You’ve heard the old saying, “don’t shoot yourself in the foot“ — but that’s exactly what New Yorkers are doing by pouring state and local tax dollars into the Legal Aid Society.
Most people think Legal Aid, which is publicly funded, exists to defend the poor in court.
But it spends millions of dollars — your hard-earned dollars — on class-action litigation and lobbying to force changes in the law that benefit criminals and handcuff cops.
Illegal Aid Society is more like it.
“The Legal Aid Society seems hell-bent on ignoring the plight of the victim while hampering the police at every turn,” Ray Kelly, Gotham’s longest-serving police commissioner, told me this week.
Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic Party’s front-runner in its mayoral primary, is promising to add 5,000 cops to the NYPD’s ranks.
Kelly laughs off the pledge.
“With the rules in place, people don’t want the job,” he said. “Experienced cops are telling their sons and daughters not to enter the force.”
The Legal Aid Society’s relentless anti-policing campaign is a big reason why.
In its latest bout of loony leftism, Legal Aid this month demanded that cops stop arresting people for what it calls ”low-level” crimes like shoplifting and drug possession.
Instead, the group said in a letter to the city’s Department of Investigation, offenders should merely receive summonses instructing them to appear in court at a later date, not be hauled into a police station.
In 2021, the letter noted, more than half of those accused of petit larceny got off with a mere summons — but now, Legal Aid lawyers complained, 75% of them are being taken into custody.
That’s a good trend, said Kelly, not something to sue about.
“Every arrest should have an investigatory aspect to it,” he explained. “Is the suspect wanted for more serious crimes, or violating parole? There is no way to find that out except bringing the suspect into the police station.”
Why should someone accused of stealing $200 worth of goods at CVS be set free without an arrest? The city is in the middle of a theft epidemic.
And state data show that suspects handed a summons fail to show up for their court appearances more than half the time.
Here’s another doozy of a Legal Aid goal: outlawing the handcuffing of accused criminals in court.
Legal Aid, which calls handcuffing “dehumanizing,” recently filed a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD to block anyone from being handcuffed “absent an individualized judicial determination” that it’s necessary.
Ridiculous, said Kelly. Handcuffing “safeguards everybody including judges, court personnel and the police. It’s just common sense.”
Legal Aid opposes using weapons scanners to detect guns being carried into the subway, deeming them “invasive.” Have its lawyers never passed through an airport, a courthouse or a federal building?
Legal Aid is pushing the City Council to abolish the NYPD’s Gang Database, calling it a “racist tool” because nearly all the gang members it lists are black or Hispanic.
But Mayor Eric Adams, who opposes the council’s bill, says the database helps cops solve and actually prevent gang shootings: “96% of the victims of shootings in the city are people of color. Let’s keep them in mind.”
Legal Aid even had the gall to demand that the NYPD turn over photographs and tax identification numbers for all active-duty officers so that the group could produce a mug book — one of cops, not perps.
The goal: making it easier for its clients to identify and file complaints against the NYPD.
Even leftist Judge Arthur Engoron, famous for presiding over Donald Trump’s 2024 trial, saw the danger, denying the request last month in a ruling that said it would be akin “to having a billboard in Times Square” targeting every police officer.
Ensuring that the poor have adequate legal representation is a noble goal, worthy of taxpayer support.
But Legal Aid goes way beyond that to, in its own words, “shape the legal landscape.”
Its lobbying is largely responsible for the state’s no-cash-bail laws, Raise the Age laws and the 2019 discovery “reforms” that require prosecutors to meet rigid deadlines and share reams of largely irrelevant paperwork with the defense.
The discovery rules have enabled thousands of defendants to walk free.
“Cops risk their lives making arrests only to have cases dismissed on hyper-technicalities brought by these ridiculous discovery rules,” said Kelly.
The damage has to stop.
Forget defunding the police — that not-so-brilliant leftist notion.
Instead, Albany should be defunding Legal Aid’s lobbying and class-action operations, along with any other nonprofit that protects criminals and makes crime pay.
Your money is being spent to make you less safe. That’s crazy — a self-inflicted wound if ever there was one.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City.
