Wilding at will NYs crime reforms let kids sow terror on our streets

On the sunny last Saturday of March, 6-year-old Inez O’Brien and her mom Ellena headed home to Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn after going out for mother-daughter haircuts.They exited the J train at Halsey Street, planning to pop into a bodega on their way.As they passed PS 137, Inez’s school, they saw a group of five pre-teens, all about 11 or 12, who were obviously out to make trouble.

The kids had surrounded a car in the street and were bashing it with the plastic barrels of their Nerf toy guns.Once the car sped off, the gang looked for a fresh target.“Let’s get that lady, now!” one shouted.They swarmed Inez and her mom, shoving the Nerf guns in their faces and firing pellets at painfully close range.One gun hit Inez in the mouth, bruising her lip.“Stop, this is scaring us!” Ellena cried, as she pushed the toys away.But one kid succeeded in whacking Ellena’s head before the group ran off.Ellena went to the hospital and needed five staples to close the bloody gash.

There, she met a food deliveryman with a punched-in face who had apparently encountered the same kids.At home, Inez was hysterical.Her little brother, age 4, saw his mom drenched in blood and vomited.When patrol officers drove Ellena around the neighborhood, she identified two of the attackers.

One youth — 120 pounds and five-foot-two — was charged with felony assault for pummeling Ellena with “intent to cause serious physical injury.”But NYPD’s juvenile desk had to release the adult-sized thug “due to age.”And that’s it.No follow-up, and certainly no justice.“We want accountability,” Ellena’s husband Matt told me.

“What’s going on? It’s a horrible thing that kids can just run up and assault a woman and her child.”But that’s exactly what New York now encourages.In recent years, wilding — youths wreaking random, group violence just for the exhilaration of it — has increased because the consequences for it have evaporated.“There’s more wilding because we made...