Much ado for many | The Riverdale Press
OWhat drives someone to commit a crime? It’s an age-old question with no simple answer and no real motivation to solve it. Instead, we focus more on reacting to criminal act than proactively exploring the root causes that lead to such legal transgressions in the first place.
Not the University of Maryville. The St. Louis-based institution has pinned a predilection for crime on biological factors such as brain function and dopamine levels as well as sociological and psychological issues including socioeconomic disadvantage and peer pressure.
Yet, whatever the cause, who is arrested and actually sent to prison is starkly disproportionate to the rest of the population. That’s exactly what the New York City Criminal Justice Services Division found, unsurprisingly.
Looking at 2019 statistics, the agency found that despite making up just 15% of the state’s population, black adults made up 38% of New York’s total arrests and 48% of its prison population. .
It’s the kind of data that can’t just be considered “one of those things”. Instead, it points to a much larger problem where the belief that certain populations may be targeted over others by law enforcement and prosecutors is not merely anecdotal.
It’s a problem Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano either doesn’t understand or simply chooses to ignore. To him, joking a sitting congressman — especially a black sitting congressman — should be stopped based on how he voted in the House is much ado about nothing.
But it’s not. US Representative Jamaal Bowman is already one of the few black lawmakers arrested by US Capitol police in recent months amid protests outside the iconic Congress building.
Even putting that aside – which we shouldn’t – threatening to arrest someone based on their beliefs or the way they express it is contrary to what America is. Bowman voted against President Biden’s infrastructure bill because he and other members of The Squad believed that decoupling that bill from the President’s signature Build Back Better legislation would essentially kill him, costing millions of dollars. people some of the very services they need as we try to find our way through these current economic pressures.
And what we can’t forget is that Bowman was right. Build Back Better became an embarrassing defeat for Biden.
There are just things we don’t joke about. The threat of taking away civil liberties – especially from someone who has had those freedoms taken away in the past – is high on the list.
For Spano, this may have been just political rhetoric, as he later described on the same CBS television station that his wife works as an anchor. But this is dangerous rhetoric. And if Spano really intends to rise to higher positions, it’s a lesson he needs to learn as soon as possible.