Former Democratic New York Governor David Paterson sharply criticized New York City’s district attorneys office for declining to prosecute shoplifters and looters since they will not bring cases against anyone who steals anything $500 or less.
“It’s another example of the anti-social, lack of judgment and lack of concern for anybody else other than the individuals who are doing this,” Paterson told “The Cats Roundtable” host John Catsimatidis Sunday.
“It was very encouraging to hear that Eric Adams, unlike a lot of previous Democratic candidates, has not let these situations go by without comment. Now, we know he’s against shoplifting, but he started to talk about the ways in which we could start to control it, and one of them is to make sure that everybody gets prosecuted.”
Paterson also predicted that when crime decreases, people will come back to New York, saying that “people love New York and they’re sorry they’re out of the city.”
He added that “whenever you reduce crime in the neighborhood, you automatically spur economic development exponentially.”
Paterson also said is has taken time for New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul, to “get her hands around the machinery of government,” and noted that Hochul will need to look at the state’s transportation issues, education issues.
Paterson added that he thinks Hochul has been “very strong, very stable, and has opened up the doors of government and the ears of government, which we’ve needed for a long time.”
When asked by Catsimatidis about congestion pricing, Paterson criticized it as an “anachronism,” and that when he was on former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Congestion Pricing Task Force, there was the idea that people coming from outside the area in question could possibly pay some taxes in order to help lower congestion there. But, Paterson noted, after COVID-19 and its economic fallout, even trying to implement congestion pricing rules is clearly “a misunderstanding of the time period.”
“Right now, we’ve got to get the trains running, the people working, the kids educated in school, and the city running like it used to,” Paterson added.
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