50 Cent is right.
The rapper has called Los Angeles “finished” as the city reinstates its controversial zero-bail policy, releasing criminals back out on the street with no consequences.
“LA is finished,” 50 Cent warned on his Instagram account last Friday. “Watch how bad it gets out there.”
LA recently revived a pandemic-era no-bail policy that expired in last July. That means anyone arrested for non-violent felonies or misdemeanors like theft, shoplifting, drug use and vandalism in the city will be released without bail.
Progressives argue the move protects those who can’t afford to post bail. But that utopian vision runs up against reality—and ends up transforming prison doors into revolving doors.
And when there is no meaningful consequence for committing a crime, there’s no incentive to stop re-offending.
It’s something 50 Cent himself would know.
Though he’s a born-again Christian, the rapper has had his fair share of run-ins with the law, including arrests for drug and gun possession charges in the ’90s.
He even once rapped in the song “How to Rob”: “The only excuse for being broke is being in jail / An entertainer can’t make bail, he broke as hell.”
Scrapping bail is a progressive social experiment destined to fail — and to endanger Angelenos in the process. In fact, it already has failed. A recent study out of Yolo County, California, found that violent crime tripled in the Sacramento area after suspects were released on low or no bail.
And this nightmare is unfolding in progressive cities across the country.
Here in New York, we’re grappling with a bail-reform measure that restricts a judge’s ability to set bail in most criminal cases. And, even though Gov. Hochul has attempted to shift blame and insists that the city is getting safer, New Yorkers just aren’t buying it.
I don’t want to live in that kind of ill-conceived utopia. As a young woman in New York City, I feel considerably less safe with the knowledge that emboldened repeat-offenders are allowed to roam the streets. And I’m not the only one.
According to recent polling, 70% of New Yorkers feel less safe than they did pre-pandemic, 3 out of 4 are worried about being the victim of violent crime, and a third say they want to leave the state after retirement — citing crime as their top reason.
Gaslighting us about how safe the city is just isn’t working.
New Yorkers have seen firsthand what happens when criminals can offend and re-offend without consequence. In fact, shoplifting is so bad that we can’t even buy a tube of toothpaste or a pint of ice cream at Duane Reade without asking an employee to unlock theft-prevention barriers.
Now that criminals know their offenses will go unpunished, crime rings have popped up around the city. I’ve personally witnessed the same group of individuals rob my local pharmacy on two separate occasions.
This complete decay of law and order has put unwitting New Yorkers in the position of enforcing vigilante justice themselves — like a CVS worker who killed a serial shoplifter with 16 arrests this month, or subway passenger Daniel Penny who choked Jordan Neely to death in May after he allegedly threatened passengers. Neely had been arrested 42 times.
Reformers who purport to be defending the downtrodden with no bail are actually endangering them by allowing criminals to cycle in and out of prison without consequences — or getting help. That catch-and-release scheme is the furthest thing from the “restorative justice” progressives claim to champion.
50 Cent is right: Enough is enough. For the sake of all of our safety, bail reform must be reversed.
New Yorkers and Angelenos didn’t consent to being guinea pigs in this ill-conceived experiment in social justice.