Tuesday’s arrest of Sean “Big Coop” Cooper again puts the lie to the claims of Gov. Kathy Hochul & Co. that New York’s criminal-justice reforms don’t need any more fixing. Indeed, they’ve turned criminal recidivists into “super perps.”
Before getting nabbed in the stabbing of Uber Eats delivery man Bharatbhai Patel during an attempted robbery on the Lower East Side, Big Coop had racked up an astounding 103 arrests — including 16 this year alone, the latest just 10 days before the stabbing.
Before the no-bail law, the ex-con would surely have been jailed in one of those earlier cases. But now serial offenders routinely get revolving-door treatment until they draw blood — the law leaves judges no choice. And so, as a law-enforcement source told The Post, Big Coop is “single-handedly responsible for Manhattan South’s spike in robbery and burglary.”
It took the alleged attack on Patel for a judge to finally order him held on $10,000 bail.
And he’s far from unique. Take Alexander Wright, arrested for assaulting a subway cleaner in August. He already had 41 priors, including for a hate crime that already made him a revolving-door-justice poster boy last year.
Or Austin Amos, finally jailed in the killing of cabbie Kutin Gyimah after 10 prior arrests, including for robbery and sexual misconduct.
Or the 10 career criminals The Post recently profiled who’d racked up nearly 500 arrests since the no-bail law passed in 2019, most of them still walking free.
As ex-Queens prosecutor Jim Quinn points out, after bail reform took effort on Jan. 1, 2020, more than 2,000 career criminal repeat offenders were released from city jails and “within weeks crime went up by double digits for the first time in almost three decades.”
Serial burglar Charles “Teflon con” Wold told The Post how “grateful” he was that judges repeatedly released him from custody amid a three-month crime spree in Manhattan and Brooklyn last year.
Yet Hochul & Co. pretend bail reform is a resounding success; any remaining issues are judges’ fault. In fact, the law still says judges must set bail only on certain offenses and only under the “least restrictive” conditions that will guarantee the defendant’s subsequent appearance in court proceedings.
Which makes it a “get out jail free card” for career criminals, springing recidivist felony offenders to re-offend — with more than half of violent offenders committing new crimes.
Until Hochul and the Legislature give New York judges the same discretion granted in every other state to consider a defendant’s criminal history in deciding whether to order remand (jail or more-than-meaningless bail), police and prosecutors can only do so much.
Come November, New York voters fed up with crime need to vote out Gov. Kathy Hochul and the lawmakers who made life miserable for the law-abiding.
