The Legal Aid Society condemned the New York City Police Department for baselessly blaming the rise in recent shootings, which has historically occurred during warm summer months, on bail reform and mass release efforts to free incarcerated New Yorkers vulnerable to COVID-19 from pretrial detention at Rikers Island. The NYPD continues to scapegoat reforms and release efforts, ignoring COVID-19 and the current economic crises, as part of a larger dog-whistling campaign to resist calls for fundamental change, reports NY1.

“As long as the people are marching and asking that the NYPD be accountable to us, we are going to keep hearing the same rhetoric, that every reform is a bad reform, as long as they don’t like it,” said Marie Ndiaye, Supervising Attorney of the Decarceration Project at The Legal Aid Society.