This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated July 31, 2020
Last week it was reported that on July 17, an 89-year-old woman was viciously attacked by two men near 16th Avenue and 77th Street, who physically assaulted her and then lit her shirt on fire. The disturbing account of this crime elicited condemnation from all local public figures and calls for everyone to work together to bring the assailants to justice.
Unfortunately, it was yet another occasion for some, bent on trying to turn every instance of a criminal act in our area, into an opportunity for political attacks. Every post sharing this news story was flooded with negative comments about how certain elected officials were directly responsible for this crime, including on posts by those same local legislators in which they expressed their outrage.
This is from the now-familiar playbook, where every report of a crime in our community is seen by some as a ripe opportunity to attribute any such act to politicians they disagree with. The more distressing the criminal act, the more eager these opportunists are to use it as a means of political attack.
The reasons employed to justify these attacks run the gamut, but are a mix of exaggerations, misrepresentations, and downright false claims.
It is common to see a City Council member slammed for being responsible for a crime because they voted for bail reform, when that legislation was actually passed at the state level, not by the City Council. Typically in these situations, when the perpetrators of the crime being used to attack an elected official are ultimately apprehended, it turns out they were not awaiting trial for a previous charge, in which case the reform of the state’s bail system isn’t even at play.
“Everyone using the abhorrent attack on an 89-year-old woman as a means to make nonsensical connections between politics and her brutal assault are doing just that — they are using the victim…”
The fact is, for many years before bail reform, New York City had been decreasing the number of people incarcerated pending trial, as well as the use of cash bail, all while crime rates declined at the same time. Before bail reform was enacted, nearly 8 in 10 new defendants remained free after being charged with a crime, while under the new system the rate will be about 9 in 10. Most defendants who needed to post bail to avoid pre-trial detention under the old system, used to do just that.
Another frequent angle of attack is to blame Democrats for defunding the police, which critics assert has now handcuffed the NYPD and led to rampant crime. The problems with this claim is that the new fiscal year has just started and there really hasn’t been any significant change to the money allocated to policing in the city.
The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting effects on the local economy have caused a $9 billion loss of revenue for New York City. It is impossible to not have cuts in order to bridge the shortfall. The Department of Education, for instance, will see their budget slashed by over a half billion dollars at a time when common sense would indicate that more money is needed to open schools in the current COVID-19 world.
The NYPD, by contrast, will see less than $400 billion in cuts, which amounts to a 6.8% reduction from last year. A sizable portion of this is being accomplished by eliminating one of the four new graduating classes of recruits, a freeze on adding non-safety positions, reducing some outside contracts, and putting off some purchases of new vehicles. These are not as much cuts to the funding that makes the current police force operate, as they are reductions to new, added spending.
Everyone using the abhorrent attack on an 89-year-old woman as a means to make nonsensical connections between politics and her brutal assault are doing just that — they are using the victim and the ordeal she has gone through.
They claim to care more about her than anyone else, meanwhile their focus is not on her, but instead on trying to manipulate how she was physically hurt in order to metaphorically hurt someone they disagree with philosophically. Eagerly looking at bad news stories that have affected members of our community as an opportunity to strike, only amount to rooting against our community.
