As early voting begins in New York City’s mayoral election, the race comes down to this: whether voters want law and order in City Hall — or a decarcerator-in-chief.
In Wednesday’s debate, the three candidates were asked about the city’s Rikers Island jail complex, which by law is set to close in 2027 — even though the first of the new county jails meant to replace it won’t be complete until 2029 at best.
Both Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa reasonably said they’d abandon the county jail plan and rebuild on Rikers instead.
The budget-busting county jails are already years behind schedule.
Only Zohran Mamdani insisted he’d close Rikers on time, because, he claimed pedantically, doing so is “required by law.”
Mamdani is running on making NYC “affordable” — a nebulous platform of free this and free that.
But his more important commitment is to “decarceration,” abolishing jails altogether, a goal he’s pushed for years.
As a candidate, he has (grudgingly) adopted the radical City Council’s plan to close Rikers and build neighborhood jails.
And while Rikers currently houses 7,100 inmates, the county jails will have a total of only 4,100 beds — meaning that thousands of serious offenders will be on the streets, simply for lack of jail space.
We’ve seen the havoc that can bring.
In 2020, when NYC released 2,000 inmates from city jails under bail reform, and then 2,000 more violent inmates when COVID struck, crime went up almost 40%, and shootings doubled. By 2022, murders were up by 33%.
Even today, the crime rate is still 32% higher than it was in 2019.
But the harm was done: If crime had stayed at 2019 levels through 2024, the city would have had almost 100,000 fewer crime victims, 3,000 fewer shooting victims and almost 600 fewer murders.
But the crime rise that will follow Mamdani’s Rikers releases will be much worse — because Rikers inmates today are far more dangerous than the ones who were let go in 2020.
Under our new bail laws, only the worst accused criminals can be held at Rikers: people charged with murder or a violent felony, or who committed a crime while out on another pending case, or who threatened a witness or violated an order of protection.
In addition to that, they have to have been arraigned by one of the few NYC judges who will set bail.
Practically all of the pretrial detainees now housed on Rikers, 96% of them, are charged with felonies — with 47% of them charged with violent felonies, including murder. Only 222 of the 7,100 are charged with misdemeanors.
In the best-case scenario, Mamdani will release 3,000 of these largely violent defendants from Rikers in order to close it. And he is fully ideologically committed to that goal.
If you woke up one morning and read that 3,000 inmates had escaped from Rikers, you’d be terrified.
With Mamdani as mayor, he’d do just that — a replay of 2020, but several times over.
Remember the long-term impact then? After the 2020 Rikers releases, New Yorkers sensed that the city was once again becoming uncontrollable.
The extensive, expensive damage of the George Floyd riots, paired with bail reform and the resultant crime wave, caused thousands to flee.
Between 2020 and 2024, 800,000 people, almost 9% of the city’s population, moved out, according to the New York City Department of Planning.
Even with the influx of Biden-era migrants, the population is still 326,000 below what it was in 2019.
Apologists claim the mass exodus was triggered by the pandemic — true, to an extent.
Yet most other large cities experienced far less of a population decline, and some even grew during this period.
And in survey after survey, ex-New Yorkers said they left because of the “quality of life” — which is usually a euphemism for fear of crime.
The city cannot bear another round of this flight.
The pity of all this is the failure of Cuomo and Sliwa to find some way to combine forces. Both have taken sensible stances on the crucial question of the city jails.
Perhaps some sort of power-sharing deal between them could bring about Mamdani’s defeat.
But the enmity between them seems intense, and while there is still time, it is fleeting.
This career prosecutor is going to wait until the last possible day to vote — and when I do, I will cast my ballot for whoever is closest to beating Mamdani in the election.
Even if I have to hold my nose when I do it.
Mamdani can promise you free bus rides, but what good are they if you get mugged on the way to the bus stop?
Jim Quinn is a retired career prosecutor in the Queens District Attorney’s Office, where he served for 42 years.
