Last week was not a good one for New York’s sense of public safety. That Monday a man with two knives roamed across Manhattan and is now accused of killing three strangers — Angel Gustavo Lata Landi, Chang Wang and Wilma Augustin — in separate attacks. The next day a man with a gun reportedly robbed a Queens bodega and a smoke shop before being fatally shot by the police after he shot and wounded an officer and a bystander.
The episodes exacerbated New Yorkers’ sense that cascading failures of state and city government have left the city out of control. A criminal justice system transformed with a goal of keeping as few people in jail or prison as possible, for as short a time as possible, has no room for error, and yet it keeps making errors. All it takes for a potentially violent suspect to go free is one weak link — and state lawmakers and city officials have constructed a chain of weak links.
Over the past six years, under two supposedly moderate governors, Andrew M. Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, New York’s progressive-dominated State Legislature radically changed the state’s criminal justice system. In 2019, for example, the state eliminated cash bail for misdemeanors and most nonviolent felonies; in 2021 it eased its parole practices to prevent people from being sent back to prison for violations such as missing a parole meeting.
After decades of declining crime and imprisonment, these abrupt changes accelerated the decarceration trend until the state and city could no longer keep reducing crime. From 2019 to 2021, the average daily population in city jails fell to 4,921 from 7,938, a 38 percent drop. The number of people in prison for crimes that took place in New York City fell to 13,020 from 18,903. Prison readmissions for parole violations fell to 2,591 from 7,277.
It’s impossible to prove that New York would have avoided any single crime had its perpetrator been jailed or imprisoned for a previous crime.
But for progressive criminal justice policies to have even a chance of working, the state’s judges, prosecutors and mental health officials would have to be much better at predicting, out of a broad group of people accused or convicted of crimes, who, exactly, is likely to repeat or escalate his behavior.
Last week’s tragedies reveal no evidence that we’ve gotten better at such predictions. Monday’s knife attacks show that even one point of misplaced leniency can undo the protections of the whole criminal justice system.
The suspect, Ramon Rivera, 51, arrived in the city about a year ago with a criminal record. He quickly committed a string of retail burglaries. Police also took him to hospitals in drug-induced crises.
This January, Manhattan prosecutors charged Mr. Rivera with 15 counts, mostly for burglary and larceny. Because he was accused of a similar crime in another state, New Jersey, they were able to get a judge to hold him on bail, a provision the legislature allowed in 2020 when it slightly amended its bail reform laws of a year earlier.
Since Mr. Rivera showed signs of mental illness at Rikers Island, administrators twice moved him to the criminal ward at Bellevue Hospital, where on one such occasion he assaulted a correction officer. He told his lawyer after one stay there that he had schizophrenia and was taking medication.
Officials had a wealth of useful information to keep the public safe: They were holding a person with no long-term ties to New York City, with potential for violence and with mental illness that could be exacerbated by drug use. He had no history of keeping to a medication regimen, and his lawyer informed the court that even on medication, his client sometimes appeared incoherent.
Instead of effectively using this information, though, officials overlooked it several times.
In August, after the assault at Bellevue, Mr. Rivera pleaded guilty to one count of felony burglary and received a 364-day sentence. A month later, prosecutors and a judge agreed that for the officer attack, he could plead guilty to a misdemeanor and serve a short sentence concurrently. The city’s Department of Correction soon released him early because, Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday, state law requires that credit for good behavior be based on comportment after sentencing, not before.
The state and city thus lost an opportunity to hold him as long as possible for observation, to see if he continued to act violently, perhaps becoming a candidate for hospitalization or intensive outpatient therapy after release.
Even if Mr. Rivera had stayed longer at Rikers, Mr. Adams said, “that has nothing to do with” whether he needed help.
Yes, it does: It would have given the city more of a chance to get him accustomed to a stable medication and therapy regimen, and it would have kept him out of the public realm for longer. In an imperfect system, buying time is a good thing.
Upon his October release, Mr. Rivera faced arrest in connection to a larceny, the theft of an expensive bowl nearly a year earlier. With the misdemeanor charge that prosecutors brought precluding bail, a judge granted prosecutors’ request to release him under the supervision of a case manager. Mr. Rivera missed his third meeting; the case management company in charge of his supervision was trying to find him. Before he was due back in court on Dec. 4, three people were dead.
The suspect in the police shooting, Gary Worthy, 57, had a well-documented violent history in New York City, including a decades-old manslaughter conviction and a 2009 conviction for weapons possession and burglary. The state released him on lifetime parole on the burglary case in 2021.
By this August, though, Mr. Worthy was back in Queens court on three charges: second-degree assault, burglary and possession of a controlled substance. Prosecutors, in requesting $120,000 bail, noted the defendant’s violent history — “seven felony convictions, three of which are violent felonies, one misdemeanor, three parole revocations” — and the nature of some of the freshest allegations: threatening a person he knew with a knife and attacking another with a vase.
Mr. Worthy’s parole officer requested that the judge remand him to jail, pending a parole revocation hearing, The officer noted that Mr. Worthy had failed to show up to several recent meetings. His public defender argued, though, that he had “appeared for every single one of his court cases.” The judge released Mr. Worthy on parole supervision, and in November he was arrested and charged with drug possession and released again. He was awaiting his final parole revocation hearing, next January, when police killed him.
Individual stories that illustrate the human cost of an unraveled criminal justice and mental health system add up to statistics. Although lower than it was in 2020 and 2021, year to date, the number of homicides in New York City is 12.1 percent higher than in 2019. The number of homicides in which the police believe a stranger killed another stranger — the crime New Yorkers most fear — varies wildly from year to year. But the annual average from 2020 to 2023, 39, is over two-thirds higher than the average, 23, from 2016 to 2019. Against this backdrop of random killings and assault, the person muttering on the subway seems scarier.
It’s easy to pick out any single case and say: The prosecutor shouldn’t have offered a plea bargain. The judge shouldn’t have let a suspect go. A public-hospital doctor should have petitioned for an involuntary commitment. The jail should have imposed the court’s full sentence.
But lost in the complexity of any one case is the broader failure: New York State lawmakers, in making it clear that the city should err on the side of a suspect’s release, have left themselves less room for even a single error. Only one harried party has to fail for everything to fail.
Progressive lawmakers and prosecutors could make the case that to more quickly reduce incarceration, we must put up with a certain amount of more crime, more random killings. They won’t make that argument, because few voters would agree.
What should New Yorkers expect from their government to achieve more robust public safety?
First, legislators should allow judges deciding whether to send suspects to jail to consider the danger they may pose to the public. All other states already provide for such assessment. New York judges, instead, assess whether a suspect is likely to return to court.
Second, the city should revisit its plan to replace Rikers Island with four borough-based jails with a combined capacity of 4,160. With about 6,500 inmates on Rikers as of October, there is no prospect of the city’s inmate population falling by a third. Though Mr. Adams often criticizes the plan, inherited from Mayor Bill de Blasio, he has continued to go ahead with it.
Third, the city and state should force more mental health accountability without sacrificing patient privacy. Without releasing identifying data on suspects or patients, the state could mandate that the city regularly report how many people accused of violent crimes had a history of court-mandated psychiatric care and what the outcome of such care was. Mr. Adams said on Tuesday that many people in jail, as well as people recently released, need “state of the art facilities” for mental treatment. Why hasn’t he proposed building them? The city, too, wants state law to more broadly define the concept of “danger to themselves” to include people who can’t recognize that their mental state prevents them from meeting their basic day-to-day needs.
Any wholesale change will require a governor who is more assertive than Ms. Hochul has been in negotiating with lawmakers. So far, over three years of modifications to the new bail and other criminal justice laws, she has acceded to too-modest repairs. “I want people to know that I will go back to the legislature,” she said last week, “I’ll go back with every tool in my kit to find ways to address this, because this is not acceptable.” But after three rounds of tweaks, a fourth is unlikely to be decisive.
New Yorkers’ unhappiness with public safety played a role in the election of Mr. Adams in 2021, and it played a role in the 2022 election for governor, when a Trumpite Republican strongly challenged Ms. Hochul. It played a role in the 2024 presidential election, when Donald Trump increased his share of the city vote. And it will play a role in the 2026 election for governor.
It was unwise for the state government to rip apart decades-old laws and practice first — laws and practices that have always been frayed and fragile — and try to stitch together the torn pieces later.
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