New York's Top Cop Thinks Not Enough People Are in Jail

August 6, 2015
John Surico
Vice News

There's a growing consensus in America that too many people are ensnared in the sprawling prison-industrial complex. The powers that be in Washington, DC, are increasingly amenable to criminal justice reform, which could dramatically reduce additions to the US prison population in the years ahead. And President Barack Obama seems to be dedicating the remainder of his time in the Oval Office in large part tocurbing the worst parts of mass incarceration. (Obama recently became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, a trip that was filmed by VICE for an upcoming special, and followed that by announcing clemency for 46 nonviolent drug offenders.)

In New York City, home to a massive and notoriously dysfunctional jail system, reformers have focused in large part on getting people out before they go in. Earlier this year, Mayor Bill de Blasio—who ran on a progressive criminal justice platform—announced Justice Reboot, a program aimed at reducing the population of the hellish Rikers Island jail complex by 25 percent over ten years. The plan is to clear court backlogs to prevent young and vulnerable people—like Kalief Browder, who languished on Rikers for three years without trial—from getting lost in the system. And in late June, New York City created a $1.4 million bail fund to help many of those facing bails under $2,000.

But now New York Police Department Commissioner William J. Bratton is apparently worried that the city is in danger of going a little too far when it comes to keeping people out of jail.

"There are people in our society, I'm sorry, they're criminals," Bratton said in a radio interview Wednesday. "They're bad people. You don't want to put them in diversion programs; you don't want to keep them out of jail. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time, because they're a danger to the rest of us, and that's the reality."

On the John Gambling Show, Bratton came out against programs he argues are "well-intended" but, ultimately, put lots of very bad men back onto the streets of New York. (It's unclear exactly which programs he was criticizing, but Bratton took pains to decry people who are "tipping too much on the side of letting them out.")

Reached for comment, a mayoral spokeswoman told VICE, "Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton agree: If people break the law, there should be serious consequences and they should receive the appropriate penalties."

But pretty much everyone agrees that killers, murderers, and rapists should be locked up. The problem is that Bratton isn't really talking about them, so much as he's touching a nerve in the law and order community—not only in the Big Apple, but nationwide. Criminal justice reform that reduces the incarcerated population—even if it sounds awfully nice—could senselessly put communities at harm, according to some old-school cops and prosecutors.

"We can't lose sight of the fact that we have a hardcore criminal population in this city of several thousand people who have no values, no respect for human life," Bratton said in the radio interview.

The commissioner's dire warning came during what's been a bloody week for New York City. Early Sunday morning, at a party in East New York, Brooklyn, a group of menopened fire and injured nine people. The next day, in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, two men shot five people in a drive-by, critically injuring a pregnant woman and taking the life of her unborn child.

Yet as grizzly as that sounds, gun violence is par for the course in New York City. When it comes to the statistics, this year hasn't been much different from 2014, which was generally on par with the years before that. All of which is to say: NYC is still the safest large city in America, and there's no indication that has changed.

"This idea that somehow too many people are getting out of jail makes zero sense considering violent crime has been on the decline here for years," Brian Sonenstein, a prison reform advocate and columnist for Shadowproof.com, a new progressive website, told VICE.