"The state of New York has a tendency to have knee jerk reactions without proper hearings or vetting," New York GOP Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis told Townhall on Sunday. Malliotakis is currently running for Congress NY-11 and scored President Trump's endorsement in February.
New York, particularly in the Andrew Cuomo years, has been obsessed with "this rush to be the first in the nation, to be the most progressive."
As a result, Malliotakis said, "there’s a lot of carelessness."
And this time that carelessness has resulted in the state legislature's new police reform measure. The legislation repeals 50-a, which kept secret officers' disciplinary records, and a host of other provisions, was hailed by Gov. Cuomo as "the most aggressive" in the nation. On Friday, when Cuomo signed the legislation, he added that he would defund any police agencies who don't enact the reforms. The assemblywoman said she only voted for one or two items in the measure.
"I don’t support any attempts to defund our law enforcement...I don’t support it and I think it’s very dangerous," Malliotakis said.
During Cuomo's press conference in which he announced the police reforms, he made no mention of the 400 NYPD officers who have been injured in the George Floyd-related protests that have swept through the city.
"Our local leadership has not denounced the acts of violence toward our police," Malliotakis noted.
The assemblywoman started to sound off on the state's new bail reform law that ties the hands of the judges from being able to hold looters and anarchists on bail, but she said that was "a whole other story."
Bill de Blasio is a lost cause on criminal justice too. He didn't escape her scorn, particularly after the city decided to release hundreds of Rikers Island inmates in hopes of decreasing the spread of the coronavirus in the jail. The mayor was surprised to hear that hundreds of those released prisoners had returned to lives of crime. She wasn't.
"He’s delusional to think that wasn’t going to happen," Malliotakis said.
By the way, she noted, the city didn’t release just low level offenders. Because of the bail law, "you had the worst of the worst in Rikers," she explained. "You had murderers, you had rapists, you had the worst gang members." The bail law releases some serious offenders, such as those being charged with strangulation, vehicle manslaughter, or homicide.
"The mayor acting as if he didn’t know is ridiculous," she said.
It gets worse. Malliotakis mentions that Washington Democrats, including her opponent, incumbent Rep. Max Rose, voted to mimic the New York law on the federal level, including it in the Heroes Act. You can read that provision here under "Limitation on Pre-trial Detention."