Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice just can’t catch a break.  Granted, she road the coattails of Tom Suozzi into office, having brought little to the table on her own and evoked the wrath of everybody in her office in first 7 minutes in office.  But that doesn’t make her a bad person, does it?

Well, putting the hate aside, Newsday has run  a series of articles about her new initiative to try to put a stop to rampant low-level drug dealing in Hempstead.  After capturing numerous people selling drugs in an open air market, cops rounded the bunch up and brought them to a meeting at the African-American Museum.  There, she told them that they have two choices, either clean up or go to jail.  These weren’t those nice, clean, sympathetic first time dealers, but people with prior convictions, violent background and sociopathic issues.

There are stipulations. It’s a one-time offer for the suspects, who have previous arrests and face prison terms ranging from a year in jail to life in prison. And they had to show up last night to accept the terms of the deal at a town hall meeting at the African-American Museum in Hempstead, Rice said

Rice offered fast-track access to a broad array of services, from education to drug treatment to psychological therapy.  One would think that the community, upon hearing of this liberal’s dream, would go after her with torches and pitchforks.  But that’s not at all what happened.  Instead, she was attacked by criminal defense and civil rights lawyers.  Notably, Fred Brewington complained that this was racist, because it started in a black neighborhood.

Marty Tankleff lawyer, Bruce Barkett, was even more strident:

[F]requent Rice critic Bruce Barket, another Garden City defense attorney, said there “ought to be an investigation on how these individuals were selected and why other individuals were not included.”

“It’s an outrageous abuse of power,” he added. “It was not a rational approach to a systemic problem.”

How dare this prosecutor help people rather than prosecute.  Bruce’s idea of an outrage is, well, broad.

But Rice didn’t dream this plan up on her own.

David Kennedy, professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, developed the anti-crime strategy while at Harvard University. He said the program targets violent drug markets, which happen to be in neighborhoods with minorities.

“It is a reality that those drug markets that are public, out of control, violent and most destructive to the community, are in troubled minority neighborhoods,” Kennedy said. “That’s not racism; that’s a fact.”

Whether this program will work is hard so say.  It’s one of those things that may well sound better in theory than it pans out in practice.  But does it not include so many of the things that we have long sought to attain for defendants?  Treatment.  Education.  Therapy.  And no prison.  How did this suddenly because an “outrage” because it came with the blessing of the District Attorney?

And unforuntately, the hard fact is that the program started in Hempstead because there just wasn’t an available open-air drug market on the north shore to use as an example.  And finally, if we keep harping on the fact that old strategies have failed, then we have to consider, if not embrace, new ideas.  This knee-jerk rejection of a potentially beneficial new idea is not merely silly, but it reduced its detractors to hypocrites.  Grow up and give it a chance.  It may actually work, but even if it doesn’t, it’s a step in the right direction.