Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s promises from the campaign trail have resurfaced, particularly the speech where he called theft the “crime of poverty” and pledged to not prosecute it in order to establish “racial equity.”
Specifically, he said during a May of 2021 meeting that he aimed on fostering “racial equity” in New York City rather than prosecuting theft, That speech was to a group from an organization called Young New Yorkers. The organization says that it “applies a racial justice framework to… all levels of operations” and it diverts those who are under the age of 25 from the criminal justice system. DA Bragg, speaking to the group, argued that he would end the “crime of poverty,” saying (emphasis ours):
“I grew up with friends disappearing over charges like [theft] and even if there is an alternative [to incarceration, such as diversion programs, there is a] consequence of disruption for the family. We need to asking, ‘Does something make us safer?’ And prosecuting a young person, even if it doesn’t end in incarceration [such as in diversion programs], in my view does not make us safer. I think we need to move away from what I would call a crime of poverty.“
Continuing, he also said during the May 2021 meeting with the group, “In Manhattan, every single step in the way a case is processed from what someone is charged with, to the plea they are offered, to the sentence they are given, is rife with racial disparities.”
That’s not all. “Equity” focused DA Alvin Bragg also claimed that enforcing the law is indefensible if it disproportionally affects “people of color,” saying in a since-deleted page on his website that:
“These cases do not belong in criminal court. The punishments are disproportionately harsh, and fall disproportionately on the backs of people of color. This makes them morally indefensible. This is why I will not prosecute most petty offenses through the traditional criminal court system… I will either dismiss these charges outright or offer the accused person the opportunity to complete a program without ever setting foot in a courtroom.”
That would effectively mean not prosecuting crime, as blacks commit an outsized share of it. Reason, a libertarian site (and chosen as the source to show that not only right-wing sources recognize this), reported on the outsized amount of black crime, saying, “Blacks, which here means non-Hispanic blacks, were 12.5% of the U.S. population, and non-Hispanic whites were 60.4%. It thus appears from this data that the black per capita violent crime rate is roughly 2.3 to 2.8 times the rate for the country as a whole, while the white per capita violent crime rate is roughly 0.7 to 0.9 times the rate for the country as a whole.”
Reason also noted that, in the context of homicide, “When the race of the offender was known, 55.9 percent were Black or African American, 41.1 percent were White, and 3.0 percent were of other races.”
So will Bragg no longer prosecute murder because doing so would “fall disproportionately on the backs of people of color”? Sadly, it seems like the answer would be “yes” if he could get away with it.
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