The effort to destroy bail reform was underway even before the law went into effect. Prosecutors and police unions issued ominous warnings about its imagined impact. One district attorney was even recorded training prosecutors in how to subvert the law.

It wasn’t until a spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes though, that the campaign really began to pick up steam. Some in the Hasidic community, an important voting bloc in New York, called on lawmakers to revisit the bail law. The New York Post, true to character, helped things along by telling the story of Tiffany Harris, a Brooklyn woman who allegedly slapped three Orthodox women and shouted an anti-Semitic slur, then was released without bail, only to be arrested the following day for allegedly punching a woman.

On Jan. 1, a judge ordered Ms. Harris held at a hospital to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. If anything, high-profile cases like this one should prompt calls for increased funding of the state’s supervised release programs, to ensure they are equipped to serve defendants fighting mental health or substance abuse issues. Roughly 40 percent of those locked up on Rikers Island are known to be suffering from mental illness — evidence of how New York has used its jails until now. But amid a deeply troubling rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes, the pressure is on to punish instead. So the Harris case, aided greatly by The New York Post, has led to calls for more incarceration.

“We need to make sure that habitual criminals stay behind bars — not on the streets,” Assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein wrote on Twitter on Dec. 30, two days before the bail law went into effect.

Never mind that bail is assessed in New York according to flight risk, not public safety. Never mind that Ms. Harris hadn’t been convicted of the crime. “It really is a vigilante mentality,” said Lisa Schreibersdorf‏, the executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services, which represents Ms. Harris.