Back to Mayhem with Just One Bad Idea

"Criminal justice reform" isn't getting "smart on crime." It's getting stupid -- again. And thousands of times, it's getting us hurt or dead.

The Leftist mantra that sees violent criminals as victims and actual victims as the uninteresting outcroppings of Big Bad Racist Amerika has had a resurgence over the last few years. It was given a push by George Floyd and the hysteria Floyd’s killing produced in a willing — make that eager — press. But that’s not the whole story. Legal academia had the narrative of a cruel and punitive country underway well before Floyd (which is one reason the MSM was at the ready instantly to magnify that episode into what it peddled for months as The Real Story of America).

But the saga has a much longer history. Making the country massively safer and more peaceful was just not something the Left was prepared to live with, because that got accomplished in large part (although not entirely) by three things the Left abhors: More police, more proactive and aggressive policing, and more incarceration.

And in fact, in the decades before George Floyd, the country had become much safer. After a three-decade long crime wave, starting in roughly the early Sixties, we woke up. As these statistics show, crime had spent at least 30 years exploding. In 1960 we had 9,110 murders per year; by 1991, we had 24,700. And it wasn’t just population growth. Over that time, the murder rate approximately doubled, from 5.1 per 100,000 to 9.8 (and if it makes a difference, which in debates like this it tends to, the majority of murder victims, about 54%, are black).

But three decades was enough. The Left could no longer fight off actual criminal justice reform, that is, the kind that attacks crime rather than institutions opposed to crime. In federal law, this was exemplified by the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act, strongly pushed by Ronald Reagan (and my friend Ed Meese). The SRA overall made sentencing stiffer and more certain; eliminated federal parole; and required judges to follow mandatory guidelines (rather than be able to freelance with whatever they thought “compassion” demanded (or whatever they thought could get them a puff piece in the NYT)).

The results were stunning. Over the next generation, after crime peaked in 1991, it fell off dramatically. By 2014, ten years ago, the murder rate had been cut by more than half, to 4.4 per 100,000, which was less than it had been since Eisenhower was President. The number of murders had fallen from 24,700 to 14,164. That’s not a typo: In significant part because we wised up and toughened up, there were slightly more than ten thousand fewer murder victims per year — a development that grossly disproportionately benefited black people, but of course was a boon to the entire country.

Which, one might conjecture, is why the Left was so disconsolate. It had to pretend to be happy with so much less crime, but in fact it was furious that conservative plans had worked. It had never let go of the “criminal-as-victim” and “society-is-responsible” memes. And, as happens in democracies, complacency crept in. It wasn’t just the Left. Many normal citizens came to view low crime as a benefit that dropped out of the sky rather than something that required a lot of work (and suffering) to achieve. Hence the quiet growth of the petri dish of modern day “criminal justice reform,” an intentionally opaque phrase that actually means throwing away success to re-embrace failure, as long as failure comes with no very specific description and is decked out in the disguise of a fancier name — say, “restorative justice.”

So the progress we had achieved started to fade. Slowly at first after 2014 — then along came George Floyd, as if beckoned from the Left’s version of central casting. The results are depressing if predictable. In 2022, the last year year for which firm figures are available, the number of murders was over 20,000, about 50% higher than at the low point we’d achieved eight years before (NB: preliminary figures for 2023, however, show a significant dropoff in the number of murders from the year before).

Q: What happens when you turn away from success to re-embrace failure?

A: You get failure. Hence I bring you this story from two days ago from none other than the New York Times:

A 24-year-old man was arrested Monday night and charged with murder after pushing another man to his death on the subway tracks at a station in East Harlem, the police said.

The attack by the man, Carlton McPherson, was unprovoked, officials said. It took place at the 125th Street and Lexington Avenue station at 6:48 p.m., when Mr. McPherson shoved the man in front of an oncoming No. 4 train, officials said….

The police had not identified the victim as of Tuesday morning. A senior law enforcement official said Monday evening that the man who was in custody appeared to have a history of mental illness. He had several arrests in Brooklyn, the first one at age 16, the official said.

Translation: We had known about McPherson’s “problems” for at least eight years. If anything at all was done about them, the Times doesn’t report it. Perhaps a part of the difficulty is that “criminal justice reform” insists (1) that defendants be given second (and third and fourth and fifth) chances, and (2) that juvenile records be sealed. Whether that was in the mix here can’t be determined from the article, but it has happened many times before and continues to happen every single day.

Train service at the station had resumed by 9 p.m. Monday, but a large number of police officers remained at the scene. Some riders expressed fear of violence on platforms and on trains.

“The subway has been insane lately,” Ray Velez, 60, from the Bronx, said as he waited on the platform two hours after the attack. “You have to look everywhere now. It’s just out of control.”

He added, “I wish someone would notice how many mentally ill people we have on the subways and try to get them out of the subway.”

Yes, some are mentally ill. And some just want your wallet.

Others who live and work near the station expressed a weary sense of frustration. They described regular encounters with people experiencing problems related to drug addiction, homelessness and mental illness, and their own efforts to remain on guard.

“I’m very careful” inside the station, said Geri Tolentino, 54, who has worked for two years at the Harlem Food Square deli, near the entrance to the 125th Street station. “It’s not surprising — there’s a lot of crime downstairs.”

Last I looked, the first obligation of government is to protect the physical safety of its citizens. Manhattan does have a District Attorney, but he seems to be occupied, not with rampant crime on the city’s essential subway system, but with prosecuting Donald Trump on abstruse (at best) campaign finance violations related to Trump’s putative hush money payments to a porn star. The DA’s star witness is reported to be Michael Cohen, a convicted felon and perhaps the most notorious liar in the country.

Glad we have our priorities straight.

The attack is the latest in a series of violent episodes that have led officials to increase the police presence in the subway and seek to reassure New Yorkers that the system is safe.

Earlier this month, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that she would deploy the National Guard and the State Police in the system to increase security and ease New Yorkers’ fears.

Did you ever notice how “de-fund the police” and “violence interrupters” and a good deal of criminal justice reform’s agenda gets (temporarily) put on the back burner in an election year?

But less than two weeks after Ms. Hochul’s announcement, a fight on the A train that ended with a shooting reinforced the difficulties of policing every inch of the sprawling system. In that confrontation, captured in a dramatic video recorded by a passenger, a man who had been menacing a rider was first stabbed and then shot with his own handgun….

Many New Yorkers’ fears about the subway rose during the pandemic, especially after a man with a history of mental illness assaulted Michelle Alyssa Go in January 2022, pushing her onto the southbound tracks as an R train pulled into the Times Square station. She was killed.

This year, a woman had both her feet amputated in early March after her boyfriend pushed her onto the tracks, where she was struck by a southbound No. 3 train.

Remember Bernhard Goetz? Courtesy of the lethal if giddy mindlessness of “criminal justice reform,” he’s coming back. And for the bad actors in the subways who actually are mentally ill rather than just hoodlums, the answer is to treat them with decency — but decency while they are held, whether they want to be or not, in secure facilities away from the rest of us, our parents and our children. As even liberals used to know, we’re entitled to decency, too.