Cops rail recidivist with 33 raps for petit larceny loose
He’s the NYPD’s new poster boy for bail “reform.”
Cops say an ex-con who has done state time for rape and robbery has become such a prolific shoplifter that he got a TV shout-out Monday from police brass.
Wilfredo Ocasio, 44, remains free despite being busted on petit-larceny charges 33 times since mid-August, including on Nov. 16 when he was arrested for 23 separate thefts from two Duane Reade stores in Manhattan, according to court records and police sources. And those came after another petit-larceny arrest Oct. 14, six charges on Oct. 11, two others on Sept. 30 and one more on Aug. 19.
Under the state’s bail reforms, none of the charges individually would qualify for bail. It’s unclear whether the sheer number of arrests would have made him bail-eligible at some point.
Ocasio spent two stints in state prison: on a 1999 rape conviction and a robbery conviction in 2013, for which he was released in November 2020, according to online records.
Ocasio’s recent slew of brushes with the law surfaced as the city’s top cops appeared on NY1 on Monday morning and ripped the state’s revolving-door justice system since a controversial 2019 statute eliminated bail for most crimes. “We are arresting the same people over and over again,” NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell told interviewer Pat Kiernan. “I understand that there are people who believe that this has no effect, but it does. We know what we see every single day.
“Judges need to have the ability to determine if someone is a public-safety threat to the community and to determine if a person who is a recidivist can be given bail,” she said, taking a swipe at New York’s reforms that bar jurists from setting bail on nearly all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
NYPD Chief of Department Kenneth Corey, on the same program, cited Ocasio’s rap sheet. “Just this past weekend [a] detective squad sergeant down in the 1st Precinct covering lower Manhattan, Soho, Tribeca, Financial District reached out to me to express her frustration over an individual that they had arrested and charged with 21 separate crimes,” Corey said.
“That’s right. That’s 21 different victims, 21 different dates,” he said. “They thought that the aggregate at least of that — you victimize 21 people on 21 different occasions — would get him held. It didn’t.
“He’s released without bail,” Corey said. The NYPD later confirmed the chief was referring to Ocasio.
Paul DiGiacomo, president of the city’s Detectives’ Endowment Association, said separately Monday, “NYPD detectives are second to none at delivering justice to victims.
“But the crime in our city will only get worse if those they arrest are freed with zero consequences.”
In an interview last week, Corey — who is set to retire this week after a 34-year tenure with the NYPD — struck a similar tone when he said Big Apple crime would rapidly decline if the state’s soft-on-crime bailreform laws were toughened.
“A simple tweak of the law,” Corey said on the “Cats at Night” show with John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM. “Give judges the discretion to hold dangerous offenders, and crime in New York plummets. It doesn’t come down gradually.
“We know who drives crime in New York City, and we continue to arrest them over and over and over again,” he said. “You put those people in jail, [and] crimes will drop.”
NYPD statistics revealed earlier this year that a small group of just 10 career criminals was allowed to run amok across the Big Apple and rack up a total of 485 arrests after the state enacted its controversial bail-reform law in 2020.