The Dangers of False Rhetoric Around Bail Reform
By Tess Cohen
CBS New York recently reported that New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea struggled to back up his repeated claims that the 2019 bail reform law is the reason that gun violence increased in New York City during 2020. This criticism comes as no surprise given that Shea’s claims were directly contradicted by the data. Gun violence has dropped sharply in 2021, even while bail reform stays the same, undermining Shea’s misguided blame-casting. In addition, re-arrest rates for people released before trial are vanishingly small; for example in September 2020, only 3% of people released on bail or their “own recognizance”(“ROR”) in New York City were rearrested, and only 1% of those individuals were rearrested for a violent felony offense.
CBS New York also revealed that “9.7% of defendants were released without bail for gun crimes, before bail reform was passed. It fell to 3.5% after bail reform was enacted.” In other words, since bail reform has passed, it has actually become less likely that a person charged with a gun crime will be released. What this data suggests is that Commissioner Shea and his colleagues have succeeded in what they hoped to do by deriding bail reform and blaming it for gun violence: they have shifted focus off their own actions and onto the courts, causing judges and prosecutors to be more likely to request and set bail in gun cases.
These false claims are harmful for many reasons. When public officials lie about the causes of crime, they make it more difficult to address the actual reasons for increases in violence. If the people of New York City incorrectly believe that bail reform caused an increase in gun crimes, they may think that fixing rising violence is as simple as rolling back the bail laws. But since the bail law has nothing to do with the rise in gun crimes, a rollback would harm those benefitting from bail reform and prevent the City from addressing the real reason for the increase in gun violence that occurred in 2020.
If the NYPD wants to impact rates of crime, their best bet is to solve more crimes. Research consistently shows that it is the likelihood of getting caught, rather than the severity of punishment, that deters people from committing crime. Meanwhile, New York City’s rate of solving shootings is abysmal.
In addition, rolling back bail reform will have extremely negative consequences not just for individuals, but also for public safety. It is easy to see the causal impact when someone is released pretrial, and during that period commits a new crime. What is less obvious, but must factor into our decision making around bail, is that “[r]esearch suggests that pretrial detention is linked to substantially higher recidivism rates post sentencing—suggesting that even if pretrial detention reduces some criminal activity during the pretrial period this is more than offset by much higher recidivism rates after individuals serve their sentences.” If we roll back bail reform, if we incarcerate more people pretrial, if judges and prosecutors continue to give into the false rhetoric of tough-on-crime advocates, we will actually increase crime rates by making people more likely to commit new crime. Study after study has shown that incarceration has a criminogenic effect, making people more likely to commit crimes.
Our country’s dedication to incarceration is not only unjust, it is making us less safe. We cannot give in to false rhetoric around pretrial release, as we will not only make our communities less safe, but we will continue a harmful history of unjustly punishing people, especially Black and Latino people, prior to conviction.
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