Living on edge, fearful they could be the next statistic in a surge of criminal activity in communities across the state — this should not be a New Yorker’s story. Unfortunately, following the misguided criminal-justice reforms championed by progressives, too many people fall victim to the corruption of career criminals thriving in a seemingly lawless state.

 Law-enforcement officials and district attorneys are desperate for the New York Legislature to act. So far, progressives have allowed their political stubbornness to halt any substantial solutions from being enacted. Inaction has shamefully allowed criminals of all ages and backgrounds to continue jeopardizing public safety.

Remarkably, the city of Syracuse has seen a 55 percent spike in shoplifting since 2021. The Onondaga County District Attorney has echoed the sentiment from law-enforcement officials across the state, citing repeat offenders as a cause. Some individuals have been arrested for the same incidents as many as 29 times. For context, in New York City, nearly one-third of all shoplifting arrests were committed by the same 327 individuals, who were arrested more than 6,000 times. As legislators, we must recognize the problems impacting our communities and resolve them with common-sense solutions.

Earlier this year, in the wake of these concerning statistics from New York City, Assemblyman Mike Reilly (R,C–Staten Island) introduced legislation (A.5029) to increase penalties for persistent offenders. The bill would give district attorneys the power to consider the aggregate value of misdemeanor petit larcenies for up to 18 months after the first conviction in order to enforce stricter penalties. If that value is between $1,000 and $3,000, district attorneys would be allowed to charge an individual suspected of the thefts with the felony crime of “grand larceny in the fourth degree.”

Additionally, as noted by Syracuse Police Spokesman Lt. Matthew Malinoski highlighting the 65 percent surge in car thefts from last year, “often, the thieves are juveniles.” This has been part of a growing concern since the legislature passed “Raise the Age” in the 2017-2018 budget. Members of the Assembly Minority Conference and district attorneys have repeatedly warned of major flaws in the legislation, which provided an avenue for younger individuals to keep committing violent crimes with little to no consequences. Albany County District Attorney David Soares recently called the refusal by the legislature to fix the law “legislative malpractice.” 

Even the strongest proponents of the “Raise the Age” law should be willing to undertake attempts to fix the glaring shortfalls and dangers that have resulted. The failure to provide accountability for youthful offenders of violent crimes is a disservice to public safety. There used to be mechanisms in place to identify troubled youth and provide opportunities for intervention before they progress to more violent criminal acts.

 The Assembly Minority Conference has made a number of recommendations to address faults in the current law. Our legislation would:

• Require any violent felony offense — especially gang assault and possession of a weapon — committed by 16-year-old or 17-year-old adolescent offenders to be maintained in the youth part of criminal court unless all parties agree to move the case to family court. 

• Include and define “circumstances” that would prevent a non-violent felony case from being moved to family court, should a district attorney prove one or more circumstances exist.

• Amend Criminal Procedure Law and the Family Court Act to ensure judges, prosecutors, and defense counsel can access records pertaining to arrests and juvenile-delinquency proceedings.

• Require a victim of a crime committed by a person under the age of 18 to be notified of the case outcome.

  It’s time to start prioritizing public safety and putting an end to the career-criminal lifestyle. However well-intended progressives’ criminal-justice reforms may have been, the result is causing chaos. The legislature has a responsibility to work with stakeholders across the criminal-justice system to deliver meaningful change to restore order in our communities. Members of the Assembly Minority Conference remain ready and willing to begin the conversation.        

William (Will) A. Barclay, 54, Republican, is the New York Assembly minority leader and represents the 120th New York Assembly District, which encompasses all of Oswego County, as well as parts of Jefferson and Cayuga counties.

A report from Northwestern University’s Medill School puts it bluntly: The loss of local journalism that we’re seeing in the United States is “a crisis for our democracy and our society.” I couldn’t agree more.

We rely on free and vigorous news media for the effective functioning of our democracy, at all levels of government. An informed citizenry is an empowered citizenry.

When we lose news coverage, we lose oversight of our public officials. We need the press to be constantly looking in every nook and cranny where our politicians are working. America’s founders recognized this, enshrining freedom of the press in the First Amendment.

Early American newspapers, of course, were often partisan and aligned with political factions, but they played a crucial role in creating an identity for the new nation. The French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, a keen observer of the young American republic, wrote that its newspapers were “the power which impels the circulation of political life.”

We still rely on news media to understand the workings of government. Newspapers, especially, play a key role in civic education and community engagement, which are essential to good governance. While serving in Congress, I learned that visiting a local newspaper office was a great way to learn what constituents were thinking.

But trends in business and technology have devastated local news. With the rise of the internet, Americans increasingly got their news online; many concluded they didn’t need to read the local paper. Newspapers relied primarily on advertisers to make money, but businesses found they could better target their ad dollars online. Newspaper revenue declined precipitously.

Closings and mergers followed. The U.S. has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005, according to the Medill School. Most of the newspapers that have shut down were weeklies serving small towns and rural communities. That’s been the trend here in Indiana, where a third of all weeklies disappeared in a recent 15-year period. Readership of the state’s newspapers shrank by half.

More than one in five Americans now live in what scholars refer to as news deserts, communities that lack or are at risk of losing local news sources. Seventy million people live in counties without a newspaper or served by only one paper. The newspapers that remain employ fewer journalists.

Studies have shown that, without strong local news, there’s more corruption in government, and taxes and municipal-bond costs are higher. Not surprisingly, voting rates are lower when no one is covering elections. As Americans increasingly get their information online or from partisan cable TV, political polarization grows more extreme. Fake news and conspiracy theories proliferate. This is an important cause of the dysfunction we’re currently seeing in Congress.

It’s true that news media have evolved throughout our nation’s history. Radio and TV disrupted the news business before the internet; and, if print newspapers go extinct, people will still seek out news. 

We are seeing some encouraging signs with the growth of high-quality, reliable online news organizations, some of them following a nonprofit model. But digital-news outlets employ relatively few journalists compared to the newspapers of the past, and they tend to be concentrated in affluent urban areas and state capitals. Rural communities and small towns are increasingly left without local news.

On a positive note, the situation is widely recognized as the crisis that it is. Universities, nonprofits, and advocacy groups are working to find solutions. Major philanthropies such as the MacArthur and Knight foundations are pledging hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalize local news. Civic-minded individuals and organizations are stepping up to buy local newspapers or start new ones.

It’s essential that these efforts succeed. The future of our democracy and our society depends on it.        

Lee Hamilton, 92, is a senior advisor for the Indiana University (IU) Center on Representative Government, distinguished scholar at the IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, and professor of practice at the IU O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hamilton, a Democrat, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years (1965-1999), representing a district in south-central Indiana.