NYC Arrests
Some numbers on the debate over crime, misdemeanors, and bail in New York, from Tabarroc.
On average, each arrested person had 3.2 prior felony arrests and 5 prior misdemeanor arrests.
The people who do not make bail are on average more dangerous—they have twice as many arrests and twice as many convictions on average as those who are released. For example, the average defendant who doesn’t make bail has 6 previous felony arrests and 4 previous failures to appear.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the average person sent to state prison in 2014 had 10.3 previous arrests (median 8) and 4.3 previous convictions (median 3)!
(These are not including the arrest and conviction that sent them to jail.)
Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.
The way bail reformers like to frame the issue of eliminating cash bail is to point to a misdemeanor case and say ‘look this ordinary person was denied bail because of a misdemeanor!’ In fact, what is going on is that judges are dealing with serial offenders–they are setting high bail rates for those who have already failed to appear on multiple previous misdemeanor charges. Eliminating cash bail for misdemeanors is one of those policies which sounds reasonable on its face but in practice it leads to shoplifters who have already been arrested 20 times being arrested and released again. The issue of “unaffordable bail” is also misleading. Judges set high bail amounts for a reason!
2 comments:
Good post Steely, people need to know these stats. They are NOT to be hidden from them by the media. PEOPLE ARE SICK OF THIS! Plain & simple.
Happy Fathers Day
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