By Joseph N. Manago
Here we go again with another bill of so-called “criminal justice reform” from City Councilman Rory Lancman (“Fare evasion data needs close scrutiny,” TimesLedger, July 21).
Mr. Lancman bemoans that the 90 percent black or Latino arrestees for theft of services — fare evasion — in 2017 faced a criminal record, time on Rikers island, or deportation for immigrants. According to the penal law of New York state, theft of services is a Class A misdemeanor (165.15), and should be rightly enforced by the NYPD. But “Get Out of Jail Free” Lancman is again playing the stale race card, assuming that the enforcement is racial discrimination just because the statistics indicate that people of color are predominate offenders. No such conclusion is a sound statistical inference from fare evasion data, but rather a bias of the liberal agenda to blame society for the social ills of autonomous individual miscreants.
So now that Lancman falsely perceives a racial disparity in mere raw data is “contrary to our values,” and impacting “certain communities unfairly,” he wants to require more wasteful bureaucratic red tape in NYPD reporting of race, gender and age of arrestees.
Then what? Lancman alleges the bill will “rectify this problem” of untimely analysis of trends purporting his racial bias hypothesis. However, the problem is miscreants breaking the law, and is neither the NYPD enforcing the law nor the criminal courts adjudicating the law?
But for Lancman, people of color are to be issued “Get Out of Jail Free” cards, in any which way, since they are not responsible for their criminal actions — but the white hegemonic system is the devil? Lancman’s agenda is fallacious, racist and antithetical to the foundations of criminal, justice.
Our biggest problem is Lancman, not the city prosecution of criminal suspects in an “overzealous fare evasion enforcement.”
District 24 constituents had better closely scrutinize Lancman’s racially tinged record before the next election to see that it illustrates little public safety benefit to this district or to the city at large. In fact, more criminals are at large now because of his obsolete, crackpot and liberal ideology of social engineering, vis-a-vis criminal justice reform. We DONT need this guy in the Council!
Joseph N. Manago
Flushing
