Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s pick to replace New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is an anti-victim bail reform advocate who would cause the city’s double-digit crime wave increase to spiral to uncontrollable heights, experts told the Washington Examiner.
Attorney Maya Wiley, 57, is one of eight candidates seeking the job of her former boss, who successfully enacted bail reform last year along with a $1 billion defunding of the New York City Police Department. Wiley has also worked for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Tom Steyer’s Tides network.
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“It’s so important that we come together as a movement, and we rank Maya No. 1,” Ocasio-Cortez told Spectrum News. “We’ve already tried Giuliani’s New York.”
But Wiley’s platform of stripping the police budget by another $1 billion and spending that money on arts and culture, with $3 billion for climate projects, doesn’t sit well with former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
“Here’s the reality of what she doesn’t understand: As the mayor, there is one item that is responsible for the increased real estate value and tourism,” Kerik said. “No one wants to live, visit, go to school, and work in a place where they aren’t safe. You aren’t going to have museums and art galleries if you don’t reduce crime. At the rate they are going now, this is going to be the first substantial crime rise in 20 years.”
The worst year was 1992, when the city had 2,000 murders and “mothers were putting their babies in bathtubs to keep them safe,” Kerik said.
“As much as de Blasio is anti-police, he still has common sense to realize he should do everything in his power to reduce crime,” Kerik said.
Kerik served as both a police officer and corrections commissioner in New York City, reducing jail assaults before bringing down crime as police commissioner in partnership with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000.
May’s crime statistics show an average jump of 22% in major crime over June 2020. The total number is 8,007, compared to 6,564 last year. Hate crimes were up 98%, the majority directed toward Asians.
In a March 15, 2019, C-SPAN video titled “Criminal Justice System and Bail Reform,” Wiley discussed her thinking while working for de Blasio between 2014 and 2016 and then as chairwoman of the NYPD Complaint Review Board.
“It’s really important for people not to spend any time in jail,” she said. “We also included creating a social worker who was actually attached to the case. People were not only spending less time in jail, we were up to 11,000 people who avoided jail as a result of the reforms, and 87% returned to court. There are ways to work the system to ensure that people come back.”
Wiley said people get caught up in a system that doesn’t work and pointed to a study that showed even two days of pretrial jail increased the likelihood of committing a crime by 40%.
At the time of the video, she was working as an MSNBC analyst.
Kerik said as bad as crime is under de Blasio, it will be far worse with Wiley.
“These things embolden the bad guys. The real criminals come out because they know they aren’t going to be held accountable,” Kerik said. “Nothing is going to happen to them.”
Viral videos showing New York City pedestrians being beaten and robbed, usually by suspects with recent arrests and no bail holds, are something many politicians refuse to acknowledge, said National Association of Bail Agents President Michelle Esquenazi.
“The next thing they want to do is parole reform,” Esquenazi said. “If you remove consequences from everything, people are going to do the crime. The biggest issue in all of this are the policymakers in New York state who continue to advocate for criminal offenders.”
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She said if Wiley was elected, “New York City has no chance of coming back.”
Wiley did not return a phone call seeking comment.
