How many violent assaults does it take before New York can get ticking time bombs off the streets?
Last week saw disturbed Bronx resident Diana Smith arrested for ripping out a chunk of another straphanger’s hair as she ranted “Jews are eating kids”; she’d had at least six run-ins with the police.
Earlier in the week Shawnee Moore allegedly stabbed a 75-year-old Brooklyn woman in the neck; Moore, 36, had three priors, including an arrest trying to set someone’s face on fire last year.
The judge had denied prosecutors’ request for bail, putting her on supervised release, which is all release with no real supervision.
Last month saw at least three similar cases:
Rhamel Burke, 32, had been arrested four times since February and was released from Bellevue hours before he allegedly pushed Ross Falzone down subway stairs to his death.
Rafael Escobar, with 41 previous arrests, was busted for shoving a Bronx subway rider onto the tracks— yet then got supervised release.
Jonathan Fernandez stands accused of murdering his girlfriend, Eryka Caldwell; his long rap sheet, including drug, assault, and robbery charges, dates back to 2015.
Part of it is the no-bail law; part of it is a mental-health system that doesn’t want to deal with the hard cases.
Behind it all, though, sit the Legislature’s Democratic majorities, which ruthlessly oppose the idea of jailing or committing blatantly dangerous individuals; just last month, they buried the PROTECT Act in committee, though it would simply let judges consider public safety and a defendant’s “dangerousness” at arraignment.
Every other state has a “dangerousness” standard, and New York in effect did too, until the 2019 “reforms” nuked it — and the Legislature’s resisted every subsequent effort to restore sanity.
Our lawmakers insist on putting their ideology ahead of your safety.
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