The Democratic Socialists of America want to decriminalize groping someone on the subway. Also petty theft, harassment, and second-degree sexual assault. They're not proposing to reduce penalties or revisit sentencing. The plan is to eliminate misdemeanor charges entirely — every one, off the books.

Not reform them. Abolish the entire category.

The DSA formally put the proposal in writing and attached their name to it. The full scope of what disappears: petty larceny, criminal mischief, unauthorized use of a vehicle, harassment, forcible touching, second-degree sexual assault. These aren't parking tickets. They're the charges that create a documented record when someone physically violates another person. Remove the charge, and the record vanishes. The act still happened. The victim still knows. The system shrugs.

If the people proposing this haven't bothered to read the list of offenses they're wiping out, that's not ideology. That's negligence dressed up as compassion.

The DSA isn't a fringe newsletter operation anymore. Their most prominent member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, represents New York's 14th Congressional District in the U.S. House. Their other headliner, Zohran Mamdani, is the Mayor of New York City. These aren't protest candidates holding signs outside City Hall. They run City Hall. They write the laws. They set the enforcement priorities.

And those enforcement priorities now apparently include making it impossible to charge someone for groping a stranger on the train.

New York City already ran a version of this experiment. Bail reform eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanor and nonviolent felony charges starting in 2020. Repeat offenders cycled through the system faster than the paperwork could keep up. The city spent the next three years arguing about whether the policy caused rising crime or merely coincided with it. The DSA apparently reviewed those results and concluded the problem was that they hadn't gone far enough.

Mamdani's office has not outlined how victims of misdemeanor-level offenses would seek justice under the proposed framework. That's not an oversight. When the policy goal is abolition, there is no framework. The question answers itself.

The DSA posted the proposal publicly. They put their name on it. The Mayor of New York City carries their endorsement. A sitting member of Congress carries their card. And the policy they're advocating would strip legal protection from every person in the city who's been groped on the train, robbed at a bodega, or harassed on the street.

Forcible touching is still on the books in New York — for now. The DSA would like to fix that.