(NYC) The Democrat agenda seems to be failing. Hundreds of prisoners released early from Rikers due to COVID concerns are being enabled to re-offend again and again without consequences, law enforcement leaders say.
“We’re continuing to see people get arrested over and over and let right back out. And it really defies common sense,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in an interview with NBC New York.
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Of approximately 2,500 defendants sprung from Rikers early because of COVID safety planning, at least 250 have been arrested again since, according to Michael LiPetri, chief of Crime Control Strategies for the NYPD.
Chief LiPetri tells NBC New York the NYPD did not object to releasing older defendants, nor those with underlying medical conditions. But he says the consequences of the larger-scale release of prisoners are now showing up in the arrest data, with those 250 re-offenders being arrested 450 times so far during the pandemic.
Josh Rahmani, co-owner of the drug store Prime Essentials, says he felt sad when he first saw surveillance tape of a man stealing socks and putting them on inside his store on Lower Broadway on June 6.
“I felt really bad that he got arrested for taking socks, food, and medicine,” Rahmani told NBC New York. “We would have just given it to him if he had asked.”
Rahmani and his business partner Ebi Khalili said they were appalled to learn from the News 4 I-Team that the man, identified by the NYPD as 27-year-old Jonathan Martinez, had already been rearrested three others times before throwing a rock through his store window that Saturday.
“This is shocking and disturbing,” Khalili said. “It’s a bad decision by our leaders.”
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