Here’s an ironic coincidence.
Just about the same time a random maniac was beating people with a board at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul declared it to be Pretrial Probation and Parole Supervision Week in the Empire State.
Good move, Kat!
Because everybody knows that there can never be enough pretrial probation and parole.
Especially when random maniacs are beating people with boards everywhere from Buffalo to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
But wait — there’s more.
Hochul also dipped into her sack full of non-solutions and pulled out a task force — the go-to deflector shield for clueless public-policymakers everywhere.
So your streets are filling up with bullet-punctured teenaged gangbangers; your straphangers are battered and bloody; your shop shelves regularly are stripped bare by thieves; your parks are full of overdosing junkies and there’s a tourist-stalking, knife-wielding lunatic wandering loose in Times Square?
Not to worry: Gov. Gaslight’s spanking new State Council on Community Justice will soon be studying the problem.
Its mission? “To further improve effectiveness and fairness of the state’s criminal justice system.”
Now the last time Albany tackled “fairness” in the criminal-justice system, it was 2018, and the result was a statewide explosion in violent crime that persists to this day.
One mark of this can be found on curbsides all across the state — those sad little arrays of rain-spattered teddy bears and guttered-out votive candles memorializing murdered teenagers.
These also speak directly to what happens when the English language is turned inside out to support dogma-driven policy.
Really, no one is against criminal-justice “fairness” in the commonsense meaning of the term: equal application of the penal law for accused criminals on behalf of crime victims themselves.
But what happens when “fairness” is redefined to exclude victims from consideration — and then to judge outcomes based primarily on racial identity and ethnic-group membership?
Well, street-corner murder memorials happen. Yes, they’ve always been a thing — but so many?
By now, anybody who cares about these issues is familiar with the argument: African Americans and other minority-group members are disproportionately drawn into the criminal-justice system — with personally disastrous outcomes.
Largely absent from the discussion — then and now — is the sad fact that African Americans and other minorities disproportionately commit street crime; take that into consideration, and the statistical disparities simply evaporate.
More important — and, indeed, tragically — the victims of street crime themselves are overwhelmingly African American or other minorities.
This made no difference: Infamously, New York’s criminal codes were neutered in 2018, and, quite predictably, crime erupted.
Again, all of this is common knowledge — and while right now there is an understandable focus on teenaged killers and their peer-group victims, that’s not news either.
The Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers, for example, notes that after Albany raised the age of criminal responsibility in 2017, youth crime ballooned. She reports a 204% increase in violent youth crime — and an 80% hike in teenage murders — immediately following that “reform.”
And the trend — or maybe it’s the new normal — persists: Just last week, three teens were shot by a young gunman during an apparently gang-related argument in Times Square.
This doubtless accounts for the current focus on teen violence, but earlier this month all eyes were on a fatal stabbing in a shoplifting-plagued big-box drugstore; before that it was subway vigilantism — and heaven only knows what the next outrage will be.
All that’s certain is that there will, of course, be another outrage.
Which is why Kathy Hochul’s new Council to Study the Possibility of Maybe Someday Putting a Few Truly Bad People in Prison has such high comedic value.
Not the Council on Community Justice part; that is funny.
But the notion that progressive New York would entertain repopulating its relatively empty prisons — even a little bit — is hilarious.
More jail time isn’t the only remedy, of course. Far from it.
But it was a big help the last time predators were feasting on innocent New Yorkers — and African Americans and other minority-group members were among that policy’s principal beneficiaries.
Do the crime, do the time is about as fair as it gets. Effective, too.
The wheel has been invented, Gov. Gaslight. Embrace it.
Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc