Say hello to Alvin Bragg’s latest victims.
The first would be Scotty Enoe, 46, a CVS drug-store employee from Brooklyn taken into police custody after allegedly knifing a shoplifter to death during a fight Thursday morning.
Another is the decedent, 50-year-old Charles Brito — a vagrant with 14 shoplifting busts so far this year, and heaven only knows how many times he got away with the goods.
And a third is New York itself, once again scarred by Manhattan DA Bragg’s hunt-and-peck approach to the penal code.
Shoplifting is beneath his attention, don’t you know — so toothpaste is behind plexiglass panels all across the borough and serial boosters are peddling stolen property to bodegas and flea markets.
It’s not only Bragg, of course; he’s just the face of a progressive plague that treats so-called petty crime as an inconvenience that must be endured as a matter of social justice.
You know how it is — muscular law enforcement comes with “disparate impact,” so don’t go there.
One problem with this approach — and there are many — is that over time (and not much time) petty crime mutates.
A junkie occasionally boosting pints of ice cream for resale becomes a shoplifting wave that shutters big-box drug retailers across the city and sharply raises prices in the stores that remain.
And it leads directly to violence of the sort that erupted at the CVS store at Broadway and 49th Street around 12:30 a.m. Thursday.
Details are murky, and aren’t they always? But it seems that Brito had attempted to leave the store with stolen Gatorade; that Enoe protested and was then attacked by Brito; that a fight resulted and Brito was stabbed to death.
Enoe was charged with murder shortly thereafter.
Ah — so many questions.
Why murder? And why not self-defense?
It was the third such incident in as many months in New York City, so is a trend developing? If so, why?
Why indeed.
Violence in public places has become endemic in urban New York since Albany progressives rewrote the state’s penal law in 2018 — and only a fool would be surprised by a violent reaction.
But here are more questions: How many shoplifting arrests should it take before a thief is seen as a threat not just to the Gatorade display, but to a civil society?
Is 14 enough?
It’s a moot point as far as Charles Brito is concerned, sad to say — but he was just one of so many.
And there’s this: Is shoplifting a “crime of poverty,” as the prog elite maintains? Or does it mostly victimize the poor?
Certainly Enoe is also a victim — of Bragg’s permissiveness, for sure, but also of Brito’s predatory behavior.
Maybe the thief didn’t deserve to die over a couple of bottles of energy drink — but neither he nor his alleged killer deserved to be placed in fatal proximity in the first place.
Sure, such encounters are singular — mostly matters of particular circumstance.
It’s progressive policy that makes them inevitable — if not at 49th Street and Broadway at 12:30 on a July morning, then somewhere else, at some other time.
And involving some other people — most often poor and not white.
All this is on Alvin Bragg. He needs to examine his conscience.
