half the city has only the vaguest recollections, if any, of life before Pax Giuliana.
Meanwhile, newcomers tend not to be wave-makers, and Gotham’s streets tend to be tranquil compared to those many immigrants left behind — so all is good. They’ll learn better, of course, but it’ll take time.
So with relatively little solid-citizen pushback, New York’s pols — in Albany, on the City Council and just hangin’ at the Park Slope Y — are falling all over themselves sucking up to activist progressive lefties and the folks they champion: the types who came so close to bringing New York City to its knees a generation ago.
Not literally the same folks, of course. The addicts, pushers, pimps, gangsters, gunsels and murderously insane vagrants who made life in pre-Giuliani New York such a pulse-pounding adventure have long since gone to the places where bad choices take people.
Jail was one such destination, and in large numbers they went. It was a dreadful necessity back then and likely will be once again now that that the Giuliani-Bloomberg urban-oasis interregnum seems to be nearing an end.
Certainly the bad actors are making a comeback, as New York moves to shed jail cells, backs away from quality-of-life law enforcement, cedes mass transit and other public spaces to threatening, often vicious vagrants — all to keep the progressive population and its dubious clients happy.
Cultures reap what they sow, of course, and this year’s crop includes Randy Santos and Tony Johnson. There’s two long months to go.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Gov. Pinko Cuomo and Mayor Sandinista de Blasio must have taken a page out of Scott Henson’s book, or vice versa.
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