Your Blue City Violent Frequent Felon of the Day: Randy Negron

NYPD executives provide updates on an ongoing investigation in Manhattan. https://t.co/ofWzSUL49s

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) April 25, 2026

Randy Negron is a serial recidivist. He’s a frequent felon who should count himself lucky that he lives in a blue city with a progressive (read: Soros-backed) prosecutor who believes in something called “restorative justice.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, that means tilting prosecutorial decisions in the direction of criminals, reducing charges for even serious felonies down to the equivalent of jaywalking, — or dropping them altogether — and allowing perps to plead out on violent crimes, giving them stiff sentences like probation or home confinement.

The practitioners of this funhouse version of criminal justice claim this promotes equity. Or fairness. Or something.

The practical outcome of this brand of fashionably leftist ideology, however, is that it leaves law-abiding citizens to fend for themselves on the streets alongside criminals who should be staring at the walls in a graybar hotel somewhere. Instead, the thugs are free to continue running wild, re-offending, and victimizing more and more innocent people, some of whom wind up dead.

Which brings us back to Randy Negron. Yesterday, he (allegedly) walked up to a man who was sitting outside a convenience store in Harlem and shot him. Repeatedly. Luckily, a couple of NYPD plainclothes cops were driving by at the time and saw the whole thing. They chased him on foot, but as they got to him and opened fire, another unidentified man squeezed off a few rounds at Negron as well.

The mysterious second shooter (there are no grassy knolls that we know of at 125th and Amsterdam) then receded into the early Harlem evening and hasn’t been identified or found yet. As for Negron, he took one bullet in the bi-directional fusillade, but it isn’t known yet whether he was shot by the cops or by the mystery man.

The original victim is reported to be in serious, but stable condition. Negron will be just fine.

We know…you’re wondering what Negron’s criminal history looks like. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that he’s got lots of criminal justice system frequent flyer points, having been arrested 11 times before, “including (for) several other violent felonies.” In fact, he was out on parole — for an attempted murder conviction — when he shot the dude outside the c-store yesterday.

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again. Pro-criminal progressive prosecutors who refuse to prosecute are a clear and present danger to law-abiding citizens in and around the blue cities where they get themselves elected. The perp-friendly decarceration policies they practice — with little or no consequence for themselves — put real people in real jeopardy, subjecting them to burglaries, robberies, assaults, rapes and even murders that wouldn’t happen if the criminals they coddle had been behind bars.

The good news is it’s become increasingly difficult for politicians who run these blue cities and states to deny the people who have to deal with their ludicrous, utopian policies the means with which to defend themselves. Thanks to the Bruen decision, people trapped in these leftist ideological hellholes no longer have to justify their desire for gun ownership or a carry permit and demand has reflected the new reality. Since Bruen became the law of the land, the number of carry permit holders has skyrocketed (permitless carry has expanded, too) and gun ownership has increased markedly. Even in places like New York City.

From the Duke Center for Firearms Law . . .

The predictable impact of these legal changes was a rapid rise in permit applications in former may-issue states, as The Reload summarized here back in July.  For example, NYPD statistics released in late September show that the period from June 23-August 31 “account[ed] for nearly 50% of all new handgun permit applications” in New York City in 2022.  In other words, applications in the two months after Bruen equaled the number filed in the first 6-7 months of the year.  San Francisco similarly recorded a “dramatic spike” in concealed carry permit applications post-Bruen, receiving 45 applications in the weeks following Bruen when the city typically sees only 2 applications per year.  Hawaii also observed a notable increase in applications, and New Jersey officials projected over 200,000 concealed carry permit applications in the state after Bruen was issued.  New permit applications in Maryland from June 23 to July 11 increased 900% from the same period in 2021. 

While most of these jurisdictions reacted to Bruen by making permitting more time-consuming and expensive, those battles are being fought in courts across the country.

And what has the result of all this expanded gun ownership and carry proliferation been? Despite the tediously hysterical, chicken-little-ish, Jim Cramer-like predictions of the gun control industry, we’ve instead seen violent crime plummet to historically low rates.

And the effect hasn’t been restricted to homicides.

 

Why, it’s almost as if John Lott knew what he was talking about.