At the Democratic primary debate for New York City mayor, the candidates backed away from a misbegotten policy.
Wednesday night’s Democratic primary debate for New York City mayor was, in many ways, a deflating affair. But not in all ways.
The decisive cultural and political repudiation dealt out to the “defund the police” movement was tacitly acknowledged by each of the Democratic aspirants, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. That’s even more important coming from representatives of the left in a city where the movement’s prescriptions were adopted early and eagerly. Indeed, these very candidates have their fingerprints on some of those misbegotten policies. Take, for example, bail reform.
Andrew Cuomo signed the state’s 2020 bail reform bill into law, “which stopped prisoners from being held on bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent offenses,” CNN reported. When the governor was criticized for the consequences of that policy, he pointedly declined to answer the criticism directly. That’s a dodge, not a disavowal — but it’s also a dramatic reversal of the governor’s position on his own policy from as recently as this past March, when Cuomo said the reform “righted a terrible social wrong.”
Even more notable is that Cuomo found himself on defense amid attacks by his fellow Democrats for being too lax on crime in the first place. Each of the candidates similarly tried to position themselves as critics of bail reform without inadvertently indicting their former selves and their colleagues.
“We had to do that, but we need to make it different and stronger now,” said former state assemblyman Michael Blake. “That means we have to hold repeat offenders more accountable, be much more attentive to that degree.”
“We need to put cops on the beat, working with the small businesses to root out the people who are constantly coming back to do this,” Scott Stringer, a former city comptroller who landed the initial blows on Cuomo, concurred. “But we also have to make sure that the people who are doing the stealing also have opportunities to get them the housing and the services that they need.”
When asked how to address repeat offenders and shoplifters, Jessica Ramos talked about the need for “treatment courts” to treat “kleptomania.” But she also acknowledged the “organized rings that need to be taken down by the NYPD,” after which the moderator curtly reminded her that she, too, voted for the city’s bail reform statutes.
Even the Democratic Socialist in the race, Zohran Mamdani, hedged when the time came to affirm his fealty to this once cherished progressive shibboleth. “I want to sustain the headcount that we have in the police department,” Mamdani said in an effort to reassure city voters. “I want to listen to police officers who are leaving in droves from the department because they’re being asked to do the work of mental health professionals and social workers,” he added.
Well, whose idea was that? The defund movement imagined police could be transformed into social workers — an idea that manifested in adding the burdens of social work onto police. Mamdani would create “a city agency called the Department of Community Safety that would focus on expanding violence interrupter programs and mental health teams that respond to 911 calls.” There are a number of problems with that, but it at least acknowledges the political toxicity of the progressive movement’s crime-fighting policies circa 2021.
This near-unanimous response is a welcome acknowledgment of reality. Writing in Commentary, Hannah Meyers described the disaster that befell the city after these reforms were implemented:
In January 2020, statewide bail reform went into effect. All jail inmates detained pretrial on bail for charges that had newly become bail-ineligible were instantly released. NYC saw an immediate 20 percent increase in index crimes over the following three months (before Covid closures), led by increases in newly bail-ineligible crimes such as auto theft, up 68 percent, and burglary, up 28 percent. At the same time, another statewide reform exponentially increasing prosecutors’ compliance burden for collecting and sharing evidence forced trial prosecutors to perform triage on their caseloads. Dismissal rates before trial rose in New York City from 44 percent in 2019 to 69 percent in 2021. For misdemeanors, dismissal rates rose from 48 percent to 83 percent of disposed cases.
“Bail laws allow people to get arrested with a gun and go home for dinner,” one NYPD officer told the New York Post at the time. “People are not afraid to carry a gun, and the slightest dispute leads to shots fired, sometimes wounding innocent people or worse,” another said.
For years, those pleas went ignored. Now, they cannot be dismissed even by those who would rather forget the whole thing ever occurred. You might just call it “progress.”