Isn’t it blatantly obvious that a criminal and/or potential criminal revels in the defunding of police agencies in his or her location? ~

 

  I know, right? I guess this is the logic:
  Place financial restrictions on law enforcement agencies as a supposed solution to police brutality, and their abilities to serve and protect will also be restricted accordingly, but don’t worry, the criminal element does not follow the news or current events.
  The worst part of the whole fiasco is those locations where the powers that be caved in this ridiculous demand are now experiencing higher crime rates already, and it’s only going to get worse. 

 

I could be wrong, but I believe the intent was to move funds traditionally allocated to the police and use it for a new department that would deal with crimes related to people with mental health issues.  In other words, traditional police department training is not equipped to de-escalate mental health situations. Police are typically trained to use physical force or their weapons to end a situation where a mental health professional might be better able to de-escalate the situation without use of force.

 

  Thank you, you’ve brought up a very good point.  I don’t believe you’re wrong at all as far as some people having had that original intent. Unfortunately, that evolved into a scorched-earth mentality, and a knee-jerk shut-‘em-down stance, and some officials buckled under pressure. 

~

I can't speak for other cities, but the crime rate relative to murders and shootings here in NYC has escalated since no-bail went into effect.  Although not applied uniformly by the police, stop-and-frisk kept a lid on who was walking around with a gun.  Now, it's getting almost as bad as it was in the 1970s.  Covid has also brought out all the homeless who are now sleeping on the subway trains because people are working from home.   They roam the subway platforms pushing people onto the tracks, slashing/punching/attacking people for no  reason.  I'm not a fearful person, but I wouldn't get on a subway train if it was free transportation.  Mayor Di Blasio has allocated almost a billion dollars to his wife's mental health initiative, which has not proven to do any good.  When I read about someone killing another person for no reason and find that this person has been arrested dozens of times and let out with no bail, it makes me wonder what people were thinking when they enacted that law.  People who have these long rap sheets should not be walking the streets.  Worried about their civil rights?  What about the public's civil rights not to have to fear walking around in the middle of the day?

 

  Allowing criminals more rights than law-abiding people is clearly a recipe for disaster.
  I don’t know if in addition to no-bail whether or not New York has something similar to California’s “flash incarceration”, which is applied when a convicted person who is released from custody on parole or probation and is subsequently arrested for another crime, in violation of that status, his or her previous convictions are not taken into consideration. Instead, the parole/probation violation is treated as a first offense, and being such, automatically places that person in county jail for ten days on the parole violation as opposed to being returned to prison to complete the remainder of the original sentence, BUT, it gets better, because of overcrowding in county jails, the ten days gets reduced to one or two days.   Even if criminals don’t follow the news and don’t know beforehand how lightly they’ll be treated, as soon as they’re released from jail yet again after committing more crimes, it dawns on them that there are little or no penalties for breaking the law. It’s like hitting the crime-does-pay jackpot. There are plenty of instances in which people are arrested several times in a week or month, and continually released after a day or two.
  Another wrinkle in California is that numerous felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors, and that many misdemeanors don’t garner a police response. Therefore, police will not respond to shoplifting calls that do not involve violence or weapons. Thieves know that they can boldly carry up to $899 worth of merchandise from a store without being challenged. Store staff and/or security guards don’t daunt them, because without the consequence of arrest, to detain them brings up liability of depriving thieves of their rights.

  Don’t even get me started on the recent statutes and bills over the past few years that have dumped convicted felons onto the streets in the liberal view that prison is bad for them and they deserve the exact same things that anyone else in society deserves. 

We may not have the exact same new rules about prior convictions, but we are definitely headed in the wrong direction.  Criminals don't have to watch the news to find out they aren't being treated as criminals any longer - they just have to talk to one another.  I believe prior arrests/convictions should be taken into consideration.  In one recent incident, a man sliced the face of a person just walking towards him on the street, in mid-Manhattan, in broad daylight.  Turned out he had been arrested on 17 similar prior charges.  Why is that man out on the street?  He belongs in prison or in a mental facility.

The explanations I've heard from different jurisdictions were as different as could be.  Spunky, I have heard that explanation in one instance.