New York State Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher stood outside Manhattan Criminal Court last week and told reporters that "one recent study found that choosing not to prosecute someone for a low-level crime led to a dramatic reduction in crime."

So we've cracked the code. The way to reduce crime is to stop calling it crime.

Gallagher, a Democratic Socialists of America member who represents District 50 — covering Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn — was appearing alongside Court Watch NYC, a group that monitored 360 arraignments over four days and found that more than half involved misdemeanor offenses. Her conclusion wasn't that misdemeanors are a problem. Her conclusion was that prosecuting misdemeanors is a problem.

This is the same assemblywoman who argued back in August that shoplifting basic goods is essentially a human right. "No one should be arrested — much less jailed — for stealing a tube of toothpaste," she wrote on social media. She went further: "Incarceration separates people from their jobs, support services, & loved ones. It perpetuates cycles of poverty & crime."

So crime causes poverty, and poverty causes crime, and the fix is to just stop enforcing the law. Somewhere a philosophy professor is weeping.

Louder with Crowder picked up her latest remarks, and the mockery was immediate and deserved. Because what Gallagher is really saying — if you strip out the activist jargon — is that the official statistics look better when you stop generating official statistics. That's not a policy. That's an accounting trick.

She also offered this gem at the Manhattan Criminal Court press conference: "We are choosing to protect billion-dollar companies, like CVS and Walgreens, over the people who are struggling to get by." Which is an interesting way to describe law enforcement arresting people who steal merchandise from stores. By this logic, locking your front door is an act of class warfare.

The unspoken part of Gallagher's argument is what makes it so revealing. She isn't disputing that the crimes happened. She isn't claiming the people arrested were innocent. She's saying the crimes don't matter because the victims are corporations, and the perpetrators are sympathetic. That's not criminal justice reform. That's selective enforcement based on who the assemblywoman thinks deserves to be a victim.

Ask any bodega owner in Brooklyn — and there are a lot of them in District 50 — whether shoplifting feels like a victimless crime. Ask them whether the guy walking out with armfuls of merchandise is fulfilling a "biological need." Ask the cashier making $15 an hour who gets written up when inventory goes missing whether CVS is really the one being protected here.

Court Watch NYC monitored 360 arraignments in four days. More than half were misdemeanors. To Gallagher, that's proof the system is broken. To everyone who lives in the real world, that's proof there's a lot of misdemeanor crime in Manhattan. The data doesn't change just because you don't like what it says.

New York has already spent years running this experiment. Bail reform. Reduced prosecutions. Revolving-door arraignment courts. And the result hasn't been less crime — it's been less accountability. The crimes still happen. The victims still lose. The only thing that changes is whether it shows up on a spreadsheet.

Gallagher cited "one recent study" without naming it, which is the legislative equivalent of "my girlfriend goes to a different school." But even if such a study exists, the logic is circular: fewer prosecutions means fewer prosecuted crimes on the books, which means the prosecution-based crime stats go down. That's not a reduction. That's a reclassification.

The broken-windows theory said you stop big crime by enforcing small laws. Gallagher's theory says you stop small crime by refusing to enforce any laws at all. One of those theories cleaned up New York City in the 1990s. The other one is why you can't buy toothpaste without asking an employee to unlock the display case.