Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chairman, just broke with the Legislature’s leaders to support Mayor Eric Adams’ call for key fixes to New York’s disastrous criminal-justice reforms. But then Jacobs actually cares about what the voters think.
Adams’ requests are modest: 1) Give judges the discretion to detain pre-trial suspects if they’re proven dangerous, for example by past convictions on serious or violent crimes. 2) Allow some teens to be tried in criminal (not family) court in gun cases, so that gangs don’t exploit legally “invulnerable” young people.
The public as a whole supports these modest reforms. Even Democrats in New York City signaled sympathy by choosing Adams as their mayoral nominee last year, specifically because he took crime far more seriously than other candidates.
But not the hard left, with its oversized power in Democratic primaries. Sadly, that seems to be all Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins care about, since their power depends only on the support of other Democrats in the Legislature unless the GOP somehow wins a majority (and they’re busy gerrymandering district lines to ensure that’s near-impossible).
Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, refuses to cross them on this issue, perhaps because she’s still worried about her own primary this year, perhaps because she’s isolated from life on the streets.
Jacobs, who’s also Nassau County Dem chair, knows a lot of other offices are at stake, including control of his county. Not to mention the safety of all the state’s residents.
For all their redistricting games (and Hochul’s troubling passivity), Heastie, Stewart-Cousins & Co. are risking a major Republican wave, with mass defections by sensible Democratic voters, all in the name of blocking common-sense justice reforms.