declined to cooperate <\/a>with prosecutors, but regrets her choice.<\/p>\n\u201cMaybe a part of me was just like, I don\u2019t want to put another black man in jail,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
That attitude \u2014 not wanting to put a dangerous, frequent offender in jail because it might be \u201cracist\u201d \u2014 also inspired the laws that cost Falzone his life.<\/p>\n
Under the state\u2019s bail reform, only a limited number of serious offenses can get a person detained pretrial.<\/p>\n
And, under New York law predating bail reform, judges cannot consider an offender\u2019s dangerousness to the community in deciding whether or not to remand him \u2014 a rule found in no other state in the union.<\/p>\n
The revolving door means that offenders like Burke keep getting rereleased until they kill someone.<\/p>\n
Indeed, according to New York state data, 88% of those who have a misdemeanor assault charge and another open case are rereleased.<\/p>\n
Of these, 40% are rearrested; 18% of rearrests are for a violent felony offense.<\/p>\n
Burke\u2019s case, in other words, is not an isolated incident.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a pattern, one that\u2019s making New Yorkers less safe.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an iron law of criminology that a handful of criminal offenders do the overwhelming majority of offending.<\/p>\n
Put public safety first<\/p>\n
New York is no exception; just 63 individuals account for some 5,000 arrests on the subway, The Post has reported.<\/p>\n
The best thing to do with such people is to take them off the streets, putting them either in prison or a mental facility as appropriate.<\/p>\n
The court in Burke\u2019s case should have been able to remand him on the basis of his danger to public safety.\u00a0Ideally, he would have been held after his unprovoked assault on two women last month.<\/p>\n
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The fact that he wasn\u2019t represents not just a failure of the court and its officers, but of New York\u2019s detention laws more generally.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s long past time for New York to catch up with every other state and permit the detention of frequent and dangerous offenders based on their criminal history.<\/p>\n
Stop worrying about putting \u201canother black man in jail,\u201d and start worrying about protecting the lives of law-abiding citizens like Ross Falzone.<\/p>\n
Charles Fain Lehman is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another New Yorker was made the victim of the city\u2019s revolving-door criminal justice system last week. Ross Falzone,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":790114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,12937,4219,5333,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,19500,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,2694],"class_list":["post-790113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-assaults","tag-crime","tag-jail","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-opinion","tag-racism","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-victims"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116559308784454303","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}