Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg was meant to reform New York’s justice system and bring down Trump. So far, both prospects look shaky. eorden reports
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In fact, the district attorney was watching her speak: He was there that day amid the applauding officers in the church. “She asked me to listen. I was sitting there and listening, and I still have her words in my mind,” he said when I interviewed him in his office a few weeks later. In a memo dated two days after he took office, Bragg made good on his promise to pivot away from prosecuting minor offenses. He instructed the assistant district attorneys to stop charging a variety of low-level crimes and to avoid seeking jail time for certain robberies, assaults, and gun-possession cases in which no other crimes were committed. Seeking jail or prison sentences, he wrote, should be reserved only for the most serious offenses — including murder and sexual assault.
The police unions, predictably, bashed Bragg, saying he was endangering their members and that his policies would usher in a crime-ridden return to “the old days,” as one union official put it. The Detectives’ Endowment Association asked Governor Kathy Hochul to appoint a special prosecutor to oversee Bragg’s cases.
Joan Vollero, who was a senior communications adviser in the office until last summer, said the memo blindsided some members of staff. “I think there is some genuine excitement and enthusiasm for Alvin Bragg being the new DA, and I think that people want to be co-conspirators in his vision,” she said. But “they want to be brought into the fold — rather than dictated to from on high.”
Bragg is by no means a newcomer to New York law enforcement, but he has virtually no prior experience with the gauntlet of New York City politics or media. He’s genial and unimposing with a round face and a salt-and-pepper goatee. A Harvard Crimson profile of him written when he was a senior, in 1995, noted that his friends called him Big Papa. He continues to teach Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which he has attended since childhood.
It didn’t help that the memo came out just before a surge in high-profile public-safety incidents. In mid-January, a man shoved a woman onto the subway tracks as a train pulled into the Times Square station, killing her. Days later in East Harlem, a man fatally shot a 19-year-old cashier during a botched robbery at a Burger King. On January 19, an 11-month-old girl was shot in the face by a stray bullet in the Bronx. Then, of course, there were the deaths of Rivera and Mora.
Bragg acknowledges that the tumult of the first few weeks has shaped the way he works with Adams. “We’re kind of forging governing relationships in the middle of this, which, you know, I don’t think that’s how anyone would have necessarily thought the year would have started.” In it, he wrote that the default in gun-possession cases would be felony prosecutions; his first memo didn’t identify such cases as among those for which his office would seek incarceration. He said commercial robberies would be charged as felonies if they involved the use of guns or fake guns — revising his previous statement that robberies would be charged as felonies only if there was a “genuine risk of physical harm.
His biggest difficulty now will be to get Sewell and the police department back on his side. “Philosophically and strategically, there are two broad camps among many on how to move the needle on public safety,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity, a criminal-justice research center. “One is, you can’t work with law enforcement. There’s no negotiating with them. The other is that you have to work with law enforcement to get a lot of stuff done.
When Bragg and another prosecutor, Peter Skinner, tried a money-laundering case at the U.S. Attorney’s office, Skinner left court one day to find more than a dozen messages waiting on his cell phone. It was his wife telling him that their roof had fallen in and rain was pouring through the ceiling while she was home with their two small children .
In the DAs office, Bragg has been meeting in recent weeks with prosecutors in groups of 20 and seeking feedback — after having told the Times in an interview before taking office that he wouldn’t tolerate internal “recalcitrance” by those who disagreed with his policies. Bragg’s lack of experience in handling the press contributes to this problem. When he was special prosecutor for police-involved deaths at the attorney general’s office, he got some media training: Democratic strategist and former White House communications director Anita Dunn prepped him for an appearance on MSNBC. During an early press conference, one colleague was tasked with reminding Bragg to wear collar stays.
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