Two teens shot near the Governor’s Mansion last week prompted Albany’s mayor to declare the city “flooded with guns” — months after Democrats ousted District Attorney David Soares for blaming the gun plague on faulty criminal-justice reforms.
Talk about karma.
Because Soares kept speaking up on how Raise the Age and other state “reforms” had spiked teen gun violence, Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan led local Democrats to endorse (and then elect) a rival candidate last year.
Soares, a lifelong progressive, didn’t believe that teens caught with loaded firearms “should go to family court and be able to walk right out of family court after having gotten juice and crackers” — but that’s what Raise the Age imposed.
The DA had first won office by denouncing the tough Rockefeller drug laws and their mandatory minimum sentences for narcotics trafficking, but his relentless criticism of criminal-justice reforms that went too far, compromising public safety, infuriated the Legislature’s Democratic leaders.
They preferred to silence the messenger rather than fix the flawed reforms that Soares warned had “normalized” youth violence.
Well, they ousted Soares, and youth gun violence in the Capital District continues unabated.
What a surprise!
His most trenchant question continues to reverberate: “At what number will the body count be enough to prompt action?” Soares asked after two fatal shootings in 2023.
Gov. Kathy Hochul this year is trying to fix one botched reform, the 2019 “discovery” rules that have forced the dismissal of thousands of criminal cases because of unworkable deadlines for prosecutors and other flaws.
But the Raise the Age law is near and dear to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and the rest of the Legislature’s Democratic majorities.
So the body count will keep on rising just beyond the doorstep of the Executive Mansion, and in poor, minority neighborhoods across New York.
