Say hiya to Alvin Bragg’s newest victims.
The primary can be Scotty Enoe, 46, a CVS drug-store worker from Brooklyn taken into police custody after allegedly knifing a shoplifter to death during a fight Thursday morning.
One other is the decedent, 50-year-old Charles Brito — a vagrant with 14 shoplifting busts so far this year, and heaven solely is aware of what number of occasions he acquired away with the products.
And a 3rd is New York itself, as soon as once more scarred by Manhattan DA Bragg’s hunt-and-peck strategy to the penal code.
Shoplifting is beneath his consideration, don’t you recognize — so toothpaste is behind plexiglass panels all throughout the borough and serial boosters are peddling stolen property to bodegas and flea markets.
It’s not solely Bragg, after all; he’s simply the face of a progressive plague that treats so-called petty crime as an inconvenience that should be endured as a matter of social justice.
You know the way it’s — muscular law enforcement comes with “disparate impact,” so don’t go there.
One downside with this strategy — and there are numerous — is that over time (and never a lot time) petty crime mutates.
A junkie often boosting pints of ice cream for resale turns into a shoplifting wave that shutters big-box drug retailers throughout town and sharply raises costs within the shops that stay.
And it leads directly to violence of the sort that erupted at the CVS store at Broadway and 49th Street round 12:30 a.m. Thursday.
Particulars are murky, and aren’t they all the time? However plainly Brito had tried to go away the shop with stolen Gatorade; that Enoe protested and was then attacked by Brito; {that a} combat resulted and Brito was stabbed to dying.
Enoe was charged with homicide shortly thereafter.
Ah — so many questions.
Why homicide? And why not self-defense?
It was the third such incident in as many months in New York Metropolis, so is a pattern growing? If that’s the case, why?
Why certainly.
Violence in public places has become endemic in urban New York since Albany progressives rewrote the state’s penal regulation in 2018 — and solely a idiot can be shocked by a violent response.
However listed below are extra questions: What number of shoplifting arrests ought to it take earlier than a thief is seen as a risk not simply to the Gatorade show, however to a civil society?
Is 14 sufficient?
It’s a moot level so far as Charles Brito is anxious, unhappy to say — however he was simply one in all so many.
And there’s this: Is shoplifting a “crime of poverty,” because the prog elite maintains? Or does it largely victimize the poor?
Definitely Enoe can also be a sufferer — of Bragg’s permissiveness, for certain, but in addition of Brito’s predatory conduct.
Perhaps the thief didn’t need to die over a few bottles of power drink — however neither he nor his alleged killer deserved to be positioned in deadly proximity within the first place.
Positive, such encounters are singular — largely issues of explicit circumstance.
It’s progressive coverage that makes them inevitable — if not at forty ninth Avenue and Broadway at 12:30 on a July morning, then elsewhere, at another time.
And involving another individuals — most frequently poor and never white.
All that is on Alvin Bragg. He wants to look at his conscience.
bob@bobmcmanus.nyc
