New York is in the throes of electing a new governor. We have Harry Wilson, a Republican and a multimillionaire, we have Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, and we have Kathy Hochul, a Democrat. While there are many other candidates poised to throw hat in ring these are the main candidates running ads right now. Wilson, with his very deep pockets hounds the airwaves day and night, Tom Suozzi, using the cadence of a modern offbeat car salesman, is now keeping pace, and Kathy Hochul has a new ad showing her hard at work for New Yorkers. Because Cuomo resigned under “me too” charges, Kathy Hochul is the incumbent, but she is a girl and NY does not elect girls to be governor, at least they haven’t so far.
The key issue in this preliminary fight for office is bail reform. After George Floyd was killed by knee on neck, our black and brown neighbors, and many white folks too, marched with Black Lives Matter signs. In my city this group of demonstrators marched for forty straight days and impressed us all with their passion. Bail reform laws were written in New York State, and it seemed like a win.
There is a vicious cycle of “catch and release” in our inner cities. Low level offenders are arrested and sent to jail, they are arraigned and issued a bail amount they cannot pay. They are held over in jail for a hearing which is slow in coming due to over-burdened courts, too few court-appointed lawyers, and a lack of will on the part of the courts to put these low-level offenders back on the streets. Our jails become crowded with people who should not be there and most of them are not white.
There has been, it is possible to conclude, a strategy used by court officials and the police to overturn these Bail Reform laws as crime rates rise in our cities. Rather than investigate the causes of the rise in crime, the establishment wants to simply return to business as usual. They use a law-and-order argument which appeals to people who like law and order at any cost. They make it appear that the reforms give the courts no choice but to turn offenders loose in the neighborhoods regardless of the seriousness of the crime.
Judges pretend that these reforms tie their hands in setting bail. They are putting dangerous, higher-level offenders back on the streets to undermine the Bail Reform laws. The police, who do face real dangers in terms of the number of guns available to criminals, are quitting their jobs and telling communities that these new laws make it too risky to stay in their jobs. Some of this is real fear; some of this may be a performative tactic to return to “catch, hold and maybe release”.
Law-and-order programs have not worked well in our communities. They pit the people against the police, the optics look authoritarian and racist, and they do not offer any off ramps to those who like the odds of earning money from illegal activities. They turn our inner cities into poverty traps and shooting galleries. The more law-and-order strategies operate the more the animosity grows between people and police. Law-and-order may clear crime for a time, but it does not solve the problem of crime, which comes with a type of war of us vs. them.
Holding low-level offenders in jail to keep them off the streets is not a real tool in our justice system. Bail Reform should help address this problem that is clogging up our jails and ruining lives. Yet both Harry Wilson and Tom Suozzi talk about nothing except getting rid of bail reform laws. New laws often need to be tweaked, but these laws should not be scrapped. It feels like a slap on the wrist to citizens who exercised their rights to highlight a problem in their community and to attempt to solve it. A lot of community good will was generated by those dedicated demonstrators and the fact that crime has spiked after a three-year pandemic and an unequal economy should not be allowed to kill that desire that people in the community must work together to resolve the root issues that keep a dysfunctional cycle in place.
Let’s bypass these obstreperous boys running for New York governor. We have been there and done that for at least two centuries. Let’s try a girl! She is committed to finding solutions to patterns that keep repeating and listening to what the people in the troubled communities have to say, implementing the solutions they offer up. Harry Wilson, get off my TV. Tom Suozzi, sound like an empathetic human rather than a shill. Even if one of them changes his tone I don’t want either of these boys. Let’s try a girl!
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