'The Five' slams bail reform after Chinatown assault: Supporters should house suspects if jail is wrong
Alexander Wright, 48, allegedly committed an unprovoked assault on a woman in Manhattan
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The panel on "The Five" debated the continuing growth of bail reform policies in states like New York, where violent, career criminals are let out on bond after their arraignment rather than held at a place like Rikers Island.
In a surveillance video posted by State Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, D-Lower East Side, 48-year-old Alexander Wright was allegedly seen walking down Bayard Street near the Bowery and randomly slugging a 55-year-old woman. The woman grabs her face in pain and collapses against the pillar of an outdoor eatery.
Wright is a homeless man with 41 prior convictions stretching back to a 3rd-degree-robbery charge shortly after his 17th birthday in 1989. The attack also comes as crimes committed in the city's MTA transit system nearly tripled last month over May 2020.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}On "The Five," host Jesse Watters compared Wright to a "hand grenade," given his rap sheet:
"You don't keep putting a hand grenade on the street."
Host Greg Gutfeld added that most if not all of the clamoring for more bail reform and more lax policies geared toward criminal offenders and defendants is coming from the political left.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"It's amazing how the left can condemn every micro-aggression but when there is real aggression, it's crickets – or cicadas," he said.
"We learned a couple of lessons in the world of cause and effect: I'm a libertarian, but we need prisons," he continued.
"If the politicians want to release [suspects], take them into their own homes. Put your money where your mouth is. Don't put them among elderly people in Chinatown -- The prisons are less crowded but the hospitals are more crowded with people with black eyes."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The "Gutfeld!" host added that there could be grounds for a class-action lawsuit against city government for failing to protect the populace by rallying around bail reform and other dangerous policies.
"There is no retribution. You never hear the politicians talking about this. We are the only people pointing this out. The politicians figure nobody sees this stuff. They don't live in these neighborhoods," he said.
Host Dagen McDowell also pointed to the Democratic Party's control of all levers of power in New York's state capitol.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}"Liberal parole boards releasing cop killers and child murderers and the idiots in Albany are pushing forward with even more parole reform," she said.
"Here's what is going on. When politicians are asked about these policies they change the subject because they refuse to own them."
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's parole board in 2020 released inmate Anthony Bottom, a former Black Liberation Army soldier who was convicted of luring two NYPD officers – Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones – into a 1971 ambush in Harlem, killing both.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}In 2019, following a commutation of her sentence by Cuomo, ex-Weather Underground radical Judith Clark was released on parole -- 28 years after being the getaway driver in the deadly 1981 Brinks robbery at the Nanuet Mall near Clarkstown, N.Y.
One other convict from the armed-robbery-turned-triple-murder case, Kathy Boudin, was released from a New York prison in 2003 and went on to become an adjunct at Columbia University.