The Legal Aid Society joined fellow advocates yesterday on a press call to educate reporters about how any tweaks to the newly enacted pretrial reforms would undermine the spirit of the laws and further marginalize New Yorkers of color. Legal Aid also warned of legislating a “dangerousness” provision, a tool that some states employ which requires judges to engage in the wholly unreliable guesswork of predicting future crimes, reports Gothamist.

“Black and brown people no matter where they are in this country, to be frank, are going to always be labeled as a higher risk than white people. And that is not because black people are more dangerous or more likely to commit crimes, it is a direct result of over-policing and mass criminalization of black and brown bodies, and especially those who are poor,” said Marie Ndiaye, Supervising Attorney of our Decarceration Project.