Horowitz: Man arrested for randomly punching elderly woman in NYC had 18 prior arrests

Every day, another shocking video of a brazen violent crime committed in broad daylight in the once safe city of New York surfaces on the internet. Each time, we discover the attacker is a repeat violent offender who has cycled in and out of the jail cell without being held for any meaningful time.

We all watched in horror when the NYPD released a video of a man on a bicycle going out of his way to swerve over to an elderly woman and punch her in the face. Thankfully, four New York firefighters sprang into action and caught up with the suspect and held him down until police arrived. Yet another reminder on this anniversary of 9/11 that NYFD officers are some of the bravest people alive. The suspect was identified as 53-year-old Daniel Biggs.

So, who is Daniel Biggs and why did he feel that he could get away with such a brazen attack in broad daylight? According to police, he had 18 prior arrests for crimes that included robbery and assault. His most recent arrest was just last month, when he was charged with slashing another man's face.

You might be wondering how a man with 18 arrests who is then charged with stabbing someone could be released on the streets yet again to attack a woman in broad daylight. But as the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, fool me … 18 times?! … shame on me! At some point, you almost can't blame the criminal for thinking he is free to attack people with impunity. The problem is the New York laws on bail and the politicians pushing pro-criminal policies on multiple fronts.

In Cuomo and de Blasio's New York, the most violent repeat offenders now feel it's open season to attack the elderly and vulnerable. Just two weeks ago, a man with 14 prior arrests, including for recent violent incidents, was caught on camera on top of a woman in a subway trying to rape her in broad daylight. Despite his record, he was offered $75,000 bail and appears to have been released several days later.

In June, we all watched the shocking video of a 92-year-old woman get hit in the face and knocked to the ground by a man with 103 arrests, including a sex offender conviction.

Given how infrequently these violent criminals are locked up – both pretrial and post-conviction – how many of these women do you think will be willing to testify against their assailants knowing that the suspects will be roaming around and that thanks to New York's new discovery law, the suspects will immediately have the victims' contact information?

What is going in in New York, according to Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart, is the perfect storm of the bail law, rioting sapping police resources and deterring better policing, and coronavirus jailbreak.

"Individuals that are being released on their own recognizance that had not been previously, whether it's COVID, where we had to have officers step back slightly on search warrants, which is something that we always use to take guns off the street, and now, with the protests, we're seeing a level of cooperation that is a little bit challenging," said Hart in reference to recent gang-related shootings in what used to be a quiet suburb of NYC.

The hallmark of all these attacks is that they are violent, they target vulnerable people in public, and the perpetrators are career criminals who clearly fear no punishment. In other words, everything that former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani built in terms of criminal justice deterrent has been dismantled by Cuomo and de Blasio in a matter of a few years.

The transition from broken windows policing and tough sentencing to allowing open anarchy is harming the very people that de Blasio claimed to care for. Black lives, under a broken windows permissiveness policy, truly don't matter because their blood is spilled like water. While white people will suffer from assaults and muggings, as was the case in this particular incident, most of the shooting victims are non-white. As the Manhattan Institute's Rafael Mangual observes of New York City, this past June, 97 percent of the city's shooting victims were non-white. As he notes, through August, there were 1,004 shooting incidents in the city, which represents an 87% year-to-date increase over last year. That's an awful lot of black lives lost or harmed as a result of the Black Lives Matter agenda.

Fortunately for the less fortunate victims of crime, residents of the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan are now dealing with the "broken windows" with the homeless, public urination, and drug dealing right on their doorsteps – just like during the 1970s. Until wealthy people begin feeling the heat of the rising crime, the pressure on the police and local judges will continue to weigh on the side of the criminals.