News

#Adams, Hochul must amend bail reform laws like they promised

“Adams, Hochul must amend bail reform laws like they promised”

New York’s top two elected executives say they want safer streets in the Empire State. This is the week for them to prove it.

The state’s new budget comes due Friday, and Gov. Kathy Hochul says she wants a rollback of 2019’s infamously moronic penal-law “reforms” to be part of it. And Mayor Eric Adams, in substance if not in detail, agrees.

Yet neither Hochul nor Adams seems to want reform of the “reforms” badly enough to openly defy the pro-criminal culture that has the state in its grasp at the moment.

Hochul’s a Janie-come-lately to the cause, announcing scarcely two weeks ago that she wants tighter criminal codes as part of the 2022-23 budget. Then she pretty much dropped the topic.

Adams, meanwhile, has been saying all the right things about crime for months now, beginning long before he was elected. But his actions to date betray a timidity that — to be blunt — ain’t going to get the job done.

Yes, he more or less sorta almost reinstated the NYPD’s undercover anti-gun units that did so much to make New York America’s safest major city a generation ago. But as far as undercover goes, his semi-uniformed cops might as well be wearing bright orange clown wigs.

Then last week he announced a return to quality-of-life policing — the so-called “broken-windows” strategies pioneered by Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s public-safety brain trust. Whereupon he said he had no intention of re-embracing those policies.

Confusing much?

Governor Hochul Updates New Yorkers on State's Progress Combating COVID-19.
Hochul is including a 10-point plan to change bail reforms in her revised budget proposal.
Darren McGee- Office of Governor

It’s understandable, though. Adams is walking policy tightropes — flirting with doing the right thing even as he eyeballs New York’s pro-criminal political establishment.

How pro-criminal? When Albany wrote the rules for legalized marijuana distribution, it created heavily subsidized affirmative-action-style franchise set-asides for ex-con former drug dealers. They’re effectively now a protected class in New York — and it doesn’t get much more pro-criminal than that.

It is this environment, then, that Adams and Hochul must navigate if they’re serious about safer streets. It won’t be easy, but they are not without weapons.

True enough, the last time the mayor approached Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, seeking penal-code reforms, he was dismissed out of hand. And there’s no evidence Hochul has seriously discussed reforms with legislative leaders.

But a new Siena College poll demonstrates that crime is foremost on the minds of New Yorkers. This can’t surprise anyone, least of all Stewart-Cousins, many of whose members represent crime-conscious districts — and that’s a pressure point, if Hochul so chooses to apply some.

Plus both legislative leaders have budget priorities that must pass muster with Hochul — another opportunity for her to win public-safety concessions.

Mayor Eric Adams delivers remarks at the New York City Police Department 's Holy Name Society's 102nd annual mass and communion breakfast.
Adams has been calling for tougher crime laws for months, and even visited Albany to make a case for bail amendments.
G.N.Miller/NYPost

Again, however, Hochul has shown scant appetite for power-politicking. But she’s on the ballot for her first full term. This is a prime opportunity for Adams to focus her attention — as well as a fair measure of the mayor’s seriousness. Will he push Hochul to do the right thing?

Adams scarcely misses an opportunity to talk about how serious he is about crime. And he pushes all the right buttons.

Yes, it is horrifying when a mother and her child are robbed at gunpoint in their own building — as an appalled Adams illustrated with a video clip Sunday evening.     

Yes, New York has in fact become a national criminal-justice “laughingstock,” just as the mayor said over the weekend.

Police respond to a homicide in Brooklyn.
A Siena College poll found that 56 percent of voters polled believed the 2019 bail reform laws were bad for the state.
Paul Martinka

Yes, violence on the streets and in the subways is an objective impediment to a full post-pandemic recovery — as Adams points out just about every day.

And yes, the mayor’s anger over tomorrow’s outrage — whatever it may turn out to be — will be genuine and convincing.

But righteous anger absent focused action is wasted energy — good for the soul, maybe, but pointless as a matter of public policy.

New York needs a rollback of the 2019 no-cash-bail legislation that has tied judicial hands all across the state.

It needs repeal of the bail bill’s accompanying changes in criminal-procedure codes that have hamstrung prosecutors everywhere.

And it urgently needs changes in the state’s mental-health laws that will give the NYPD sufficient power to deal with the criminally insane in the city’s public spaces.

But most of all, New York needs focused leadership — a governor and a mayor courageous enough to face down the hard-left ideologues and self-serving schemers setting the state’s public-safety policies.

There is opportunity for both Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams to shine, in their respective roles. How they respond will profoundly shape the remainder of their respective careers.

Email: [email protected]

If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on Google News too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com

If you want to read more News articles, you can visit our News category.

Source

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button
Close

Please allow ads on our site

Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker!