Regarding “Two slays in 2 days,” (April 12), New York’s obscene no-bail “reforms” and the irresponsible judges who “enforce” them are directly responsible for two more murders in the city.
Messiah Nantwi was arrested in February 2021 for allegedly shooting at police and initially held without bail.
Over the prosecution’s objections, his bail was reduced to $300,000, which his family met by posting a $30,000 bond.
Last weekend, video shows that Nantwi allegedly shot and killed a man in a Harlem smoke shop after reportedly killing another on a Manhattan street.
No matter what Assemblyman Carl Heastie and Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins say, this is blood on their hands.
Marc E. Kasowitz
Manhattan
Shelter squabble
Thank you for once again reporting about the failed policies of the de Blasio administration that have been carried forward by Mayor Eric Adams (“Storm from the shelters,” April 9).
No residential New York City neighborhood should be inundated by homeless.
While “safe havens” can work on a smaller scale, it is an inappropriate model for New York City.
With the uptick in crime committed by homeless mentally ill, it’s not a good idea to place folks in a stimulating environment in what is a cultural and economic engine in the city.
This is not a NIMBY issue. It’s common sense.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of acres in the state where former state schools and hospitals were once situated.
Create a mini-community on these unused acres with social and health services available.
One can use renovated buildings, tiny houses, trailers or modular units for that purpose.
Please start thinking differently, or we will continue on this long, downward and dangerous road.
Laura Logue Rood
Manhattan
Stepmom horror
The evil stepmom who placed two children in a freezing garage was sentenced to 25 to life (“Rot, evil stepmom,” April 12).
One of the boys, an autistic 8-year-old, died.
How any human being could do that is just beyond understanding.
The judge remarked at the sentencing that it’s too bad there was no garage at the prison.
Their argument as to when life begins — whether it’s after 15 weeks, 12 weeks or at conception — is based on faith rather than scientific fact.
Their claim that they are concerned with the right to life of the unborn raises the question: Where is their concern for the health and well-being of the already born?
The argument over the “abortion pill” proves that point.
The “pill” has been shown to be safe and effective for decades.
They are, in effect, attempting to impose their religious beliefs on other Americans.
Addressing each and every anti-abortion argument when raised is a waste of time and energy.
Irving Gelb
North Bergen, NJ
Stern’s turn
Howard Stern is a washed-up, leftist big-mouth (“Stern spanks Kid,” April 12).
It seems like during COVID, he transitioned from kind of an edgy guy to a typical, full-blown leftist and paranoid millionaire hypocrite.
He is insulated by his obscene wealth and is clueless about the decline of this country.
Raymond Fontana
Westbrook, Conn.
Want to weigh in on today’s stories? Send your thoughts (along with your full name and city of residence) to letters@nypost.com. Letters are subject to editing for clarity, length, accuracy and style.
“Our state law allows for those accused of violent crimes or repeat offenders to be held. And we must continue to give judges the tools to enforce these laws,” Cooney said at a Hochul event in Rochester Wednesday.
“This isn’t a rolling back or an overstep in public policy. It is a surgical approach to the law,” he said.
Amid rising crime, especially among repeat offenders, Cooney had joined Hochul as she pushed Albany Democrats to change – for serious offenses – an existing law requiring that judges impose the “least restrictive conditions” on criminal defendants ahead of their trials, whether or not the crime is bail-eligible.
But after cameras stopped rolling and daily newspapers went to print and web, Cooney expressed a change of heart in a statement to The Post sent via a spokesman late Tuesday night.
“Continued discussion on tweaks to bail reform is necessary, but he did not state his support for all of the proposed bail reform changes,” read the statement.
State Sen. Jeremy Cooney was for a bail change proposed by Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday until he showed a change of heart in the middle of the night. Facebook/Jeremy Cooney
A day’s worth of phone calls and tweets from progressive constituents angry about him supporting any bail changes appeared to be a reason for Cooney backing away from the idea Hochul wants to pass in the state budget due April 1.
“My response of ‘WTH?’ was quite spontaneous,” Kelly Cheatle, a Rochester member of the Working Families Party, told The Post of criticizing Cooney soon after he spoke.
Hochul praised Cooney as “courageous” on Tuesday, a label belied by his reversal on bail just hours later following angry phone calls from progressives.Andrew Schwartz / SplashNews.com
Cooney was the only state lawmaker who appeared alongside Hochul on Tuesday after ongoing resistance from state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) to changing controversial criminal justice reforms first passed in 2019.
A Hochul spokeswoman did not provide immediate comment.
His about-face leaves Hochul with just a few Democratic senators who have publicly supported her proposed bail change while exposing himself and the governor to mockery from across the aisle.
“Senator Cooney is a perfect example of Albany politicians who only pay lip service to issues when it is convenient for them. He is afraid of angering the far left, while residents in his district are fearing for their lives,” state Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt (R-Lockport) said.
Republican political consultant William O’Reilly noted that Cooney’s apparent fear of the left makes Hochul look weak with the Legislature just weeks ahead of the state budget deadline.
“Sen. Cooney appears to be more afraid of the ‘woke’ Left than he is of his governor. That doesn’t bode well for Mrs. Hochul, who clearly realizes that current bail reform laws are a political loser. We keep waiting for Mrs. Hochul to use her substantial leverage with fellow party members, but she somehow seems disinclined to crack the whip. It’s odd,” O’Reilly said.
“Representing Rochester Sen. Cooney should know better than most that when it comes to bail reform Governor Hochul gets it mostly right. As such it’s sad that he in an outright embarrassing manner would cave to downstate progressive interests,” Conservative Party Chair Gerald Kassar told The Post.
“Strange the governor has such a weak hold on her Democratic colleagues,” he added.
Other Republicans argued that scaling back the “least restrictive” standard was hardly a bold move given the wider push to loosen limits on cash bail while increasing judicial discretion to jail people pre-trail based on their supposed threats to public safety.
“Senator Cooney was correct the first time … The “least restrictive means” should be removed. But that’s just a Band-Aid. Bail reform must be repealed and there needs to be consequences for people who commit crimes,” state Sen. George Borello (R-Jamestown) said.
State Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt slammed Cooney for walking back his supposed support for loosening limits on cash bail amid rising crime. Hans Pennink
Members of the political left have similarly felt burned by Cooney after he supported a “Good Cause Eviction” bill while running for his state Senate seat with the backing of progressive groups like the Working Families Party.
“A profile in courage! A real stand-up guy!” Michael McKee, treasurer of the left-leaning Tenants PAC, told The Post Wednesday while expressing regret for his group ever supporting Cooney before his “betrayal.”
Cooney denied that he changed his position on bail reform when asked by The Post at the state Capitol on Wednesday while nonetheless citing a letter from 100 prominent Rochester citizens to state reps demanding they support Hochul’s bail proposal.
“I would be against inaction, like not doing anything,” he said. “I do think that we need to give clarity so that judges know that they have the ability for violent offenders, and for repeat offenders to be able to hold them. And I’ve said that on the record.”
He noted that he “did not specifically say” he supported her proposal – despite his comments giving the exact opposite impression – while claiming he would somehow still “stand by her” on the issue of bail despite the evidence to the contrary.
“I think she’s being courageous and leading on this issue. I think it’s well-needed,” Cooney said. “Rochester is looking for leadership on this issue.”
It’s the speech Albany refused to listen to — or heed.
David Soares is the Albany County district attorney, an African American and a Democrat. Yet he’s also a fierce critic of the criminal justice “reforms” passed by the Legislature, saying they have made the state less safe and victimized black residents. He was slated to address a state Senate hearing on crime, but was disinvited because legislators did not like the optics of being criticized by someone they couldn’t dismiss as a “white supremacist” or Republican.
The remarks eventually were read into the record, by someone else, and they were quickly ignored. So here, in Soares’ own words, is what has gone wrong in New York — and what needs to be done. Will Albany continue to dismiss the problem?
Thank you for having me here to testify about public safety in New York state.
I’m going to open by saying something you’ve all heard before; the reforms passed in 2017 and 2019, although they were well intentioned and brought about important changes, have been extremely detrimental to public safety.
What you may not have heard before is a hard truth: that these reforms have had their most devastating impact on black and brown communities. If you take an honest look at the data — the increases in crime, the victims of those crimes and the location of the most violent crimes — the connection is quite clear.
Set the record straight
I’ll set the stage by taking a look at our practices before the reforms. For statistical purposes I will highlight a large metropolitan county and a mid-sized upstate county.
A NYPD officer investigating a shooting in Manhattan on February 18, 2023.Christopher Sadowski
One area that commanded much attention pre-reforms was the percentage of people who were being held on bail post-arrest but pre-conviction. Let’s set the record straight: that was always low, even prior to bail reform. In Albany County, 40% of the beds at the correction facility were occupied by sentenced defendants and defendants awaiting trial on violent felonies.
One 2019 study of the jail population in Queens County found that 95% of the defendants being held pretrial were being held on felonies, 41% on violent felonies.
The perception that many people were being held on minor charges on low bail amounts was always absolutely false. In fact, the same Queens study showed that defendants being held solely because of their inability to post bail on misdemeanor charges had an average of more than five felony arrests, seven misdemeanor arrests, seven misdemeanor convictions and almost three failures to appear.
At some point, repeated violations of the law and disrespect for the process has to be treated with the level of seriousness it deserves.
When bail reform took effect just over three years ago, thousands of defendants were released from local jails. In fact, some judges actually started a “soft launch,” if you will, by releasing some defendants in November of 2019 in anticipation of the new laws, apparently to avoid the mass release of thousands of incarcerated individuals on one day — and perhaps the bad press that would garner.
Lockup under lockdown
Among those individuals suddenly released were hundreds of accused drug dealers, car thieves, shoplifters, burglars, and robbers statewide.
Members of law enforcement have often been told that the suspension of services during the overlapping coronavirus pandemic was the driving force behind the increases in crime in 2020. While that was undoubtedly a contributing factor, that is not a holistic explanation for the decline of public safety.
We actually do have a short window of time to analyze that was post-reforms but pre-COVID. That would be the first 2 ¹/₂ months of 2020. Crime had already started rising — by a lot — by the time the coronavirus hit.
Soares called the criminal justice reforms passed by the state Legislature “extremely detrimental to public safety.”Hans Pennink
In New York City alone, crime rose 20%, ending a 27-year stretch of yearly crime reductions. Crime was up across the board. Burglaries up 26.5%; robbery up 33.9%; grand larceny up 15.8%; car theft up 68%; petit larceny up 19%.
What a coincidence that each of these crimes became a non-bailable offense in 2020, meaning that all those previously held on bail on these charges were released by Jan. 1, 2020. If you deny that the release of hundreds of car thieves, burglars, drug dealers and petty thieves had an obvious impact on crime in New York, you’re denying common sense.
You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
Additionally, the new law created a new form of release: “non-monetary release.” This allows judges to release a defendant without bail but enables them to impose certain conditions, such as requiring the defendant to report to a pretrial agency, seek employment or wear an ankle bracelet. These conditions could only be imposed if the court found that the defendant was a flight risk.
This release condition was designed to replace bail, while placing some restrictions on the defendant intended to be more impactful than release on recognizance. These were imposed, essentially, on the defendants who would have had bail set under the old law. If they had a prior conviction or pending case, it would be even more likely a judge would have set bail under the old law.
Blood splattered on the sidewalk after a shooting in Manhattan on February 12, 2023.Matthew McDermott
If we use the Unified Court System’s pretrial data dashboard, and look at the defendants put into the non-monetary release program, we see the following:
Between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 30, 22, 39.6% of the defendants put into NMR got re-arrested while their case was pending.
For those defendants put into NMR who had a prior conviction or pending case (79% of the total), the re-arrest rate was 44.6%.
For those defendants put into NMR charged with commercial burglary, the re-arrest rate was 62%. For residential burglary, it was 47%. For grand larceny, it was 56%. For robbery third degree, it was 56%. For petit larceny, it was 67%.
Doomed to repeat
However, even these numbers undercount the full scope of recidivism. They do not count re-arrests during the time between plea and sentence, which can run for weeks or months. They only count one re-arrest, so if a defendant gets re-arrested four times while out on bail, it only counts in Department of Criminal Justice Services stats as one arrest. The implicit assumption in all of this, that a career criminal is arrested every time they commit a crime, is naïve to say the least.
In the mind of someone who is determined to break the law, the ability to repeat offenses over a short period of time with minimal repercussions serves only to incentivize such behavior.
Speaking of incentivizing behavior with the removal of consequences, the impact of Raise the Age has been comparably detrimental to public safety. Since the implementation of Raise the Age, Albany County has seen approximately 312 Raise the Age cases, involving only 230 defendants. I only say “approximately” because these numbers can change on a day-to-day basis.
Thirty-four percent of those defendants have been arrested more than once; 19% percent of those re-arrested were detained as minors. Of those re-arrested, 62% were re-arrested for a violent felony.
But what do those numbers mean? Those numbers mean that transferring a case to family court often leads to the defendant being returned to the very community that led them down that path to begin with. Violent cases need to remain in the adolescent part to prevent further community harm.
Flat-out wrong
Back to the bail reform law, we should also look at the literal wording of the law, specifically, the words “least restrictive.” These two words from the Bail Elimination Act are specifically referenced by judges when making a determination on bail. That standard often leads to a demonstrably dangerous person being returned to the same environment and community in which they committed their crimes. This helps neither the community nor the offender.
I’d like to conclude by saying, despite the wild misconceptions, generalizations and assertions of activists about the intentions of prosecutors, our aim isn’t to lock up as many people as possible, for as long as possible.
The decade-and-a-half period between the Rockefeller Reforms and Pre Bail Reform in 2020 reflect the greatest gains in public safety in the history of New York state. Prosecutors engaging in intelligence-based investigations and prosecutions applied a tough-on-crime and smart-on-diversion approach that ushered in the age of prison closings throughout New York state.
We understand the complicated nature of social determinants of crime and agree that those should also be prioritized.
However, pretending that accountability and the immobilization of criminals isn’t a critical part of public safety is akin to pretending the Earth is flat.
Just because your echo chamber repeats it, doesn’t make it true.
“A glaring weakness in our effort to combat gun violence is the fact that you have Raise the Age that still permits 16- and 17-year-olds to possess loaded firearms,” Albany District Attorney David Soares told The Post in a critique of the public-safety goals Gov. Kathy Hochul outlined in her State of the State speech.
Right on: It’s another huge omission when Hochul’s claiming to put public safety first.
Soares, a George Soros-backed progressive, has long flagged the issues with Raise the Age, a 2018 law that sends most teen criminal defendants to Family Court rather than the adult justice system.
He’s also blasted Hochul and the Legislature over the no-bail law and other reforms that Soares feels have “normalized” violence. “No meaningful legislative action has been taken to address bail reform, and Raise the Age, which have demonstrably impacted violent crime in our most vulnerable neighborhoods,” he thundered after two more fatal shootings in Albany last fall.
Soares criticized Hochul and the state Legislature for the bail reform laws that he claims to have “normalized” violence.Photo by Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
The cookies-and-hot-chocolate approach to teen gun violence just doesn’t work, Soares told The Post.
Last fall, a bombshell NYPD analysis revealed that the number of teen shooters and victims in NYC has tripled in the last five years — a deadly trend that coincides with enactment of the Raise the Age law. The report also noted that teen recidivism has shot up since 2017.
That is: Adolescents are a prime driver of the frightening rise in gun violence across the city. Worse, this means more young people beginning a life of crime — meaning big trouble for the future, with a growing criminal class.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie prides himself on being a “numbers guy,” but ignores the data showing that the Raise the Age law has been a disaster for minority teens. Instead, he stands by his theory that teenage brains just can’t learn self-restraint, so it’s just wrong to hold young people responsible — no matter the consequences to society, or to them.
So he won’t consider fixing RTA, and Hochul’s plainly unwilling to force the issue. And the body count of young victims in minority communities around the state will keep rising.
Never mind that the gov holds immense power in budget negotiations to insist on legal changes: She’s determined to work with the Legislature, no matter how little legislators want to work with her on anything besides spending and taxing ever more.
In her first State of the State Address since winning election in her own right as New York’s chief executive, Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed to work with the Legislature — even as lawmakers are working to derail her nominee for chief judge. In short, she’s yet to show even a hint of fight.
She showed she’d heard voters’ concerns about crime, saying, “Public safety is my top priority.” But her only concrete proposals for fixing bail reform are more minor fiddles, not anything dramatic like allowing judges to consider “dangerousness” as they do in every other state.
Worse, in a naked bid to appease progressives, she insisted that bail reform is not the primary driver of crime before saying she wants to “have a thoughtful conversation during the budget process about improvements we can make to the law.”
That’s a hint that she might hold lawmakers’ spending desires hostage to getting real changes, but then she detailed minor ones to give judges a little more discretion to remand defendants accused of serious crimes.
Yes, “dangerousness” is a red flag for the Legislature’s progressives; that’s one reason why Mayor Eric Adams has recently focused on asking lawmakers to simply get tougher on the handful of repeat offenders driving crime. But Hochul didn’t raise the issue.
No: On crime, the best news she offered was a tripling of aid to the state’s 62 district attorney offices to help them handle the huge added costs (under the “discovery” changes enacted along with the no-bail law) of prosecuting every defendant, even those destined for a plea bargain.
She’s also looking in the right direction with her $1 billion plan targeting the most serious mental illness, including restoring lost inpatient psychiatric beds and even adding 1,000 beds statewide (though only 150 for the five boroughs) as well as 3,400 units of supportive housing to foster outpatient care.
Another plus: With a recession in the offing, she vowed no hike in income taxes this year. That’ll mean a fight, as legislators are talking about finding $40 billion in new tax revenue. But it shows she understands the “why” behind the population loss she wants to reverse.
Or does she? Hochul then squashed hopes for an improved business climate by proposing to peg New York’s $15 minimum wage to inflation. That remark brought Democrats to their feet. And her anti-carbon “climate” policies will never build business confidence no matter how much she pretends they will magically lower energy bills.
Plus, she didn’t make any promises about ensuring the “temporary” income-tax hikes passed in 2021 (under the last guy) will actually expire, when temporary hikes have a long habit of becoming permanent in this state.
Hochul claimed that “public safety is my top priority” and gave proposals to fix bail reform laws.AP Photo/Hans Pennink
Oh, and as Citizens’ Budget Commission chief Andrew Rein noted, “The State of the State presented an expansive menu [of new spending]. We now await the Executive Budget to see the bill.” Where will she find the revenue?
Her goal of getting 800,000 new homes built over the next decade seems fine, but her address failed to mention one key means to that: replacing the city’s 421-a tax credit to make it affordable for builders to construct anything besides luxury complexes.
Yes, that made it into her longer policy handout, but that hardly suggests she’ll go to the mat for it.
Even though her audience theoretically included the whole state, Hochul seemed exclusively determined not to offend the lawmakers hearing her in-person. Yet she’s going to have to if she’s to get even what she’s asking for outright.
That is, she’ll need to at the very least rally moderate Democratic state senators to back her: They actually outnumber the chamber’s progressives, yet the hard left is calling the shots so far in the LaSalle nomination, and plainly intends to keep doing so.
Democrats lost seats in the Legislature last fall, but the left pretends that’s all Hochul’s fault for not somehow doing better against Republican challenger Lee Zeldin — though all he did was hit hard on the issues of crime and the economy. Progressives refuse to see what changes the voters want.
Hochul opted to skirt that reality once again in her closing: “Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ‘You . . . who are going to build a new world must go forward with courage.’ We will build a new world. And we will be courageous.”
All that did was leave everyone wondering when New York’s governor will show that courage.
Aside from downplaying the role that the state’s controversial bail-reform laws may have on rising city crime, Hizzoner and his team threw around terms such as “infrastructure’’ and “urgent action items,’’ which left more questions than answers.
“We’re having an issue around the infrastructure of our criminal-justice system,” Adams told reporters during a conference call, referring to the discussions between his office and district attorneys, law enforcement agencies, judges and advocates over the weekend. “This antiquated infrastructure is impacting on the ability of New Yorkers seeking justice on both ends of the spectrum.”
City Hall plans to form working groups with the various participating entities to focus on pre-trial discovery, mental health and “urgent action items,” officials said.
But Adams provided few details about what the criminal-justice system exactly needs to change, other than his wish to create a “centralized portal” for pre-trial discovery and to reduce the amount of time defendants spend waiting for their comparatively brief trials.
Mayor Eric Adams didn’t share major details about what was discussed at his “mayoral summit on criminal justice” this weekend.Mayoral Photo Office
Officials also hope to introduce what they called “care vans” to greet defendants as they come out of their first court appearances and offer them mental-health resources, Chief Counsel to the Mayor and City Hall Brendan McGuire said.
“We’re obviously just coming out of this, and so we’re still formulating the list of urgent action items,” McGuire told reporters.
City Hall held the summit just two days after the mayor blamed the news media for fueling a “narrative” that New York City and its massive subway system are unsafe. Violent crime was up 39% in August citywide compared to 2019, according to NYPD.
Adams said the city has an issue with the “infrastructure of our criminal-justice system.”Christopher Sadowski
Yet Hizzoner on Sunday downplayed the role of bail reform in the city’s crisis of crime and recidivism, echoing comments from earlier in the weekend that there are “many rivers in the sea of violence.
“Any time we engage in this conversation around the criminal justice system, people highlight one term, and that is ‘bail reform,’ ” the mayor said.
“There are so many other aspects of the justice system that we were able to talk through and discuss.”
Palacios walked free after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office lowered felony criminal-mischief charges to a misdemeanor and dropped menacing charges altogether. Then, on Monday, after video of him threatening customers with an ax and destroying property went viral along with news of his release, Hochul played damage control.
“We’re actually asking what the thought process was,” she said, because officials had “the discretion” to file “bail-eligible” charges.
First: Yes, Bragg’s decision was outrageous — but typical. The moment he took office in January, he made clear his main goal was to keep criminals out of jail, and he’s repeatedly declined to seek the toughest possible charges and penalties. Yet Hochul has refused to use her power to remove him for fear of upsetting perp-coddling progressives.
Second: As ex-prosecutor Jim Quinn explained in The Post, even if Bragg hadn’t reduced the charges, “Palacios STILLwould have been released without bail,” thanks to New York’s disastrous bail laws. “Everything that Palacios is seen doing on that video,” he noted, “from smashing plate glass partitions, breaking tables, chopping his hatchet into walls and waving it at patrons, is a non-bailable offense.”
Palacios walked free after Bragg lowered his felony criminal-mischief charges to a misdemeanor and dropped menacing charges.Kevin C. Downs for The New York Post
The laws require judges to release, bail-free, all accused criminals except those charged with the most horrendous crimes. New York judges, unlike those in every other state, can’t consider defendants’ threats to public safety — or their criminal records or risk of reoffending.
Alas, Hochul lacks the backbone to shame pro-crime Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins into fixing the statutes. Instead, she pretends they’re fine and shifts all the blame to judges and prosecutors like Bragg.
And ground-level Democratic leaders, from Mayor Eric Adams to Freeport Mayor Robert Kennedy, want the laws fixed too. It’s “about the safety of our residents,” said Kennedy in joining a bipartisan call from Long Island officials.
Rather than do something about outrages like the bail-free release of ax-wielding madmen, Hochul opts to lie. She’s a pathetic excuse for a leader.
New York has become Dodge City, because of laws without consequences and judges who practice revolving-door-justice.
Don’t believe me? Read The Post any day of the week and you’ll find stories about brazen daylight shootings, jewelry store smash-and-grabs, shameless shoplifting and tales of serial offenders wreaking mayhem across the five boroughs.
It’s particularly personal for me given my close encounter with a homeless emotionally disturbed person on an 6 train in The Bronx early this year.
Readers may recall my wife and I encountered a young, disheveled and barefoot man standing over and threatening an older rider with a blade. The man, later identified by police as Johnathan Gonzalez, threatened to cut the other passenger’s throat, dared anyone to stop him and ranted about getting “three squares a day” on Rikers.
I distracted him long enough for the other guy to get away. After getting off the train at the Parkchester station, I called 911 and NYPD cops caught up to him a few station stops later.
Subways in chaos
Gonzalez was arrested, sent to a local hospital for evaluation and later charged with menacing by The Bronx District Attorney’s Office.
The case is still open. Gonzalez failed to show up for his March court date and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Since then, he has been arrested seven or eight times on petit larceny shoplifting charges on the Upper East Side — yet still isn’t being held.
Mayor Eric Adams proposed ways to reduce subway crimes, but the violence continues. Paul Martinka
Since shoplifting isn’t a bail-eligible crime, Gonzalez can’t be remanded. And for some reason, Manhattan judges appear reluctant to hold him on the Bronx warrant — likely only urging him to return to the Bronx court.
It’s maddening. Gonzalez most likely suffers from a mental illness. He’s obviously not getting the help he so clearly needs. Yet Manhattan judges believe that he’s capable of making his court dates.
The whole catch-and-release approach to recidivist shoplifters in Manhattan is disheartening and undermines public confidence in our court system.
I’m an inveterate subway rider. I refuse to be deterred from my daily commute because we can’t cede ground to crime and disorder.
On a recent morning commute, I avoided a subway car where a muttering, shoeless vagrant was seated in the corner. And in the car where I settled down, I spotted a homeless man covered with a white bedsheet lying asleep across one of the train car’s benches.
I looked out of the car at the MTA subway cleaners before realizing that there was little that they could do — or should do.
At the same station last month, their co-worker Anthony Nelson was hospitalized with a broken collarbone, dislocated nose and other injuries after trying to stop another demented homeless serial arrestee (42 arrests at last count) from harassing straphangers.
MTA worker Anthony Nelson was attacked by Alexander Wright.Robert Miller
That suspect, Alexander Wright, one of several revolving-door-justice poster boys, sits in Rikers awaiting trial for this latest assault. Nelson’s family and the Transport Workers Union have rallied around him in urging that his attacker be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Meanwhile, the MTA is looking to ask the court to ban Wright from the subway system for three years. And those who assault transit workers and menace commuters need to understand that criminal behavior has consequences.
Those persons shown to suffer from severe mental illness need to be held accountable and, from a humanitarian perspective, they need mental-health treatment in an appropriate setting given their crimes.
Alexander Wright is a repeat offender, with a dangerous past of harming others. nypd
The EDP situation on the subway continues to be real and dangerous. I was fortunate not to have suffered Mr. Nelson’s fate.
The pattern of “catch, release, and repeat” for individuals like Johnathan Gonzalez puts public safety at risk and does nothing to provide them the necessary care.
Mayor Adams definitely doesn’t have the subway situation under control. He needs Albany lawmakers and judges to cooperate with his effort to make the transit system safer.
Former Assemblyman Michael Benjamin is a member of The Post’s editorial board.
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