Mamdani just revealed his utter ignorance of how – Latest News
Mayor Zohran Mamdani lately visited the household of Jabez Chakraborty, the person shot by a police officer in Queens as he attacked him and his companion with a 13-inch carving knife.
After his thorough legal, medical and psychological evaluation of the case, the mayor opined that Chakraborty shouldn’t be arrested or prosecuted, that he needed mental-health therapy quite than jail and that his handcuffs needs to be eliminated.
Thankfully, Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz and a Queens County grand jury disagreed, and had Chakraborty arraigned on an indictment charging him with first-degree tried assault and possession of a weapon.
The mayor then repeated that Chakraborty shouldn’t be charged.
Mamdani’s statements and actions right here show a disturbing lack of information about actuality and how the criminal-justice system works.
The mayor doesn’t get to determine who will get prosecuted; the district lawyer does.
The mayor doesn’t get to determine what precipitated Chakraborty to behave as he did; that’s for the police and DA to research.
The mayor doesn’t get to deem Chakraborty no longer a menace to others or himself primarily based upon his dialog with Chakraborty, an obvious paranoid schizophrenic, and his grieving household.
Katz was proper to current this case to a grand jury. This will give the courtroom system a degree of control over Chakraborty.
His case will likely be dealt with within the Queens County Mental Health Court, the place legal and medical professionals, together with prosecutors and his lawyer, will help in figuring out the best consequence.
This case is a tragedy — for Chakraborty, his household and the officers concerned.
The mayor spoke to Chakraborty and his household, after which spoke up on his behalf.
Did he communicate to the officers concerned? They are his workers. Did he even marvel how they’re doing?
We ship our police into the road to put themselves in perilous conditions.
We ask them to risk their lives for us, however we are able to’t ask them to commit suicide by not defending themselves.
On Mamdani’s watch, by means of Sunday, 24 people have been murdered, 58 shot, 3,118 feloniously assaulted and 1,500 robbed, amongst different victims. How many of these people has he visited?
Oh, and did anybody on his workers advise him that perhaps he shouldn’t be speaking to a potential defendant who attacked two of his police officers? Is he able to testify about what Chakraborty advised him?
I perceive: The mayor dislikes cops, and his knee-jerk response to any incident the place they use drive is to be overly suspicious of their actions.
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists
Subscribe to our each day Post Opinion e-newsletter!
Thanks for signing up!
But as typical with police incidents, knee-jerk, ideological reactions by the left usually fly within the face of actuality.
In 2024, the NYPD responded to six.9 million 911 calls. Of these, 162,961 responses concerned an emotionally disturbed particular person.
Only 355 of these (0.2%) required the use of drive by police, and 353 of these concerned tasers.
In different phrases, in all of 2024, solely two of the 162,961 emergency calls that concerned EDPs resulted in police discharging firearms. That’s 0.0012% of all police EDP responses.
In one of these two responses, an EDP attacked the officers with a machete; within the different, the officers’ tasers didn’t stop the EDP as he attacked with scissors.
I get it. The mayor is taking part in to his base. To push his plan to ship social employees to circumstances like these, he irresponsibly injected himself into this one.
Far higher for him to look into what occurs to the mentally in poor health as soon as they develop into a recognized public-safety drawback: It’s very tough to keep mentally in poor health people in a psychiatric hospital in opposition to their will — legally and logistically — until they’re charged with a crime and held on bail.
That is the place the mayor ought to focus his consideration.
But that is what progressives do. They exaggerate a drawback, normally distorting an outlying incident, suggest ridiculous options, cite some ideologically pushed examine that helps their program after which ignore the implications of their actions.
Remember the 2019 bail reform? Progressives claimed nearly half the people in Rikers had mental-health points and shouldn’t be in jails. Their answer was to release them below the 2019 law.
Result? Thousands of mentally in poor health profession criminals had been set free on metropolis streets with no controls or assist systems.
Predictably, crime rose 40% nearly instantly and stays nearly 25% greater at the moment.
The mayor ought to step back, review the body-cam footage of this incident and ask himself what a social employee would have completed in a different way.
Mr. Mayor, that is actual life. It’s one factor to ship armed and educated police officers to deal with conditions like this; it’s fairly one other to ask an unarmed social employee to speak down a man charging at them with a 13-inch knife — and having just seconds to determine what to do.
Leave prosecution to the professionals. People are going to get harm.
Jim Quinn is a retired profession prosecutor within the Queens District Attorney’s Office, the place he served for 42 years.
