Deterrence. That is what’s missing from the equation in places like New York, and it is the overlooked reason why we are seeing so much violence against Jews, cops, and others in the Big Apple.

Much of the focus in the wake of the weekend anti-Semitic terror attack in Rockland County, New York, will be on the trend of anti-Semitism in the New York area. This was the 13th anti-Semitic attack in just two weeks. According to the NYPD, anti-Semitic incidents have spiked by over 63 percent in New York City this year. We are now also seeing this in Jersey City in the wake of the anti-Semitic attack on the kosher grocery earlier this month in which a black supremacist couple killed four people, including a police officer.

However, there is no evidence that there is anything new fueling these outrages in the New York-New Jersey area. Unfortunately, there have long been many who subscribe to the poisonous Jew-hatred of the likes of Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. That discussion deserves its own analysis and debate divorced from the criminal justice debate. What is new, however, is that there is no deterrent against such attacks any longer, just like there is no deterrent against other forms of crime, including drug trafficking, theft, subway violence, and assault on cops. Thus, all the potential violence, be it anti-Semitic, petty, or general violent crime, is now going kinetic.

Several years of policy after policy designed to reduce the prison population without reducing crime, culminating in New York’s omnibus jailbreak law beginning to take effect now, is likely the true culprit of all the violence. Societal changes have all thus far failed to stamp out hatred lurking in people’s hearts, but it takes only a functional criminal justice system that focuses on the victim and punishes criminals to prevent that hatred from killing or maiming people.