By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2024-12-28 18:54:05 | Updated at 2024-12-29 10:30:38
16 hours ago
Repeat Offenders to City: Drop Dead.
New York lawmakers have been viewing criminals through rose-colored glasses. The past decade of reform policies treated offenders as innocent neighbors bamboozled by “root causes,” like poverty or poor education, into doing bad things. Our sympathetic laws chipped away at the criminal justice system’s ability to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate these lambs, instead offering them social services — so they wouldn’t want to prey on others.
But last Sunday this dream-world conception of criminality went up in flames. Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, reportedly a K2-addict in this country illegally (for the second time) lit a sleeping woman on fire on the F train.
Then he stood back and watched her burn to death, gently fanning the blaze as it consumed her standing body.
This stunningly grotesque murder is a wake-up call for city and state leadership to finally reorient law-and-order policies to protect the city’s most vulnerable people in its most vulnerable places. Zapeta-Calil sadistically slayed an apparently disabled homeless woman — in the subway, where there is limited access to protection or escape. It is she, tortured while sheltering underground from the cold and heartbreakingly anonymous, who deserves our compassion.
But our city leadership likes to pretend there isn’t a criminal mindset that responds better to stringency than to coddling. This blind delusion ignores the self-indulgent sense of entitlement that criminal psychologists have long understood to be a central feature of offenders’ thinking. Indeed, an estimated majority of prison inmates exhibit antisocial personality disorders.
When law enforcement stops curbing entitled behavior, it actively intensifies the sense of entitlement. And New York has been indulging like crazy.
Perhaps the most vivid example is the harmful impact of New York’s “Raise the Age,” which boosted the age of criminal responsibility statewide to 18-years-old. Under RTA, 75% of older teens committing violent felonies face no real consequences. Meanwhile, the most hardened teens get housed in detention facilities with younger (actual) kids. In the South Bronx’s Horizon facility, the number of older residents aged 16 to 21 jumped 880% in the five years since RTA, and those with a top charge of murder rose a terrifying 1,550%.
Placed in cuddlier institutions, these murder defendants aren’t behaving more nicely. Supervised by impotent Administration for Children’s Services workers instead of cops or corrections officers, the percentage of assaults resulting in injuries at Horizon grew 30% last year. This in a facility where 20-year-olds are housed with 13-year-olds whom they may harm again and again.
This fall, even the City’s own Department of Investigation found that RTA and bail reform rendered “existing disciplinary measures and institutional responses insufficient to deter misconduct, including acts of violence.” How do they know? “This ineffectiveness is demonstrated by the high levels of youth-on-youth and youth-on-staff violence, security breaches, and recovery of contraband including weapons and cellphones.”
Again, we aren’t protecting our most vulnerable in the most vulnerable settings.
Outside of juvenile detention, too, teens freed from consequences by RTA are not acting nicer. Youth arrests for major crimes are surging, including a 42% leap last year, with hundreds of these offenses happening in vulnerable places that should be safe: public housing buildings and the transit system. New York is growing criminals by indulging youths’ sense of entitlement to harm others, rather than curbing it.
And we are also importing criminals, like Zapeta-Calil, who returned to the US after his original deportation. Last month, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency data revealed that Gotham harbors almost 60,000 migrants who are convicted felons or facing criminal charges. Having rewarded each illegal entrant with $352-worth daily in free housing and services, we then expect them to behave like lawbreaking has consequences? Nope.
Illegal drugs also almost certainly played a role in Sunday’s twisted murder. Zapeta-Calil’s roommate describes his intense daily use of the synthetic drug K2 — a favorite among recent high-profile dangerous New Yorkers from Jordan Neely to Assamad Nash.
But drug offenses have also seen a softer response in part due to NY’s 2020 “discovery” law, which upped compliance burdens on prosecutors, forcing them to dismiss many more cases. The Bronx District Attorney’s office, for instance, went from convicting 57% of non-marijuana drug cases in 2019, before “discover reform,” to an average 33% conviction rate in the four years since. Even just considering felony cases, Bronx prosecutors went from 999 convictions in 2019 to only 341 convictions in 2022 (and merely 137 last year, although some cases are still pending).
The Bronx’s rampant open-air drug markets attest that reducing consequences for drug abuse did not inspire addicts to stop harmful behavior. Indulgence has just enabled more of it.
Even last month, NYC’s supremely indulgent Public Advocate Jumaane Williams cosponsored a City Council bill establishing a commission on “the root causes of violence in the city” to address everything from gang assault to murder through the lens of non-criminal justice approaches such as poverty reduction programs. This ignores the fact that committing violence is often the most obvious “root cause” for committing more violence.
Yes, justice often calls for leniency. But for criminals hurting New Yorkers, the default shouldn’t be leniency. Justice demands the default be enforcement.
New York: stop giving antisocial lawbreakers the benefit of the doubt that they won’t set homeless women on fire. Re-establish laws that protect the truly innocent.
Hannah E. Meyers is a fellow and director of policing and public safety for the Manhattan Institute.
