If NY Doesn’t Amend Discovery Laws, Proverbial ‘Broken Windows’ Will Remain Broken
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.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Hannah Meyers is director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute.
Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images
