Lawmakers show little appetite for Adams’ bail changes
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Some Queens lawmakers say there’s little support for Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to rollback a series of criminal justice reforms he says have led to higher rates of violence. AP photo by Yuki Iwamura
By Jacob Kaye
New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants state lawmakers to rollback a handful of criminal justice reforms that he says are helping to fuel a rise in gun violence in the city.
But some Queens legislators – and lawmakers throughout the State Senate and Assembly – say there’s not much of an appetite to abandon the hard-fought reforms that only recently passed.
Adams said Monday he believes the state’s Raise the Age law and bail reform both need to be reassessed and that they are two contributing factors to a rise in gun violence throughout the five boroughs – though murders in New York City are down around 26 percent when compared to last year, shootings are up nearly 24 percent in 2022 when compared to 2021, according to NYPD statistics.
Several high profile shootings – including a shooting that led to the deaths of two NYPD officers on Friday – preceded the rollout of the Adams administration’s Blueprint to End Gun Violence, a plan that includes the reintroduction of the NYPD’s plainclothes unit, changes to the courts and the proposed legislative revisions.
But lawmakers from Queens – the people who actually have the power to enact the changes – say reforms to Raise the Age and bail are unlikely. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie also both said this week that they were against changes to either Raise the Age or bail reform.
Assemblymember David Weprin, who represents a stretch of Southern and Eastern Queens from Richmond Hill to Glen Oaks and who chairs the Assembly’s Committee on Corrections, said that the legislature worked hard on passing Raise the Age and that it’s a solid law.
“We spent a lot of time and it was a very important piece of reform legislation that we worked on for years,” Weprin told the Eagle.
Raise the Age, which passed in 2017, allows for 16- and 17-year-old defendants to be tried as juveniles – prior to the passage of the law, New York was one of two states to try the teens as adults.
In his gun violence plan, Adams said that the city has seen a spike in the number of teens arrested on gun charges in the past year and claimed that gun traffickers are using children as “pawns,” knowing that the teens will receive a lower sentence if arrested. In 2019, around 2.5 percent of kids under 18 arrested had a firearm, a number that jumped to 10 percent in 2021.
“If a 16- or 17-year-old is arrested on a gun charge, the NYPD should ask the individual where they got the gun from,” Adams said Monday. “If the individual refuses to disclose that information, prosecutors should have the ability to charge the individual in Criminal Court, rather than Family Court.”
Queens lawmakers say they haven’t seen much support for legislative changes Mayor Eric Adams recommended in his recently announced gun violence prevention plan. Photo via Wikimedia Commons
But Weprin says going after the teens isn’t the way to go. Instead, the state should focus more of its efforts on going after the gun traffickers, he said.
“[We should be] cracking down on or even increasing the penalties on people that are taking advantage of children by using them to do their bidding,” Weprin said. “I think that could be done.”
State Senator Michael Gianaris echoed Weprin’s concerns.
“We must effectively combat illegal guns coming from other states — not rollback effective reforms to our criminal legal system,” Gianaris said on Twitter.
Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas said that any changes to the recently passed criminal justice reforms were a “hard no” for her.
“My concern is that he's really fear mongering and that's really dangerous right now,” González-Rojas told the Eagle. “It's not the solution – criminalizing our young people.”
The lawmaker added that she hadn’t heard much discussion about Adams’ recommendations among her colleagues and that she doesn’t expect the legislature to roll back the reforms any time soon.
“I think where I could be, and many of us could be, a partner to the mayor is investing in after school program funding, anti-violence programs and increasing funding for mental health services,” she said. “Our investments really need to be in prevention and support, as opposed to criminalization. We don't want anyone to die –we want to prevent the violence from happening at all, and I think we have to make those really smart investments to create pathways and opportunities for our young people.”
However, not all Queens legislators spoke out against the proposed changes – Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, an early supporter of Adams’ run for mayor, said in a statement that she supports the plan in its entirety.
“‘The Blueprint to End Gun Violence’ is a transformative plan to deliver the public safety our city needs,” Rajkumar said. “I will be proud to partner with Mayor Adams and my colleagues in the state Legislature to make this plan a reality.”
Rajkumar’s office did not respond to request for comment before print time.
Weprin also urged caution on reforming the state’s bail laws, which were reformed in 2019 to greatly reduce the number of crimes that a judge could set bail on. In his address, Adams said that judges should be given the discretion to issue bail based on a defendant’s perceived level of dangerousness – New York is currently the only state in the country that only allows judges to determine bail based on a defendant’s perceived flight risk. Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks said he was in favor of the change during a Tuesday budget meeting but added that he wasn’t speaking for “100 percent” of judges.
“The bail reform law is still relatively new and we haven't really seen the statistics, but from what I've seen, as far as these cases, they're not really as a result of bail reform,” Weprin said. “It's become something that Republicans have used in different elections – that [bail reform] is the boogeyman that's going to make the difference in solving crime, but I don't think that's the case.”
The Unified Court System recently released data that showed that 23 percent of New York City defendants freed under supervised release were rearrested on felony charges while their cases were still pending, THE CITY reported. Around 12 percent of those defendants who had bail set against them were rearrested and around 11.8 percent of those released with no restrictions were rearrested, data shows.
The Queens lawmakers are not alone – Governor Kathy Hochul defended bail reform on Wednesday.
"I will absolutely stand behind the fundamental promise on why we needed bail reform in the first place," she said at an unrelated press conference. “But I also said that if reform is needed…I’m willing to have those conversations.”
“I’m [still] looking for data that shows me that bail reform is the reason that somehow crime is going up in 90 of 100 cities in New York,” she said.
Queens Rep. Tom Suozzi, who is challenging Hochul in the race for governor, said that he fully supports Adams’ plan, legislative reforms and all.
“[Hochul] has been hiding for weeks, and now we know why,” Suozzi said on social media. “She is siding with the legislature who oppose fixing bail reform. I stand with [Adams] to fix bail reform [and] include the dangerousness standard.”
