New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says that too many people are being let out of jail in the city, reports the New York Daily News. Bratton is singing a different tune from his boss, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has stressed cutting the jail population. “There are people in our society — I’m sorry, they’re criminals. They’re bad people. You don’t want to put them in diversion programs. You don’t want to try to keep them out of jail. We need to work very hard to put them in jail and keep them there for a long time, because they’re a danger to the rest of us,” Bratton said on the John Gambling radio show.
Bratton said efforts to keep offenders out of jail have gone too far. “We need a degree of balance, and I think unfortunately it’s been tipping too much on the side of 'Let 'em out,'” he said. “The problem with letting them out is there's nothing to do when they come out. They can't find jobs, so a lot of them go back to the crimes that put them in jail in the first place.” De Blasio wants to shrink the population at city jails by 25 percent, and to eliminate money bail for 3,000 nonviolent defendants and instead put them under pre-trial release. While Bratton did not criticize those specific efforts, he emphasized the need to keep criminals behind bars. “Some of what’s getting lost in this effort to let people out of jail and keep people from going to jail, those are well intended efforts but we can’t lose sight of the fact that we have a hard-core criminal population in this city of several thousand people who have no values, who have no respect for human life,” Bratton said.