Broken Windows Policing on the Ballot in New York’s Attorney General Race

Quality of life crimes, like shoplifting and fare evasion, are in the spotlight in New York’s attorney general race thanks to a new policy push by the GOP candidate, Saritha Komatireddy. The challenger to Attorney General Letitia James reckons that the Democratic incumbent has dropped the ball on a core job, fighting crime. General James, she laments, “has more people assigned to investigate cops than investigate criminals, and that’s a problem.”Ms. Komatireddy, a former federal prosecutor based at Brooklyn, evinces a clear-eyed familiarity with the disorder plaguing the city’s transit system. “Stabbed. Robbed. Pushed onto the tracks. The subways have become a mess,” is how on X she characterizes the crime underground. Part of the solution, she avers, is to “stop the violence at the gates.” That’s a nod to the need to enforce the law on fare evasion — a cornerstone of broken windows policing.That model of law enforcement was pioneered under Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who in the 1990s broke the back of New York City’s crime wave, and later maintained under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly. The strategy is based in part on the awareness that individuals who commit low-level offenses, like turnstile jumping, often go on to commit more serious crimes.By enforcing the law on, say, fare evasion, in other words, police can prevent worse crimes from being committed. Yet liberals never accepted the merit of broken windows policing. Critics argued that enforcing laws on quality of life was “discriminatory,” and “a tool to target minorities,” as Messrs. Kelling and Bratton lamented. They added that some liberals claim that broken windows policing seeks “to impose a white middle-class morality on urban populations.”Ms. Komatireddy ties the disorder in the subway to the recent surge in fare evasion. To a large degree, New Yorkers can thank General James for this trend. In 2020 she thwarted NYPD efforts to enforce fare evasion laws with a probe into whether these efforts were “targeting communities of color.” She accused NYPD officers of “racial biases” and “discriminatory practices in their enforcement of these laws and regulations at subway stations throughout the city.” Since then, turnstile jumping without consequences has become a familiar frustration for law-abiding New Yorkers. It costs the state $1 billion a year in lost revenue. Of the evaders Ms. Komatireddy asks, too, “who are we letting through?” She notes that sometimes a fare evader “isn’t just skipping the fare. They could have a gun, a knife, or a warrant out for their arrest.” Giving up on enforcing fare evasion strips police of a key crime-fighting tool.On shoplifting, too, Ms. Komatireddy zeroes in on why so many products are under lock and key in city drug stores. The tighter security followed the move in 2019 by Albany Democrats to weaken laws on fighting crime. That included limits on imposing bail for crimes like shoplifting. The candidate explains that “shoplifting is up because, in New York, shoplifters who are arrested get released back onto the streets in an hour.” Ms. Komatireddy adds that criminals take advantage of this laxity and “build a whole business model around it,” as “organized crime rings steal goods off the shelves and then resell them.” This belies claims by liberals that the thefts are by poor New Yorkers seeking necessities like toothpaste. Shoplifting, too, is raising prices across the city. No wonder Ms. Komatireddy insists that “there’s a three word solution to affordability in New York: Just Fight Crime.”

Broken Windows Policing on the Ballot in New York’s Attorney General Race

Broken Windows Policing on the Ballot in New York’s Attorney General Race

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