Four border-busting thugs are freed without bail after kicking two cops around Times Square, and they promptly go into the wind.
What a surprise.
Who would have dreamed that cop-fighters with no jobs, no community ties — and thus no reason to hang around to face criminal charges that could send them to prison for years — would choose to bolt?
Which is what Venezuelan “asylum-seekers” Darwin Gomes, 19; Kelvin Arocha, 19; Wilson Jurez, 21, and Yorman Reveron, 24, seem to have done.
They weren’t the only border-busters involved in Saturday night’s West 42nd Street cop beat-down — there were at least eight — but they were the first to be flushed through a system front-end loaded to favor criminals over public safety.
And now this newspaper reports that the four have split for California — if so, a poetically just destination: The Golden State more or less invented the sanctuary-city concept — and so Gavin Newsom stands to get a micro-dose of his state’s own medicine.
Not that New York is likely to run short of cop-fighting “migrants” soon.
Or progressive judges eager to put them back on the street.
Or elected officials reluctant to revisit the wrong-headed 2019 criminal-justice “reforms” that led to this latest insult to common decency — and to so many others before now.
Progressive pols see no problem here, of course.
They argue that ethnic disparities in prosecution and incarceration numbers are proof positive of a racist criminal-justice system — despite near-identical imbalances in crime commission and victimization rates.
The progressive solution to its perceived problem is simple enough: if too many people are going to jail, stop sending people to jail.
This bit of magical thinking led directly to the 2019 bail “reforms” — and also to changes in criminal procedure codes meant to hamstring prosecutors.
And these, in turn, almost immediately produced a crime wave that persists to this day — never mind the recent, albeit marginal, dips in crime achieved by a beleaguered NYPD.
Yes, there is a boring blah-blah-blah to this lecture.
But ignoring what the Legislature did in 2019; what then-Gov. Cuomo signed off on and what current Gov. Hochul refuses seriously to address won’t make the streets safer.
To the contrary — as Saturday’s Times Square melee and its disgraceful aftermath demonstrates.
On the other hand, who could ask for a more sharply defined illustration of the fruits of progressive governance.
There was a violent mob attack on two cops trying to keep order in an iconic section of the city — one vital to its economically crucial tourist trade — with an insane outcome: Instant freedom for the perps, who just as quickly disappear.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad?
Seems so.
All of this is on New Yorkers themselves, of course.
The progressive majority on the City Council, the state’s equally misguided legislative leadership and, say, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg didn’t pirate their positions, after all.
They were elected.
But, as it happens, this is a legislative election year — and thus New Yorkers have a choice.
Sending fewer progressives to Albany would be a first step in reclaiming the streets.
Sending more would be to surrender them — once and for all, with potentially lethal consequences.
Who’s ready for that.
Email: bob@bobmcmanus.nyc