The nation watched with horror the viral video of yet another black-on-Asian unprovoked beating in New York on Monday. A security camera showed the assailant randomly beating a 65-year-old Asian woman in broad daylight in front of her midtown Manhattan apartment. The man punched and beat her so severely that she remains hospitalized.

Thankfully, on Wednesday morning the suspect was caught, but his rap sheet once again raises questions about the criminal justice system in New York City.

There is a lot to say about the rash of black-on-Asian crimes (blamed on white supremacism, of course) unfolding on New York's streets and subways similar to the black-on-Jewish attacks in recent years. However, given my focus on criminal justice, my first question is always about the individual's rap sheet. As I've chronicled over the past several years, whenever there is a viral beating in New York City, the suspect invariably had a long rap sheet and was let out on the streets.

Brandon Elliot, 38, who allegedly told the elderly victim, "F*** you, you don't belong here" as he kicked her head on the ground, was arrested by NYPD on Wednesday morning. The New York Post is reporting that Elliot was convicted of stabbing his own mother to death in 2002, but had been paroled in November 2019. If you remember, that was when the city began emptying its jails after passage of several jailbreak bills and implementation of the new de-incarceration agenda. Elliot also had a previous robbery arrest, according to police, and lived at a nearby homeless shelter. Perhaps he was homeless because he killed his own mother.

What could possibly motivate city officials to parole a man like this? Whether he is criminally and violently insane or just a regular violent criminal shouldn't matter. Someone who stabs his mother to death at a young age clearly is irremediably broken and needs to be locked up for life. But this is what happens when both parties spend five years promising to release "low-level, nonviolent" offenders. Everything is now deemed low-level. Evidently, the definition of high-level, violent offenders is only reserved for those caught opening a business without people wearing masks.

What everyone is missing in the rancor of racial debates in this country is that we have violent criminals of all sorts who go undeterred because of the unstoppable jailbreak agenda. Almost every violent random attack is committed by a known criminal offender. I'm sure the man caught on camera brutally beating an Asian man unconscious on a New York City subway the very same day also has a rap sheet. Both cases appear to be black-on-Asian hate crimes, and both incidents reveal the weakness in our society, with not a single bystander intervening. Both of these issues need to be discussed at the societal level. But from a criminal justice standpoint, if we only locked up the violent criminals, we'd prevent a lot of crime – whether it's motivated by hate, greed, insanity, or anything else.

The real question is how many more people like Brandon Elliot are walking the streets, relative to last decade, when we were still locking up the bad guys? Unfortunately, we will only find out the answer after they strike and needlessly victimize more innocent Americans. It must be all that white supremacism in the air.