Good News, Criminals: Manhattan’s Next D.A. Has Your Back

R eeling psychologically and economically from the pandemic, New York City could use a boost. Unfortunately its central borough’s choice for district attorney is a guy whose big selling point is telling us about all of the criminals he won’t be prosecuting.

Alvin Bragg has won the Democratic primary for D.A. of New York County (Manhattan) by promising not to prosecute minor crimes such as trespassing, resisting arrest, turnstile jumping, and traffic offenses. In a debate, Bragg (who previously prosecuted state crimes in the attorney general’s office and federal ones in the Southern District of New York) boasted that he had only ever prosecuted one misdemeanor, when he charged some men for blocking access to a Planned Parenthood office.

“Non-incarcerations are the outcome,” read his campaign materials, “for every case except those with charges of homicide or the death of a victim, a class B violent felony in which a deadly weapon causes serious physical injury, or felony sex offenses.” In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Bragg is almost certain to win the general election against a Republican opponent in the fall. His proposals threaten to be yet another catastrophe for Manhattan — the economic heart of the region — by bringing San Francisco’s laissez-faire prosecution philosophy to New York City and promoting social decay in the name of social justice.

A co-director of the Racial Justice Project at New York Law School, Bragg is a graduate of Harvard Law School who claims that police pointed guns at him six times before he was 21, when he was growing up in Harlem. He specifically rejects the “broken windows” model of policing whose implementation accompanied 20 years of steep declines in the crime rate under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg. Now that the crime rate is spiking (in the last two years, murders are up 43 percent and shootings have more than doubled in New York City) he frames crime primarily as a quality-of-life issue for criminals while calling for reduced police funding. Bragg says that he will not seek life sentences and opposes the NYPD’s gang database; instead, he suggests starting a database on NYPD misconduct. He vows to hire a public defender to work in his office. That’s bizarre. Public defenders don’t feel the need to welcome prosecutors into their office, and when it comes to parole, Bragg says he will default to the side of the applicants rather than the state. “Right now, the D.A. writes a template letter opposing parole. We’re gonna do the reverse,” he says.

In June of 2020, at the height of police-hating hysteria, Bragg called for “shrinking and re-imagining the role of police.” Broken-windows theory holds that getting minor criminals off the streets prevents things from spiraling out of control, and as Mayor Bill de Blasio has discouraged police, criminals feel emboldened to commit high-level, very violent conduct. “I grew up being stopped and harassed under a broken windows theory,” Bragg told the leftist site The Appeal. “And I can tell you, it alienated me and others like me who you might need later as a witness to something. You’re undermining community trust.” How about steadily rising crime, though? Does that undermine community trust?

Bragg holds that locking up criminals does not make a city safer: “In the 80s when I was growing up, when we were incarcerating more, I was not safer.” He suggests “diversion” into therapeutic programs for those charged with drug offenses, but when asked whether the criminals in question should at least be forced to complete drug-treatment programs before their charges are dropped, he said merely that a “good-faith” effort is all he expects. He has also said that police should not be responding to “mental-health crisis calls,” so don’t expect the police to come by to deal with anyone who might be merely a ranting lunatic, until it’s too late.

Even the richest neighborhoods in Manhattan are plagued by homeless people slumped in doorways or living in boxes on the sidewalk, yet Bragg says that “police should not be doing homeless sweeps. . . . Law enforcement efforts should focus on housing insecurity.” That’s a breathtaking misunderstanding of what police are for. They’re not real-estate agents. In schools, Bragg suggests, absurdly, that “zero-tolerance disciplinary practices” are the rule today but should be replaced by “a restorative justice approach.” Outgoing D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. has already stopped prosecuting for prostitution, something that Bragg will likely continue, too.

Bragg suggested in the conclusion to an essay on the matter that police are out of control and that a city with a $99 billion budget is guilty of insufficient social-service spending. (Chicago, with one-third of our population, spends only $12.8 billion, while Los Angeles, with half our population, spends $11.2 billion.) “There is more work to be done,” Bragg wrote. “We need to change the law on when police are allowed to use deadly force, we need a searchable database of police misconduct. . . . We need to invest in education and youth programs, center communities and social service experts in our response to public safety and public health, and we need prosecutions that complement this approach.”

Demoralized police are bound to hear all of this as a warning that the kind of dirtbags they arrest for low-level crimes will be dumped laughing back onto the streets the next day. New York City is currently spending $30 million of federal bailout money on its biggest ad campaign in decades to woo tourists back to a city where witnessing public defecation and veering around passed-out bodies on sidewalks has become the new normal. Which factor is going to be more salient in the eyes of visitors, without whose dollars New York City cannot return to pre-pandemic conditions: the obvious visible decline or the oblivious TV commercials?