New York City Mayor Eric Adams wants to crack down on crime. The city’s new district attorney, however, wants to make it worse.
In his first memo to staff on Monday, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg instructed prosecutors not to seek prison sentences for criminals unless they commit homicides, domestic violence felonies, violent sexual offenses, or white-collar crimes, such as public corruption.
“This rule may be excepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on a holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victim’s input (particularly in cases of violence or trauma), and any other information available,” the memo states, adding that prosecutors must consider the “impacts of incarceration” before seeking prison sentences.
When prosecutors bring charges that would result in incarceration, they can only request a determinate sentence of up to 20 years, according to the memo, so that it can’t be reviewed or changed by a parole board.
It gets worse. Bragg also instructed prosecutors to reduce charges filed by police officers against criminals in almost every case. For example, armed robbers “who use guns or other deadly weapons to stick up stores and other businesses” will now only be prosecuted “for petty larceny, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured.” Normally, armed robbery is prosecuted as a class B felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison. Petty larceny guarantees a sentence of 364 days in jail maximum and a $1,000 fine.
“Data, and my personal experiences, show that reserving incarceration for matters involving significant harm will make us safer,” Bragg said.
San Francisco’s residents would beg to differ. The West Coast city has been struggling with its own crime wave over the past two years, driven in large part by leftist District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s similar hands-off approach to crime. Conditions have deteriorated so severely that several companies have shut down their San Francisco locations, citing the city’s high theft rates, and residents are fleeing en masse.
If Democrats were smart, they’d learn from San Francisco’s mistakes and get tough on crime. New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, promised to do just that (which is why he won). But Bragg’s leftist agenda threatens to upend every one of Adams’s promises and turn the city into a breeding ground for crime. Adams should take that as the threat it is.
