Only a few are guilty, but all are responsible
My Sunday Daily News column on whose lives matter here in NYC:
“For the next four years, let’s do something different: Let’s protect the innocent people,” Mayor Adams said on Friday morning.
Speaking at the intersection in Flatbush where a speeding car smashed into the Lyft taking Isaiah Benloss home, needlessly cutting short the 18-year-old’s life, Adams focused on what Albany is not doing (letting the city control its own speed cameras) rather than on what his administration is doing.
There have been 57 traffic deaths through March 20, compared to 38 in the same span last year — the deadliest year for traffic deaths in nearly a decade as the pandemic seemed to bring out the worst in some drivers.
The NYPD has issued about 80,000 traffic summonses so far this year — 100,000 less than it had at this point in 2019.
Along with those 57 traffic deaths so far this year, there have been 86 murders as violent crime has continued going in the wrong direction, and fast. The number of shootings has more than doubled since 2019, with 29 people shot last weekend alone.
“For the next four years, let’s say we’re going to protect innocent people in our city. Can we try that?” Adams said. “And all of the loud voices of those who want to protect people who break the law, can they join us and protect people who are following the law? That’s what I’m trying to do.”
This is politics: The divvying up of common goods as a way to answer always fraught questions about what burdens and benefits should be shared and by who. That means coming to collective decisions about whose lives matter — and how much.
As the crime numbers have continued going up so far on his watch, Adams had repeatedly cited terrible acts committed by people who were out despite long rap sheets and pending charges for reasons that by and large didn’t actually have anything to do with the bail reform law to demand changes to that law.
He may still be coming off better than the Democratic lawmakers complaining about how the bail law isn’t the issue without offering any real plan of their own for changing a system that keeps leaving obviously violent and antisocial people free to all but inevitably commit more violence.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how “the root-cause set can come off like a human sacrifice cult,” but then again the mayor and others who want more policing, whether or not they call that “broken windows” policing (and Adams emphatically does not), are willing to make human sacrifices too.
While bail reform — which passed in 2019 along with a “Raise the Age” bill to keep juveniles out of adult courts and an overdue change to the state’s terrible old discovery law that let prosecutors unfairly keep information from defendants — has dominated the conversation, there’s no evidence that ending the inequity of cash bail has been driving the rise in violence here that’s matched a national rise since the pandemic’s arrival and the George Floyd protests that year.
All three of those 2019 reform bills aimed to correct circumstances that contributed to the death of Kalief Browder, who committed suicide after having spent years locked up at Rikers — including two in solitary confinement — for allegedly stealing a backpack when he was 16 in a case that the Bronx DA dropped before he ever had a trial. (His brother, Akeem, just wrote a powerful piece, “The governor’s plan will create more Kalief Browders,” for The News about this.)
In 2020, following a wave of violent attacks on religious Jews, the Legislature reluctantly rolled back part of its bail reform. Now, after a wave of attacks on Asians, they’re being pressed to do it again by Adams and, as of last week, Gov. Hochul.
This is all argument by anecdote, which is a damn dangerous way to write, or rewrite, laws.
Adams has been saying many of the right things, vowing that “we’re going to make sure we’re not going back” toward abusive policing practices “but the city is also not going backwards on crime. That is the key here, is the balance of justice and safety.”
But so far, at least, the city has continued going backward on crime, and to fix that the mayor and the governor now want to go backward on justice, at least as many Democratic lawmakers see it. This is a rock and a hard place.
“A lot of the goals we’re trying to obtain, unfortunately, we’re creatures of Albany,” Adams on Friday. He was referring to speed cameras but it sounded like a bigger lament:
“Why can’t we control our streets? I believe the more we have the barriers removed, and from the outside intervention, we can achieve that goal and we’re going to move towards that goal.”