I must admit to viewing the statements from the new Manhattan DA, especially in light of a year or more of similar approaches to crime carried out by other Soros backed DA’s in other large cities, with a degree of morbid fascination.
Fox News’ Eric Shawn interviewed newly elected Alvin Bragg and asked if his policies were going to give criminals a “green light”.
Bragg answered:
“No! I mean it depends upon your definition of criminal. For all too long, we have dealt with this 'othering,' that anyone we put in jail is a criminal. Well, you know what, we are putting in jail homeless people, who literally in one example used one counterfeit bill to buy food and toothpaste, got a sentence of four to eight years, so if that's your definition of criminal, I suggest that we really need to reorder ourselves."
So, crime is not crime if the perpetrator really, really needs something.
It appears that police and the public must entertain the “quality” of an action rather than basing it against objective criteria defined by mutual consent of the larger society. Theft is no longer theft if the perpetrator “really needs” something or they are of a socio-economically disadvantaged segment of the population – and because this criterion is impossible to define, all crimes must be treated this way for fear of arresting one criminal whose heart is in the right place.
My fascination comes from the leftist idea that crime was a creation of an elite, white power structure (the same one that invented Western civilization and culture, of course), the purpose of which was to control the lower classes and to keep minorities and the poor down through incarceration. To think the concept of crime was the creation of Western civilization is to completely ignore that every aggregation of people in the history of history that wanted to create a civil society laid down basic formal and informal rules of interpersonal behavior to facilitate getting along.
From the Stone Age forward in time, and on every continent, societies have laid down the law. The first legal code of which we are aware was that of King Urukagina (who ruled a couple of cities in Mesopotamia around 2400 BC) and as far as I know, Mesopotamians and Sumerians weren’t honkies.
Law wasn’t just a white thing, and neither was the idea of crime.
If anything, Western civilization, and America in particular, improved societies greatly by instituting the ideas that people are not assumed to be guilty but are innocent until proven otherwise within an adversarial justice system that is fair to all.
The very essence of unfairness and unequal treatment is the arbitrary and capricious application of law as executed by these leftist DA’s. They are effectively substituting themselves for judge and jury in these matters.
This is just another iteration of the anti-capitalist/pro-communist attempt to destroy Western culture, capitalism, and America though class warfare by establishing the idea that crime is the result of the justice system rather than the justice system being made necessary by crime.
This process also heavily draws from the communist idea that there should be no such thing as private property and the right to being secure in your own person, because in their twisted minds, no private property means nothing to steal and no right to be secure within your person means no crimes to commit.
What it does do is create a particular lawless class of people who are impervious to the rules of civil society and prevents the police from executing their duties and responsibilities to protect the people and property that are targets of this class.
All you need to do is look at LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City for the results of this kind of thinking. Consider that Krasner in Philly, Gascon in LA and Boudin in San Fran are all facing recall efforts even as we speak.
You must ask why people vote for these characters in the first place. Heavyweight black leaders from Harlem endorsed this guy - the same as powerful people supported Krasner, Gascon and Boudin.
I can’t really blame Bragg; he explicitly ran on a crazy platform to decriminalize crime – and that is what he is doing.
I know, this is nuts – but when have bad ideas ever stopped the committed leftist?
As we've seen in the cities where this approach is "tried", crime rates explode, stores close and people move away. Then there's no tax base to support the local government, including the DA's salary. Perhaps they can get by on the Free Government Cheese larded into the infrastructure bill, or Build Back Broke. That's the Democrat way, after all. You and me paying for the degenerate governments in Blue cities and states.