City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander’s suddenly very concerned about the crime wave he helped cause.
He wants retailers like Duane Reade to be able to use a Big Brother-type camera system to report shoplifters to the police, which Lander imagines could get theft down enough to unlock the toothpaste.
Wait, isn’t that racist? We thought Lander and his ilk saw shoplifting as a crime driven by poverty, which makes prosecuting white supremacy?
Why on earth would he ever want to report it to the eeeevil, fascist cops?
Oh, right: Because he desperately wants to be mayor.
And even Lander — slow as he is — has finally gotten the message that Gothamites are sick of crime and disorder.
Don’t buy it.
This is the same man who’s been lying about the consequences of the disastrous no-bail law (and other criminal justice “reforms”) for years.
Take, for example, his much-touted claim that only 1% of people arrested for a violent felony reoffended after being let out on their own recognizance: A closer look at the numbers shows that in fact two-thirds — two-thirds! — of such people cut loose in the suburbs and upstate who had a recent prior arrest were rearrested within two years.
Since crime is driven primarily by hardcore recidivism, it’s no shock that the overall results of the policies Lander’s long loved have been massive increases across all crime categories in the city since 2019.
And of course his eleventh-hour turn to “defending public safety” is still thin gruel: Cameras alone won’t stop make the toothpaste safe — New York still needs a justice system that routinely makes the perps do hard time, and Lander’s not demanding that.
The good news for New York is that Lander’s mayoral campaign is only limping along, same as the other progressive candidates’: The voters are sick of this blather.
So this particular pompous hypocrite, at least, may have talked himself out of any future in local politics.
