New York’s Legislature returns to work Wednesday.
This session, maybe Albany Democrats can finally make good on promises to address serious bail-reform flaws as crime soars and people flee urban areas for safer environs in the suburbs.
With a supermajority stranglehold on both chambers and control of the governor’s mansion, Democrats have enjoyed one-party rule since the 2020 election.
Translation: Only their bills make it to the floor for a vote.
And once legislation is passed and signed into law, the party in power will vigorously oppose any Republican efforts to address flawed or failed policies.
Elections sure do have consequences. And residents are now voting with their feet.
The state is seeing a mass exodus, an obvious result of suffocating taxes, unaffordability and rising crime — due in no small part to sweeping bail reforms enacted in 2020.
The 2019 bill’s architect was Assemblywoman Latrice Walker, a Democrat representing a portion of Brooklyn that includes Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville.
My experiences as a law-enforcement professional assigned to an FBI-NYPD task force in the early 2000s working the high-crime housing projects that dot her district taught me her constituents desperately wanted the police to remove violent, repeat offenders.
But we exist in the demonization-of-cops and defund-police era.
Albany legislators also think they know far better than state judges and oppose affording courts “judicial discretion” in determining an offender’s dangerousness.
Yet even when the bill passed, some Democrats admitted it was flawed and needed to be amended.
Four years ago, state Sen. James Skoufis (D-Cornwall), then representing the district where I reside, New York’s 39th, lamented the obstacles to voting on “clean,” single-item bills as he justified his vote and called for amending it.
“There was no up-or-down vote on bail reform. It was in an enormous budget bill,” he told me. “If the bill was voted down, government would’ve effectively shut down.”
While the legislative process can be messy and wholly confounding, why would such a consequential issue be crowbarred into a voluminous budget bill?
Answer: It suited the purposes of the party in power.
Even Gov. Hochul’s appeal in March for her fellow Democrats to revamp bail reform was shot down.
Walker conducted a three-week hunger strike in April to protest fairly modest modifications to the law.
Clearly her fellow Dems concurred when they blocked the governor’s minimal “fix” proposals.
Will Albany Dems keep refusing to acknowledge the need to apply reasonable adjustments to their failed law?
Will they continue to stridently claim there exists no clear connection between surging crime and their flawed legislation?
Arguments that bail reform hasn’t had a deleterious effect on public safety are easily disproven.
When the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services released data in 2022, it was clear: As Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman noted, “Rearrests rose after bail reform.”
That fresh tranche of data included details about subjects who were arraigned prior to bail reform’s 2019 passage and highlighted that after the law went into effect, a significant increase in criminal reoffending occurred.
So what can Albany do?
Listen to a 42-year-veteran of the Queens County district attorney’s office, Jim Quinn, who offers four recommendations:
- Allow judges to set bail, remand, release on recognizance or conditions of release for any crime and any defendant.
- Allow judges to remand defendants without bail if they are deemed a danger to the public or have a high probability of reoffending.
- Allow judges to change the conditions of release based on violations of the original release conditions or failures to comply with the judge’s order.
- Require the New York State Office of Court Administration to collect additional data, including rearrests of defendants between plea and sentence and rearrests post-sentence, and to provide a full accounting of the total number of rearrests, not just the number of defendants rearrested.
These are reasonable and sensible repairs.
It’s been four years. More than enough time.
Maybe Democrats headed back to Albany can attempt a serious overhaul this session.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
James A. Gagliano is a retired FBI supervisory special agent and doctoral candidate in homeland security at St. John’s University and serves on the board of directors for the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.