Several borough District Attorneys in the city of New York have controversially decided to drop the majority of cases against rioters and looters who were arrested over the course of the last year, as reported by Breitbart.
The report first came from NBC New York, which says that “data reviewed by the NBC New York I-Team shows 118 arrests were made in the Bronx during the worst of the looting in early June.” Of those 118 cases, the Bronx DA has dismissed 73 cases, leaving only 45. There are still 18 cases open, and there have been just 19 convictions so far.
“In Manhattan,” the report continues, “the NYPD data shows there were 485 arrests. Of those cases, 222 were later dropped and 73 seeing convictions…another 40 cases involved juveniles and were sent to family court; 128 cases remain open.”
Anonymous sources claimed that one motivation for the dropping of cases was that the District Attorneys’ offices simply could not handle the overwhelming number of cases, with a backlog building up quickly due to the courts being shut down as a result of the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns. When asked about this reasoning, former NYPD Chief of Patrol Wilbur Chapman scoffed at the suggestion that it was too much work, quipping that “if they are so overworked that they can’t handle the mission that they’re hired for, then maybe they should find another line of work.”
There was a nationwide spike in violent riots, looting, assault, murder, and other crimes in the summer of 2020 following the accidental fentanyl overdose death of George Floyd, a black man, while in police custody in Minneapolis. The race riots that followed, which falsely blamed the police and baselessly accused American police of being “systemically racist,” saw the nation’s largest cities hit the worst, including New York. The violence was primarily carried out by the far-left domestic terrorist organizations Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
It is widely speculated that the reason the vast majority of such rioters have been allowed to go free is because the left-wing officials overseeing such jurisdictions, including mayors, governors, and district attorneys, share their political views and thus do not wish to see them prosecuted.