No wonder crime on the subways continues to be a scourge: The same lawbreaking fiends keep being cuffed, only to be cut loose again and again.
Monday’s Post revealed the shocking stats: 63 transit terrors with more than 5,000 busts among them, for crimes ranging from robbery to assault to sex crimes.
Yet, thanks to lenient judges, the no-bail law and pro-crime prosecutors who drop or downgrade charges, the vast majority are still walking the streets — only about five are now locked up.
Cops are well-acquainted with these chronic menaces and do their part to get them off the streets, making quick busts when one of them breaks the law (again).
But they’re spat back out almost as quickly as the NYPD can haul them in, often after getting less than a slap on the wrist.
The rap sheets of this rogues’ gallery of street scoundrels are eye-popping.
Take Carlos Baez-Caban, who’s racked up a total of 48 arrests, one for allegedly biting a rider while stealing her phone: He’s out on probation and still walking the streets.
Or Shaquille Clarke, whose arrests include pressing his groin area against one woman and punching another while robbing her: He’s also free as a bird, despite getting busted for another crime while on probation.
Matthew Leon, a serial predator arrested for sex-related offenses a whopping 13 times, wasn’t kept behind bars after he allegedly groped a woman’s breasts and buttocks on the L train; only after an arrest for reaching inside a stranger’s pants and top this spring was he finally held.
These are the sickos with whom soft-on-crime leaders expect New Yorkers to share a subway car or bus, all in the name of “justice reform.”
Passive, pro-crime prosecutors throw gasoline on the fire: Last year, 62% of subway felonies were downgrades to misdemeanors in the Bronx, while the Manhattan DA’s Office declined to prosecute 69% of misdemeanor arrests.
What exactly do Gov. Kathy Hochul, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg or other electeds have to say to the New Yorkers who have been robbed, groped or assaulted by one of these serial offenders?
The answer seems to be “Put up with it,” because consequences for criminals are at odds with the left’s anti-cop, anti-carceral ideology (which Hochul and other “moderates” either can’t or won’t fully confront).
Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani seems to think these recidivists just need greater access to government services, and they’ll magically change their ways.
Except if that tact were ever going to work, it would have by now: These criminals have been through the system thousands of times collectively; countless social workers, public defenders and other miscellaneous city workers have crossed their paths.
It’s likely the only intervention the government hasn’t tried is keeping them behind bars.
The only way to ensure that these repeat offenders quit preying on New Yorkers: Stop letting them go.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
