EDITORIAL

Much ado about a lot

Posted

What drives someone to commit a crime? It’s an age-old question lacking a simple answer, and any real motivation to solve it. Instead, we focus more on reacting to a criminal act than proactively exploring the root causes that lead to such legal transgressions in the first place.

Not Maryville University. The St. Louis-based institution pinned a predilection for crime on biological factors like brain function and dopamine levels as well as sociological and psychological issues including socioeconomic disadvantages and peer pressure.

Yet, no matter what the cause, who is being arrested and actually sent to prison is quite disproportionate from the rest of the population. That’s exactly what New York’s criminal justice services division found, to really no one’s surprise.

Looking at statistics from 2019, the agency found that despite making up just 15 percent of the state’s population, Black adults accounted for 38 percent of New York’s total arrests, and 48 percent of its prison population.

It’s the kind of data that can’t simply be waved off as “one of those things.” Instead, it’s indicative of a much larger issue where belief some populations may get targeted over others by law enforcement and prosecutors isn’t simply anecdotal.

This is a problem either Yonkers mayor Mike Spano doesn’t understand, or simply chooses to ignore. To him, joking a sitting congressman — especially a Black sitting congressman — should be arrested based on how he voted on the House floor is much ado about nothing.

But it’s not. U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman already is one of a few Black lawmakers arrested by U.S. Capitol Police in recent months as part of demonstrations outside the iconic congressional building.

Even putting that aside — which we shouldn’t — threatening to arrest someone based on their beliefs or how they express it is antithetical to what America is. Bowman voted against President Biden’s infrastructure bill because he and other members of The Squad believed unpairing that bill from the president’s signature Build Back Better legislation would essentially kill it, costing milions of people some of the very services they need as we try to find our way through these current economic pressures.

And what we can’t forget is that Bowman was right. Build Back Better became an embarrassing defeat for Biden.

There are simply things we don’t joke about. The threat of removing civil liberties — especially from someone who has had those liberties stripped from him in the past — is right at the top of the list.

To Spano this may have just been political rhetoric, as he later described on the same CBS television station his wife works as an anchor. But it’s dangerous rhetoric. And if Spano really does have his eye on moving up to higher office, that’s a lesson he needs to learn sooner rather than later.

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crime data, racial profiling, protests, Jamaal Bowman, Mike Spano,

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