Mysonne Linen<\/a>, a rapper who served seven years in state prison for committing armed robberies in the 1990s. <\/p>\nNow he is going to sit on the mayoral transition\u2019s \u201ccriminal legal system committee,\u201d boasting on Instagram that \u201cwe are building something different.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n
Many New Yorkers may think none of this makes any sense. <\/p>\n
But in the world of radical left politics in which our mayor-elect marinates, it makes complete sense.<\/p>\n
Because all these appointments are evidence not just that Mamdani likes to pal around with bad people \u2014 we already knew that. <\/p>\n
The policies are based around Mamdani\u2019s career-long belief that prisons are the problem and that closing them is the solution. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same thinking that means he will take advice from someone who beat up and robbed cabdrivers, but not from cabdrivers who have been beaten up and robbed.<\/p>\n
This makes sense only if we understand the kinds of models that Mamdani and his fellow radicals look to.<\/p>\n
High up on their list of happy places is the system of justice that has been tried out in South Africa. <\/p>\n
This is the system known as \u00ad\u201crestorative justice.\u201d<\/p>\n
It emerged out of the post-apartheid era when the remarkable \u201ctruth and reconciliation\u201d commissions ensured that the country didn\u2019t fall into an endless series of trials of people who had committed terrible wrongs during the apartheid era.<\/p>\n
New, leftist approach<\/p>\n
But underneath that, a whole new approach to crime and justice was developed. <\/p>\n
Professing to be rooted in traditional, local African customs and traditions, it is inevitable that this Third Worldist hokum would appeal to Mamdani and company. <\/p>\n
It is the sort of claims that Mamadani\u2019s father and others have spent their lives pushing from within America\u2019s universities.<\/p>\n
The belief system is centered on the idea that criminal justice as most of us understand it is a \u201cwhite\u201d and \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 \u201ccolonialist\u201d idea. <\/p>\n
It suggests that identifying criminals, convicting them for crimes and sending them to prison does not address the \u201croot causes\u201d of violence and that older, pre-colonial traditions are needed to address justice.<\/p>\n
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Several things need to be noted here.<\/p>\n
The first is that there was no golden age of justice before the colonial era. <\/p>\n
Most of Africa \u2014 including South Africa \u2014 was governed by justice as brutal and arbitrary as possible in centuries past. <\/p>\n
The idea that incarceration for crime is some kind of white man\u2019s imposition on a previously Edenic society is utter fantasy. <\/p>\n
African tribes had their own ways of meting out justice, and I\u2019d be surprised if even Zohran Mamdani and his supporters would support some of those means.<\/p>\n
But \u201crestorative justice\u201d doesn\u2019t just blame white, Western systems for processes of punishment and imprisonment (also labeled as \u201cvengeance\u201d). <\/p>\n
It claims that in order to get past such \u201cwhite\u201d systems, it is necessary to involve the perpetrators of crime as well as its victims. <\/p>\n
This is meant to \u201cunlock\u201d the cycle of violence.<\/p>\n
It is why the mayor-elect has talked about the importance of replacing cops with mental health outreach workers.<\/p>\n
Certainly it is the case that this city and state needs far better facilities to address the mainly drug-driven mental-health-disaster cases that we can see on our streets every day. <\/p>\n
But turning roles that should be carried out by cops into situations overlooked by health workers puts the whole thing the wrong way around.<\/p>\n
The purpose of convicting, punishing and imprisoning people who commit crimes is not because it is fun to do so. <\/p>\n
Nor is it because it is some \u201cwhite\u201d tradition.<\/p>\n
It is because policing crime should primarily be about protecting victims and stopping there from being more of them. <\/p>\n
Imprisoning dangerous offenders like Mysonne Linen is necessary because it is necessary to prevent other cabdrivers in the city from being held up and violently robbed.<\/p>\n
Expect suffering<\/p>\n
But expect Mamdani and his new appointees to take a very different approach. <\/p>\n
And expect the whole city to suffer as a result. <\/p>\n
Why can I say with confidence that we will suffer from this approach? <\/p>\n
Well you only have to look at that great hope of Mamdani and company: South Africa.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, South Africa happens to have one of the highest crime rates of any nation in the world. I just checked our own State Department\u2019s travel advisory for the country: \u201cViolent crime is common and includes robbery, rape, carjacking and mugging.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other advice includes \u201cavoid walking alone, especially after dark.\u201d<\/p>\n
As they say: coming to a city near you. <\/p>\n
Very soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Well, New York \u2014 we\u2019re going to be in for quite a ride. But then I suppose many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[303,9,24,55,54,56,103,299,10857,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-68393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-crime","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-city-news","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nypd","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-south-africa","17":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}