Brooklyn District Attorney and self-proclaimed progressive prosecutor Eric Gonzalez on Tuesday called for “tweaks” to New York’s disastrous bail reform laws.
“The system that we have now was meant to protect people from being needlessly detained on small amounts of cash bail,” Gonzalez said on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.” “Bail reform was needed, but we have to always continue to look at the data, and the data suggests that there’s some need for tweaks.
“Most of the people who are arrested for gun crimes are not incarcerated,” the top prosecutor said. “About 80 to 90 percent of the people who have been arrested for gun possession in Brooklyn are out. Either they’ve made bail or no bail was set on their case.”
His comments come as shootings are up in the city 32 percent so far this year over the same period in 2021, prompting a vowed crackdown on gun crimes from City Hall and even a visit to the Big Apple last week from President Biden.
New York’s controversial bail reform laws, which took effect in January 2020, barred judges from being able to set bail in nearly all misdemeanor and non-violent felony cases — dumping a slew of violent criminals back on the streets, where they allegedly committed more crimes.
Gonzalez told Lehrer he backs giving judges some kind of discretion in setting bail. A year ago, he told CBS, “We have to get judges involved.”
“I think it’s the wrong model just simply to look at the charge,” Gonzalez said Tuesday of the state’s current bail reform system, noting that state law classifies some crimes as “bail eligible” simply by their definition and others as ineligible.
“You have to be able to look at the person’s history,” he said, referring to the suspect.
Gonzalez said prosecutors’ hands were too tied when it comes to young offenders as well.
“A lot of 16- and 17-year-olds who are arrested with a gun, unless they’ve used that gun unlawfully against another person or displayed it during the commission of a crime, those cases are not eligible to go to court and they’ll be returned to family court,” he said. “There is no option for prosecutors to ask if those cases can stay in Supreme Court.”
Gonzalez, a native of East New York in Brooklyn, told Lehrer that if more shootings could be solved in the city’s underserved neighborhoods, that would help keep guns off the street.
“The clearance rate for shootings in communities of color was so low and remains very low,” he said.
“When I was a young man, I knew a lot of young people who carried guns, and they carried guns because they did not believe that the police or the criminal justice system could protect them, and they were going to protect themselves. We have to end that.”
Gonzalez said that while shootings and crime in general soared during the first year of the pandemic, gun crimes were down by 20 percent in Brooklyn in 2021.
“Shootings went up in jurisdictions that had tough-on-crime prosecutors as well as places that had more progressive prosecutors,” he said. “It was something about 2020 and this once-in-a-century pandemic that I think has caused this place that we’re in, and it’s a really bad place.”
The progressive prosecutor defended Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was widely criticized as “soft on crime” after he told his office to begin downgrading a slew of felony charges when he took the helm in January.
“I believe there was a communication problem in conveying what he had intended to do,” Gonzalez said of Bragg, adding that he knew his fellow prosecutor when Bragg was at the New York Attorney General’s Office.
“I know the DA, and I know he cares about public safety,” Gonzalez said.
Bragg has since walked back some of his controversial lenient policies amid outcry.
Mayor Eric Adams, a former city cop, announced the formation of a new NYPD anti-gun task force to address shootings, while Biden met with him to tout his own plans to crack down on gun trafficking and homemade “ghost guns.”