Bail Reform at Work for Granny

“Bail reform” has been one of the most prominent of the innovations the Left has been pushing.  The theory is that no one should be held in jail simply because he can’t pay cash bail to assure his later court appearance.  That would be the “criminalizing of poverty,” to use one of their favorite phrases.  Moreover, it would interrupt (and often for practical purposes end) the defendant’s employment, such as that might be.  We need to overcome our class-ridden, knee-jerk punitive responses to embrace “real solutions” and compassion.

Heard that before?

OK.  Here, in a video that justifiably has gone viral, is what compassion looks like.

NBC New York has the story, several parts of which are quite revealing.

“I’m so happy he was arrested. Boy, he should stay in jail and think about what he did. Try to change, and try to make himself better,” the [92 year-old] victim said.

Obviously, this lady is a product of “privilege” and doesn’t understand how she  —  and the rest of us  —  failed her attacker.  If she had just paid more taxes for a better Head Start program, maybe she wouldn’t be whining so much now.

Now here’s the payoff (emphasis added):

A senior law enforcement official tells News 4 [Rashid] Brimmage [the attacker] is a recidivist with 100 prior arrests who has gotten a desk appearance ticket for his most recent ones because of bail reform. He is an NYPD co-response client, which means police have responded with social workers when dealing with him. Brimmage has an extensive history of being emotionally disturbed in police encounters as well.

He’s been arrested three times since February for alleged assaults. On March 9, he allegedly punched a 29-year-old man in an unprovoked attack at a pizza shop in Manhattan. A few weeks before that, Brimmage allegedly punched a 39-year-old female at a Dunkin’ Donuts in the Bronx. On Feb. 4 he allegedly punched a 39-year-old man in the face at that same Dunkin’ Donuts. In the latter two cases, he received desk appearance tickets.

Brimmage is currently a suspect in a grand larceny that happened on Feb.19 at the 116th St. train station in which a woman had $120 stolen from her purse, the senior law enforcement official said. He’s also a transit sex crime recidivist.

Police fear Brimmage will receive yet another desk appearance ticket for the latest incident, freeing him to attack at random again, the senior official said.

What does this episode teach us?  Well, that depends on who the “us” is.  If it’s the sponsors of bail reform, the answer is  —  not to put too fine a point on it  — nothing.  Bail reform was advertised, as so many criminal justice “reforms” are, as simply a common sense, fair-minded improvement to an overly punitive and racist system.  If it was going to have any costs, we never heard about them  —  or, at best, they were downplayed or dismissed.  We were admonished to get past outdated ideas.

The rest of us, however, might have a different reaction, namely, that this case is a scandal pushing back the curtain on an even bigger scandal.  The problem with bail reformers is not that they didn’t know this sort of assault was going to happen.  The problem is they didn’t care.  Everyday people, like this 92 year-old lady with her shopping cart, are not the kind who show up at Columbia and NYU legal symposia about overincarceration.  They don’t have law degrees from Harvard, Yale or Stanford and are instead the New York City equivalent of trailer park trash.  It’s not that they don’t exist, or that their existence is unknown.  It’s that they don’t count.

Here’s the message for the rest of us:  We don’t need to get woke.  We need to wake up.  How can we claim to be serious about keeping people safe  —  indeed, how can we claim to be serious about anything  —  when we release time and time again, after one hundred episodes, a violent adult man who years ago proved that he is a danger to anyone he runs into and is unfit to live in civil society?

I have no idea what Mr. Brimmage’s defense lawyer will say this time.  Probably it will be something off the word processor  —  his poor upbringing, deficient schooling, emotional deficiencies, etc., etc.  Or it may be something more creative  —  that Brimmage was treated so leniently so often that the system was teaching him there just isn’t that much wrong with the way he behaves.  And, for as perverted as that thinking is, it has at least the virtue of embracing a poisonous kernel of truth.