Wrong, again, on bail
Talk about hijacking a tragedy for political gain: Two New York City police officers are shot, and the conversation quickly turns to the entirely irrelevant topic of bail reform.
It was, sadly, as predictable as it was wrong. This has been a running theme in criminal justice debates in New York state since key reforms were passed and signed in 2019: Blame the reforms designed to make the system a little more just — whether they had anything to do with a shooting or not. Blame the politicians, blame the laws, blame anything but the one undeniable factor in every crime involving a firearm: the access to a gun, most of the time an illegal one.
So it was, police say, in the case of Friday night’s shooting of two officers, leaving one, rookie Jason Rivera, 22, dead, and the other, Wilbert Mora, 27, in critical condition. Police say that they were responding to a domestic incident when they were shot by a man who had a gun that had been stolen in Baltimore in 2017.
What we need is a national disstatistics.
cussion on out-of-state guns turning up in the vast majority of crimes involving firearms in states like New York. What we don’t need is to be sidetracked by the red herring of reforms, which statistics show play little apparent role in gun violence or crime overall.
Between July 2020 and June 2021, according to state data, defendants released without bail pending trial were rearrested for a violent felony in a mere 2 percent of cases; less than half of one percent of rearrests were for a crime involving a firearm. Overall, 80 percent of defendants released under the bail laws had no further problem with police while awaiting a resolution of their case. The answer from those who oppose criminal justice reforms, like state Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt, R-north Tonawanda? Don’t trust the Guns, on the other hand, are the undeniable common factor in every single crime involving a firearm, and most of them — 86 percent of the handguns used in crimes, according to a 2016 study by the state attorney general’s office — come from outside New York. And 70 percent of those came from the “Iron Pipeline”: six Southern states along the I-95 corridor with far looser gun laws than New York — Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
If anything, politicians who portray themselves as strong on law and order and profess their support for police should be talking about ways to get the guns that kill and wound cops and innocent civilians off the streets. That includes universal background checks and clamping down on interstate trafficking with tighter rules on straw buyers and harsher federal penalties.
Strengthening gun control may not be a panacea for the gun violence that plagues our communities, but it would be a far more productive approach than waiting, shooting after shooting, for just the right one to match a tired political narrative.