No Bail Fail....in New York

Looks like this "no cash bail" thing is a failure everywhere:

• Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch released new crime statistics indicating that, compared to last April, crime in New York City last month was down 9.5% overall.

  That is very good news, and kudos are due to her and to the men and women of the NYPD.

  But before we start popping the champagne corks, we have to understand that comparing statistics year over year obscures the real crime story in NYC.

  You really have to compare crime in NYC pre-bail reform to crime post-bail reform.

  Crime in NYC began its historic rise not last April but in 2019 when bail reform was passed, releasing thousands of career criminals onto our streets.

  While murders are down 14% from April 2019 to April 2026, robberies are up 8.8%, grand larcenies are up 9.4%, felony assaults up 50% and auto theft a whopping 171%.

  We are seven years into this bail reform “experiment” and felony index crime overall is up over 26% from what it was before the law passed

CWB recently did a piece about how crime was actually up after the yearly stats caught up with the warming weather, and we really hate to ask their number crunchers to dig deeper, but....

• What are the chances of a New York Post-type comparison, i.e. before and after SAFE-T Act numbers?

The best way (in our opinion) to get a look at trends is (A) year over year or (B) after some significant event that altered behaviors. In this case, we'd look at:

• the election of Crimesha and her non-prosecution of felony cases
• COVID interruptions to crime
• SAFE-T Act implementation

Numbers on both sides of those significant events would expose a lot of number manipulation and more than a few lies.