Repeat offenders to the city: drop dead.
New York lawmakers viewed criminals through rose-colored glasses. Correctional policies of the past decade have treated criminals as innocent neighbors tricked by “root causes,” such as poverty or poor education, into committing bad deeds. Our compassionate laws have weakened the criminal justice system's ability to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate these lambs, and instead provided them with social services – so they wouldn't. He wants To prey on others.
But last Sunday this criminal concept caught fire in the dream world. Sebastian Zabieta Calil, said to be an illegal K2 addict in this country (for second Time) set fire to a sleeping woman on the F train.
Then he stood and watched her burn to death, gently fanning the flames as they consumed her standing body.
This heinous murder is a wake-up call to the city and state leadership to finally redirect law and order policies to protect the city's most vulnerable people in its most vulnerable places. Zabetta Calil sadistically murders an apparently disabled homeless woman – in the subway, where there is little protection or escape. She, tortured while trapped cold and heartbreakingly unknown, is the one who deserves our sympathy.
But our city leadership likes to pretend we don't have a criminal mindset that responds better to toughness than coddling. This blind delusion ignores the self-absorbed sense of entitlement that criminal psychologists have long understood as a central feature of criminals' thinking. In fact, the vast majority of prison inmates display antisocial personality disorders.
When law enforcement stops curbing deserving behaviors, it does so actively Intensify Sense of entitlement. And New York was binging like crazy.
Perhaps the most obvious example is the harmful impact of New York's “Raise the Age” campaign, which raised the state's age of criminal responsibility to 18. According to the RTA, 75% of older teens who commit violent crimes face no real consequences. Meanwhile, the most hardened teenagers are housed in detention facilities with younger (actual) children. At the Horizon facility in the South Bronx, the number of senior residents between the ages of 16 and 21 has jumped 880% in the five years since RTA, and the number of people charged with first-degree murder has risen by a terrifying 1,550%.
These murder defendants are placed in warmer institutions, and do not behave any better. Under the supervision of incapacitated Department of Children's Services workers rather than police or corrections officers, the rate of assaults resulting in injury at Horizon rose 30 percent last year. This happens in a facility where 20-year-olds are housed with 13-year-olds who may be hurt over and over again.
And this fall, even the city's Department of Investigations found that the RTA and bail reform made “existing disciplinary measures and institutional responses inadequate to deter misconduct, including acts of violence.” How do they know? “This ineffectiveness is evident in high levels of violence among youth and between youth and staff, security breaches, and the recovery of contraband including weapons and mobile phones.”
Once again, we are not protecting our most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable places.
And outside of juvenile detention centers, too, teenagers freed by RTA from consequences do not fare any better. Arrests of youth for major crimes are on the rise, including a 42% jump last year, with hundreds of these crimes occurring in vulnerable places that should be safe: public housing buildings and the transit system. New York is increase Criminals by indulging young people's sense of their right to harm others, rather than curbing it.
We also import criminals, like Zabita Calil, who returned to the United States after his original deportation. Last month, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement data revealed that Gotham harbors nearly 60,000 immigrants who are convicted felons or face criminal charges. After rewarding each illegal immigrant with $352 a day in free housing and services, do we expect them to act as if breaking the law has consequences? no.
Illicit drugs are also certain to have played a role in Sunday's twisted murder. Zabetta Kalil's roommate describes his extensive daily use of the synthetic drug K2—the drug of choice among recent high-profile dangerous New Yorkers from Jordan Neely to Assamed Nash.
But drug crimes also saw a less severe response, in part because of New York's 2020 “discovery” law, which increased compliance burdens on prosecutors, forcing them to dismiss many other cases. For example, the Bronx District Attorney's Office went from convicting 57% of non-marijuana drug cases in 2019, before the “fix discovery,” to an average conviction rate of 33% in the four years since. Even when considering criminal cases, the number of convictions in the Bronx rose from 999 convictions in 2019 to just 341 convictions in 2022 (and just 137 last year, although some cases remain pending).
The Bronx's outdoor drug markets are a testament to the fact that reducing the consequences of drug use has already occurred no Inspiring addicts to stop harmful behavior. Indulgence has enabled more of it.
And even last month, the very tolerant Public Defender Jumaane Williams co-sponsored a City Council bill to create a commission on “root causes of violence in the city” to address everything from gang assaults to homicide through the lens of non-criminal justice approaches like poverty. Discount programs. This ignores the fact that committing violence is often the most obvious “root cause” for committing further violence.
Yes, justice often requires leniency. But for the criminals who harm New Yorkers,… shortening It should not be tolerated. Justice requires virtual execution.
NEW YORK: Stop giving anti-social lawbreakers the benefit of the doubt that they won't set fire to homeless women. Reinstate laws that truly protect innocent people.
Hannah E. Myers is a fellow and director of Police and Public Safety at the Manhattan Institute.
