NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton warned Wednesday that “well-intentioned” social programs are keeping too many violent criminals from where they belong — behind bars.
“There are people in our society, I’m sorry, they’re criminals. They’re bad people. You don’t want to put them in diversion programs; you don’t want to keep them out of jail,” Bratton said on the John Gambling radio show.
“We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time, because they’re a danger to the rest of us, and that’s the reality.”
The top cop had said at a press conference a day earlier that an overwhelming percentage of people who commit shootings have either fired at someone before or taken a bullet themselves, and that some people are just “committed to a life of violent crime” and can’t be reformed.
“We can’t lose sight of the fact that we have a hardcore criminal population in this city of several thousand people who have no values, who have no respect for human life,” he added to Gambling.
Bratton said social programs “have a role to play” but can’t be expected to help everyone.
“We need a degree of balance, and I think unfortunately it’s been tipping too much on the side of … letting them out,” Bratton said.
His comments come about a month after Mayor de Blasio unveiled a get-out-of-jail-free plan that would a keep low-level offenders from being held on bail for non-violent crimes, including some felonies.
Bratton said at the time that he supported the mayor’s efforts, but he doesn’t want the system to go easy on more violent criminals.
He said he talked about the issue with other police commissioners while at a national policing conference in Washington, DC, where his counterparts also expressed frustration with social programs in their cities.
“This is a growing problem in most cities in the country, one that is being impacted by the increasing efforts to get people out of prison and the increasing efforts to keep people from going into prison,” he told reporters Tuesday.
“We were of one mind … that there are a core group of individuals who should be put into prison and kept there for extended periods of time,” he continued. “They are the shooters, they are the people committing these murders.
“While we are all supportive of the idea that there are too many people in prison who don’t need to be there … there are certainly a group of individuals we all need to work hard to put in jail.”