California: LA County Begins Policy Of Zero Cash Bail

Los Angeles County’s zero-bail policy takes effect – KTTV Los Angeles, 2023/02/22

Los Angeles County officially moved to a zero-bail system Sunday, ending the years-long standard of setting cash bail amounts for defendants commensurate with the severity of the crime they are accused of committing — a process critics say favors the rich while doing little to protect public safety.

But the zero-bail system has come under fire from hard-line law-and- order backers who contend it removes accountability from the justice system by allowing the vast majority of arrestees to be quickly released from custody rather than kept in jail as they await charges and trial, unless they are accused of the most serious of crimes.

…
The new system is borne from long-held criticism that cash bail favored the rich, meaning well-heeled people arrested for even the most serious of crimes could pay their way out of jail, while low-income people languished behind bars for far lesser offenses. The new system is based not on cash, but on the risk an offender presents to public safety or the possibility the person might fail to appear in court.

This is not about equity. This is changing the system so that it will be subjective to who they hold in jail, and who they let go.

With cash bail, it was based on money – which is semi-objective. Yes the poor could not post bail, but typically monetary bail amount was based on the crime. But they could set bail amounts high enough to punish rich people.

Now that the requirement of money is removed, local governments can be totally subjective with who they let go and who they keep in prison.

So with the underlined, it’s totally subjective based on perceived risk to society. We can see how this would be misused politically – while at the same time releasing more criminal offenders back into society.