By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-03-30 17:00:52 | Updated at 2025-04-01 18:06:01
2 days ago
New Yorkers are fed up with crime and disorder.
Recent polling shows that public safety is the top concern for Gotham voters in this fall’s mayoral race—and with good reason. Rates for major, violent and property crimes all remain between 25% and 30% above 2019 levels. Meanwhile, low-level offending, from evading fare to punching strangers, has turned streets, stores and subways into zones of danger and distrust.
But in order to effectively combat this degradation, New York must first confront the false narrative that “small” crimes don’t matter. This idea has been growing for the past decade — enabled (ironically) by the increasing safety created through “broken windows” policies that specifically enforced these quality-of-life crimes. New Yorkers came to feel so safe that they could indulge in the illusion that the criminal justice system needn’t bother imposing consequences for anything short of horrific felonies.
And so, we started enacting state laws that made it literally impossible to punish low-level offenses. But low-level crimes do matter: They have victims, reduce trust between citizens — and inevitably feed more dangerous offending.
With debates roiling this coming week over amending the discovery law, citizens need to tell Albany that all crimes matter and we want laws that treat them that way.
This would mean amending the radical “Raise the Age” legislation enacted in 2018, which barred sending 16- and 17-year-olds to Criminal Court for anything short of the most heinous felonies. Since then, essentially all misdemeanors committed by these teens go straight to cushy Family Court — as do 83% of felonies and 75% of even violent felonies. There, their crimes are forgiven and erased over and over. No wonder youth arrests for even major crimes have spiked 69% over the past five years!
Then, in 2019, statewide bail “reform” was enacted, dictating that those who commit misdemeanors and some low-level felonies absolutely must be set free pre-trial — even if they pose a glaring public threat. Now, there are more than one-and-a-half times as many new felony arrests prosecuted within three months of their first arrest for defendants out free on “pretrial release.”
But of all these “reform” laws, the most explicitly aimed at removing consequences for misdemeanors was New York’s 2020 discovery law. By imposing a radically high compliance burden on prosecutors, the law forced them to triage their caseload, declining and dismissing lower-level offenses in order to put all their resources toward the most grievous felonies.
Changes to evidence laws proposed by Hochul — and backed by all 5 city DAs — are as follows:
Reduce the scope of what evidence prosecutors have to gather and hand over to the defense.
Requires defendants to pose their challenge to a discovery violation within 35 days of prosecutors handing such evidence over.
Clarifies that a defendant has to show that they were harmed (prejudiced) by evidence not being turned over in order for a case to be dismissed.
Allows a judge to issue other sanctions for a discovery violation short of dismissing a case entirely.
The effects have been enormous.
NYPD arrest data shows that by last year, overburdened prosecutors declined to prosecute more than twice the misdemeanors as in 2019. That’s around 15,000 more misdemeanor arrests that prosecutors didn’t even charge. Indeed, under discovery reform an average of 65% of misdemeanors are either dismissed or declined — compared to just 41% before.
These ignored incidents have a direct effect on the quality of life, especially for things like subway violence and disorder that loom large for citizens. Tragically, victims of NYC transit crimes (many of which are misdemeanors) are now around twice as likely to see their cases declined by prosecutors as they were in 2019.
Altogether, NYC prosecutors went from declining or dismissing 45% of transit crimes in 2019 to an astounding 72% last year. (And this number will likely rise as more 2024 cases are belatedly dismissed.)
And, again, the result doesn’t just affect “small” crime. NYPD data shows a horrifying 62% increase in felonies that overwhelmed prosecutors are now simply declining to pursue at all.
In order to get Albany to amend these laws, New Yorkers must reject the nonsensical narrative that misdemeanors don’t count — because that argument helped pass these laws to begin with. During 2019 legislative sessions, progressives explicitly insisted that if the discovery law stymied prosecutors from pursing misdemeanors, it just proved these cases didn’t need to be prosecuted.
Amazingly, pro-criminal advocates are still blithely insisting that enforcing low-level crimes is for chumps.
This has been excruciatingly evident as Albany stakeholders debate Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed amendments to the discovery law, included in her FY2026 budget.
One brazen example was last week’s op-ed by Kathryn Miller, whose career ranges from representing death row inmates to decrying New York’s “mass incarceration.” She argued that the discovery law is not a problem because “the overwhelming number of dismissals have occurred in misdemeanor cases in New York City.”
And those … don’t count?
Miller is saying the quiet bit out loud: Not only doesn’t she think we should care—she is glad!
“These minor offenses, the majority of which involve no allegations of physical harm,” Miller wheedles, “often result from the over policing of black and brown neighborhoods.” But of course, all these offenses do have victims, a disproportionate number of whom are black and Hispanic. And if any arrests are the result of bad policing, the courts should decide; they shouldn’t be dismissed because the law keeps prosecutors too busy jumping compliance hurdles to pursue them.
Shamefully, Miller’s insane arguments are being echoed by state legislators — and they’re getting away with it.
It’s time to reject this bogus narrative and urge Albany to substantially amend all of these sweeping criminal justice “reforms” — starting with the discovery law. New Yorkers deserve a system where all crimes have consequences.
