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    Where the Investigations Into Donald Trump Stand

    One of the highest profile investigations into the former president appeared to stall on Wednesday, but several other inquiries are in progress around the country.The abrupt resignation of the two prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Donald J. Trump leaves the future of the inquiry, which had been put on a monthlong pause, in doubt.But that does not mean that the former president or his family business, the Trump Organization, are out of legal jeopardy.In addition to the Manhattan criminal investigation — which resulted in criminal charges last summer against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer — Mr. Trump and his business face civil and criminal inquiries into his business dealings and political activities in several states.Mr. Trump and his family have criticized the Manhattan investigation, and the other investigations, as partisan or inappropriate, and have denied wrongdoing.Here is where each notable inquiry now stands.Manhattan Criminal CaseThe Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has said that his office’s investigation is ongoing and that it will continue without the two prosecutors. How it will proceed is unclear, though the investigation has already produced criminal charges against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg.In July, before Mr. Bragg’s election, the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged the Trump Organization with running a 15-year scheme to help its executives evade taxes by compensating them with fringe benefits that were hidden from authorities.The office, then under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., also accused Mr. Weisselberg of avoiding taxes on $1.7 million in perks that should have been reported as income.On Tuesday, lawyers for the company and for Mr. Weisselberg argued in court documents that those charges should be dismissed. The district attorney’s office will have a chance to respond before the judge overseeing the case decides whether to dismiss some of the charges.The case has been tentatively scheduled to go to trial at the end of this summer.New York State Civil InquiryThe New York attorney general, Letitia James, had been working with Manhattan prosecutors on their criminal investigation. But she is also conducting a parallel civil inquiry into some of the same conduct, including scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump’s company fraudulently misled lenders about the value of its assets.Ms. James, a Democrat who is running for re-election this fall, is expected to continue her civil investigation.The inquiry is focused on whether Mr. Trump’s statements about the value of his assets — which Ms. James has said were marked by repeated misrepresentations — were part of a pattern of fraud, or simply Trumpian showmanship.Last week, a state judge ruled that Ms. James can question Mr. Trump and two of his adult children, Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, under oath as part of the inquiry in the coming weeks.The Trumps said they would appeal the decision. Even if their appeals are unsuccessful, it is likely they would decline to answer questions if forced to sit for interviews under oath. When another son of Mr. Trump’s, Eric Trump, was questioned in October 2020, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against incriminating himself, according to a court filing.Westchester County Criminal InvestigationIn Westchester County, Miriam E. Rocah, the district attorney, appears to be focused at least in part on whether the Trump Organization misled local officials about the value of a golf course to reduce its taxes. She has subpoenaed the company for records on the matter.But the Manhattan investigation, in which prosecutors had been bringing witnesses before a grand jury before pausing in mid-January, appeared to be more advanced.Understand the New York A.G.’s Trump InquiryCard 1 of 6An empire under scrutiny. More

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    As Crime Surges, Roll Back of Tough-on-Crime Policies Faces Resistance

    With violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s.Four years ago, progressive prosecutors were in the sweet spot of Democratic politics. Aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement but pragmatic enough to draw establishment support, they racked up wins in cities across the country.Today, a political backlash is brewing. With violent crime rates rising in some cities and elections looming, their attempts to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s are increasingly under attack — from familiar critics on the right, but also from onetime allies within the Democratic Party.In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall vote in June, stoked by criticism from the city’s Democratic mayor. In Los Angeles, the county district attorney, George Gascón, is trying to fend off a recall effort as some elected officials complain about new guidelines eliminating the death penalty and the prosecution of juveniles as adults. Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, quickly ran afoul of the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, and his new police commissioner over policies that critics branded too lenient.The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less — forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren’t rushing to their aid, with some saying they’ve soured on the officials they once backed.“I think that whole honeymoon period lasts about five or six hours,” said Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County in Missouri, who is seeking re-election this fall.St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, center, surrounded by area police chiefs before a news conference about a police officer who was shot and killed in 2019.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Bell, a former city councilman in Ferguson, Mo., is part of the group of prosecutors elected on a promise to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Most support eliminating the death penalty and cash bail, limiting prosecutions for low-level, nonviolent offenses and scaling back sentences.In a show of political strength, progressive prosecutors in Chicago and Philadelphia handily defeated challengers in recent years. Mr. Bell’s re-election bid in November is one of several races being watched for signs that voters’ views have shifted on those policies as violent crime has risen and racial justice protests have fallen out of the headlines.Homicide rates spiked in 2020 and continued to rise last year, albeit less slowly, hitting levels not seen since the 1990s. Other violent crimes also are up. Both increases have occurred nationally, in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities without.That’s left no clear evidence linking progressive policies to these trends, but critics have been quick to make the connection, suggesting that prosecutors have let offenders walk and created an expectation that low-level offenses won’t be charged. Those arguments have landed on voters and city leaders already grappling with a scourge of pandemic-related ills — including mental health care needs and housing shortages, rising drug use, even traffic deaths.Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York City found that 74 percent of respondents considered crime a “very serious” problem — the largest share since the survey began asking the question in 1999 and more than 20 percentage points greater than the previous high, which was recorded in January 2016.Politicians are heeding those concerns. In New York, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has promised to crack down on crime, and his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, slammed Mr. Bragg’s proposals as threatening the safety of police officers and the public. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Boudin’s approach, which emphasizes social services over policing.“This is not working,” Ms. Breed said recently on The New York Times podcast “Sway.” “We’ve added all these additional resources — the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the services, the buildings we purchase, the hotels we purchase, the resources. We’ve added all these things to deal with food insecurity. All these things. Yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”The criticisms from two prominent Black mayors are particularly biting. In their liberal cities, the leaders’ nuanced complaints have far more influence with voters than familiar attacks from Republicans or police unions. Both mayors have argued that the minority communities that want racism rooted from the justice system also want more robust policing and prosecutions.President Biden, who was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime criminal justice overhaul of the 1990s, recently spoke highly of Mr. Adams’s focus on crime prevention. Some prosecutors and their allies took that as sign that the Democratic establishment is digging in on a centrist approach to criminal justice reform.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the Democratic Party worried about retaining the support of moderate suburban voters in midterm elections this year. Many Democratic lawmakers and strategists believe that protest slogans like “defund the police” hurt the party in the 2020 elections — particularly in Congressional swing districts and in Senate races. Republican candidates, eager to retake control of Congress in November, already have run advertisements casting Democrats as soft on crime.Most progressive prosecutors oppose the calls to gut police department budgets, but that is a nuance often missed. At one liberal philanthropic group, some newer givers have said they will not donate to any criminal justice groups — or to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors — because they don’t want to endorse defunding the police, according to a person who connects donors to criminal justice causes, and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist who has been involved in several organizations pushing progressive prosecutors, said prosecutors hadn’t been as forceful as law enforcement unions in selling their solutions to rising violence in cities.“Police are spending a lot of money convincing people the appropriate response to that is more policing and incarceration,” he said. “I think that individual cities and counties are having to push back against that narrative. But I think they’re struggling to do that right now.”In San Francisco, Mr. Boudin argued that the effort to recall him was fueled by politics, not voters’ worries about crime. He pointed to the Republican megadonors who have funded the recall efforts and said Ms. Breed has a political incentive to see him ousted — he beat her preferred candidate for district attorney.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this week. He faces an effort to recall him.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images“These are Republican talking points,” Mr. Boudin said. “And it’s tremendously destructive to the Democratic Party and the long-term progress that the party is making at the local and national level around public safety and criminal justice to allow a few folks dissatisfied with a local election to undermine that progress.”Mary Jung, a Democratic activist leading the recall campaign, said those who painted the efforts as fueled by conservatives or moderates were missing the point. Many of their supporters, she said, are lifelong liberal Democrats.Those voters, she said, don’t view the effort to recall Mr. Boudin, who was elected in 2019, as a broad shift away from progressive policies, but as a local response in a community that feels unsafe. She cited several attacks against Asian immigrants and incidents of shoplifting as the sort of crimes that have rattled residents, regardless of political ideology.In another sign of Democrats’ discontent, San Francisco voters ousted three progressive members of the Board of Education in a recall election driven by pandemic angst.“Over 80,000 San Franciscans signed our petition and we only needed 53,000 signatures,” Ms. Jung said. “There’s only 33,000 registered Republicans in the city. So, you know, you do the math.”Some progressives warn against ignoring people’s fears. Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, which includes Chicago and some of the country’s most violence-plagued communities, said that any dismissive rhetoric could make prosecutors risk looking out of touch.“You can’t dismiss people,” Ms. Foxx said. “I live in Chicago, where we hit 800 murders last year, and that represents 800 immediate families and thousands of people who are impacted.”Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, right, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police First Deputy Supt. Eric Carter announcing charges last month in a fatal shooting.Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Foxx faced a well-funded opponent and won re-election in 2020, as did Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, the following year. Those victories show the resilient support for progressive ideas, Mr. Krasner said, warning the Democratic Party not to abandon them.“Put criminal justice reform on the ballot in every election in almost every jurisdiction, and what you’re going to see is a surge in turnout,” Mr. Krasner said. “And that turnout will overwhelmingly be unlikely voters, reluctant voters, brand-new voters, people who are not connected to what they see as governmental dysfunction between the parties — but they are connected to an issue that has affected their communities.”But there are signs that attitudes about overhauling the criminal justice system are changing even among progressives. Many activists have shifted their focus away from electoral politics and toward policies they think address root of the problem, such as reducing the number of police and abolishing prisons.That “makes it very difficult to even defend or support particular prosecutors, because at the end of the day, they’re still putting people in jail,” Mr. Sinyangwe said.In 2020, Mr. Bell, the St. Louis prosecutor, faced the ire of the same progressive activists who had helped elect him. That July, he announced that his renewed investigation into the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr., a young Black man, which ignited weeks of protests, had delivered the same results: no charges for the officer who killed him.Mr. Brown’s mother denounced Mr. Bell’s investigation. Speaking to reporters then, Mr. Bell said the announcement was “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official.”Asked to discuss the incident and the investigation, Mr. Bell declined.Josie Duffy Rice, the former president of The Appeal, a news outlet focused on criminal justice, said that in some ways the voters were learning the limitations of the progressive prosecutor’s role.“Prosecutors have the power to cause a lot of problems,” Ms. Duffy Rice said. “But not enough power to solve problems.” More

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    Conflict Quickly Emerges Between Top Prosecutor and Police Commissioner

    A memo by New York City’s new police leader sharply questioned Manhattan’s new district attorney over his strategy for prosecuting crime.New York City’s new police commissioner has expressed severe dissatisfaction with the policies of the new Manhattan district attorney, sending an email to all officers late on Friday that suggests a potential rupture between City Hall and the prosecutor over their approaches to public safety.The email from Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said she was deeply troubled by policies outlined by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, in a 10-page memo that Mr. Bragg sent to his staff on Monday. The memo instructed prosecutors to avoid seeking jail or prison time for all but the most serious crimes, and to cease charging a number of lower-level crimes.Commissioner Sewell, who, like Mr. Bragg, was just a week into her job, said in her email to about 36,000 members of the department that she had studied the policies and come away “very concerned about the implications to your safety as police officers, the safety of the public and justice for the victims.”The email, which was first reported by WNBC-TV, suggests a looming conflict not just between them, but also between the new district attorney and the commissioner’s boss, Mayor Eric Adams.The collision course between the mayor and the district attorney was sketched out during the Democratic primary in the spring of 2021. Mr. Adams made a crackdown on crime one of the main themes of his campaign; Mr. Bragg, following in the path carved by a handful of prosecutors in cities around the country, pledged to help reshape the legal system, to avoid disproportionate punishment for first-time offenders or those struggling with mental health issues or poverty.In a statement on Saturday, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office said: “We share Commissioner Sewell’s call for frank and productive discussions to reach common ground on our shared mission to deliver safety and justice for all and look forward to the opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings.”“For our office, safety is paramount,” the statement said. It added that contrary to the way that Commissioner Sewell and others had interpreted parts of the memo, the office intended to charge anyone who used guns to rob stores or who assaulted police officers with felonies. “All must be held accountable for their actions,” it said.To some degree, the emerging tensions between the commissioner and Mr. Bragg reflect a broader political argument between centrist Democrats across the nation looking to soothe voters worried about crime and a movement of progressive prosecutors that has pushed for more lenient policies to make the justice system more fair and less biased.Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell has expressed serious concerns about Mr. Bragg’s policies.Hiram Durán for The New York TimesSome of those tensions are likely to play out in Albany this year in a debate over whether to scale back changes in a state bail law that went into effect two years ago, and that provoked strong reactions almost immediately.There is always an ingrained tension between the police and prosecutors that often centers on what charges to bring and, at times, whether there is sufficient evidence to make an arrest. For the police, in some measure, the job ends with handcuffs, while prosecutors are left with proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt or finding some other resolution. But such arguments do not often became public at all, let alone so early in a new administration.Mr. Adams has been complimentary about Mr. Bragg when asked about him in recent interviews, calling him a “great prosecutor” and declining to criticize the memo. Asked about the commissioner’s email, the mayor’s office responded with a statement from Stefan Ringel, a senior adviser: “The mayor has deep respect for the district attorney and looks forward to working with him and the police commissioner to make sure the streets are safe, and to discussing any concerns directly.”A police spokesman said the email “speaks for itself.”Mr. Bragg and Mr. Adams, both Democrats, have significant histories in law enforcement, and both have pledged some measure of reform. Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor, stood out in a competitive primary vowing to balance safety with justice. Mr. Adams, a former police captain, has spoken out against police brutality and, while serving, pushed for changes within the department.Mr. Bragg is the first Black person to lead the district attorney’s office, Mr. Adams is the second Black mayor in the city’s history, and Commissioner Sewell is the first woman and third Black person to lead the Police Department.In his memo, Mr. Bragg instructed his prosecutors that unless they were required by law to do otherwise, they should ask judges for jail or prison time only for those who had committed serious offenses, including murder, sexual assault and major economic crimes. Others, he has said, would be directed to programs better equipped to deal with the issues that had led them to commit the crimes.The new district attorney also instructed his prosecutors not to charge a number of misdemeanors. Many of the crimes on his list already were not being prosecuted by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. But Mr. Bragg directed his staff to avoid charging several misdemeanors which previously had been charged, including resisting arrest.“These policy changes not only will, in and of themselves, make us safer; they also will free up prosecutorial resources to focus on violent crime,” Mr. Bragg said in his memo.The directive on resisting arrest was among those that Commissioner Sewell expressed most concern about. She said that it would send a message to police officers and others that there was “an unwillingness to protect those who are carrying out their duties.”“I strongly believe that this policy injects debate into decisions that would otherwise be uncontroversial, will invite violence against police officers and will have deleterious effects on our relationship with the communities we protect,” she wrote.Incoming N.Y.C. Mayor Eric Adams’s New AdministrationCard 1 of 7Schools Chancellor: David Banks. More

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    With Trump Investigation Unresolved, Cyrus Vance's Legacy Is Incomplete

    Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s third and final term as Manhattan district attorney is ending, but his investigation into former President Donald J. Trump goes on.Much of the furniture had been hauled away. The walls were stripped bare. And the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., sat on a brown leather couch in his eighth-floor office earlier this month, considering the last big question before him as his term neared its end: Would he decide whether to charge Donald J. Trump with a crime?“I am committed to moving the case as far along in the decision-making as I can while I’m here,” he said.As Mr. Vance, 67, leaves office at the end of this week, that inquiry is still unresolved. He will hand the investigation over to his successor, Alvin Bragg.A Democrat who was only the fourth district attorney to hold the office in nearly 80 years, Mr. Vance chose not to seek re-election this year. He said he had promised his family he would not run again. “Twelve years is a long time to hold an office this volatile,” he said, adding, “It was time for me to write a new chapter in my life.”The fate of the Trump inquiry, which could result in the first indictment of an American president in history, will help shape the public understanding of Mr. Vance’s tenure.Asked how he might deal with criticism if the case is not resolved to people’s liking, Mr. Vance, who otherwise maintained a low-key congeniality during two recent interviews, grew animated.“Look, I’ve been criticized for a lot,” he said. “Do I like it? No. But do I have to put it all in perspective? Yeah. And if you don’t put it in perspective, you’ll shoot yourself. Because people are passionate and they’re angry, and people have only gotten more divided and more angry in the last five or six years than they ever were before.”Before he took office in 2010, Mr. Vance had worked as a prosecutor for his predecessor, Robert M. Morgenthau, a titan of New York City law enforcement. Mr. Morgenthau, who died in 2019, made his reputation as a crime-fighter when prosecutors were still venerated figures.Mr. Vance was handed a more complex task: to help reimagine the prosecutor’s role as crime dropped to record lows and the inequities of the justice system loomed larger than ever before.“I was inheriting an office that was very much a 20th-century operation in terms of its systems and its practices and its policies,” he said. “It was, ‘How many trials did you have?’ It was, ‘How aggressive can you be?’”Mr. Vance instituted a less sweeping, more precise approach to addressing gang and gun violence. He stopped prosecuting certain low-level misdemeanors, including marijuana possession, fare evasion and, earlier this year, prostitution.He moved his office into the digital age, using data to inform decisions. He started a cybercrime unit and used hundreds of millions of dollars from settlements with big banks to fund programs that he argued would make the city safer.Mr. Vance’s close advisers say he sowed the seeds of a more progressive method of prosecution.“Law enforcement was just starting to change, and Vance came in as that was happening and really was a leader in shaping that conversation,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former deputy to Mr. Vance.While some of Mr. Vance’s ideas seemed cutting-edge in 2010, he was overtaken in his appetite for change by his peers in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago and nearby in Brooklyn, where elected prosecutors enacted more lenient policies, and in some cases spoke more forcefully about the harms of harsh prosecution.“As we progressed in how we think about the best ways to keep communities safe and how to rethink the way prosecution works, he and his office simply could not keep up,” said Janos Marton, who fought to reduce incarceration in New York and briefly competed in the race to succeed Mr. Vance. “That’s really the story of his tenure.”Alvin Bragg, who won the race to succeed Mr. Vance, will take over the Manhattan district attorney’s office’s investigation into former President Donald J. Trump.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesMr. Vance’s successor, Mr. Bragg, is a former federal prosecutor. The plans Mr. Bragg has committed to, which include lengthening the list of low-level crimes that will not be prosecuted and placing a renewed focus on accountability for law enforcement, put him in line with other newly elected prosecutors.Mr. Vance said he is hopeful about Mr. Bragg’s policies but is not convinced that they will be effective in reducing crime, particularly in the face of a sharp rise in murders and shootings that began last summer.“Alvin Bragg is a smart, experienced former prosecutor who I believe cares about public safety as much as anybody,” he said. “It remains to be seen whether going leaps and bounds further than we have gone in our time will result in continued lower crime rates.”Mr. Vance’s conviction integrity unit, his critics say, exemplifies his strengths and failings. Set up in 2010, it was one of the first such units in the country. It helped the office assess new cases, leading to dozens of post-arrest dismissals. And in November, its work led to the exoneration of two men who had spent 20 years in prison for the 1965 murder of Malcolm X.But the unit has been criticized for having done far less than it could have. Mr. Bragg, while campaigning in the Democratic primary, said it appeared to exist “in name only” and vowed to start a new one explicitly devoted to freeing the wrongfully convicted.Mr. Bragg will be the first Black Manhattan district attorney, and critics of the office hope he will address the harms they say it does to Black people, who continue to be prosecuted disproportionately. Public defenders who faced Mr. Vance’s prosecutors and assistant district attorneys who worked for him said in interviews that his office still treated defendants harshly.Jarvis Idowu, a three-year veteran of the office who helped draft its policy to stop prosecuting fare evasion, said that the leadership there “talked a lot about how important diversity was.”But, he said, all the talk did not result in changes to the office’s policies that were informed by those diverse perspectives. Mr. Idowu, who is Black, said he left the office in 2018 after being asked to seek a yearslong prison sentence for a man in his 20s who had used forged credit cards to buy food, and to charge a homeless man stealing salmon from a grocery store with a felony. Both men were Black.Mr. Vance noted that he had invited the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, to examine his office’s record on racial disparities in prosecution soon after taking office. The institute found race was a major factor at nearly every stage of Manhattan’s criminal process.“I don’t pretend that I’m the most progressive prosecutor on race issues, but it is something that we never ignored,” Mr. Vance said. “Could we have done better? I think we could have done better.”Much discussion of Mr. Vance has focused on his most high-profile cases. Some decisions drew criticism early in his tenure. A 2011 sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, was dropped after Mr. Vance’s prosecutors questioned the victim’s story.He did not charge two of Mr. Trump’s children in 2012, or Harvey Weinstein in 2015, and was criticized for dealing leniently with the disgraced gynecologist Robert Hadden, who was accused of sexually abusing nearly 20 women, but avoided any prison time.Mr. Vance later found success in high-stakes cases. He won a conviction of Mr. Weinstein in 2020, which Mr. Weinstein is appealing. He also convicted the murderer of Etan Patz, a boy who disappeared on his way to school in 1979. His office is again investigating Mr. Hadden, who has also been charged with federal crimes.Mr. Vance said he kept a promise to his family in choosing not to seek another four-year term.John Minchillo/Associated PressMr. Vance, like Mr. Morgenthau before him, has close familial ties to the highest echelons of American government. His father, Cyrus R. Vance Sr., was a U.S. secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter. Early in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Vance expressed concern that the president was undercutting the rule of law, and his yearslong investigation into Mr. Trump — as well as inquiries into associates who were pardoned by the president in Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office — reflects that concern.In 2019, Mr. Trump’s lawyers fought a subpoena demanding eight years of the president’s personal and corporate tax returns, beginning an extended legal battle between the president and the district attorney and delaying the investigation for more than a year.Ultimately, Mr. Vance won the battle. The Supreme Court decided in his favor, twice, most recently in February, victories he called a “high-water mark” in the office’s work. This summer, he indicted Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, in connection with what prosecutors said was a yearslong tax-avoidance scheme in which executives were compensated with off-the-books benefits like free cars and apartments.Mr. Trump has consistently derided the investigation as a politically-motivated “witch hunt.” Mr. Weisselberg’s lawyers have said he will fight the charges in court.In his final weeks in office, Mr. Vance continued to push the Trump investigation forward. But the calendar was uncooperative, and the inquiry will not be resolved this year.Mr. Vance said that, whatever his critics might think of the Trump case — or any of his other actions — his conscience was clear.“I know what we did, I know why we did it and at the end of the day, that’s what I have to live with,” he said. More

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    Alvin Bragg Wins, Becoming First Black D.A. in Manhattan

    A former federal prosecutor, Mr. Bragg will take over an office that has brought charges against the family business of former president Donald J. Trump.Alvin Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney on Tuesday and will become the first Black person to lead the influential office, which handles tens of thousands of cases a year and is conducting a high-profile investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, a former federal prosecutor who campaigned on a pledge to balance public safety with fairness for all defendants, beat out seven other Democrats for the nomination earlier this year and will succeed Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat who did not seek re-election. Mr. Bragg had been heavily favored to prevail over his Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, given that Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans in the borough.He will take over an office that continues to disproportionately prosecute Black defendants, and Mr. Bragg throughout his campaign has drawn on his personal experiences growing up in New York to illustrate the types of changes he wishes to make. Mr. Bragg has said he would show leniency to defendants who commit low-level crimes and has emphasized the importance of accountability for the police and the office’s prosecutors.Mr. Bragg will be working in close partnership with a police department run by Eric Adams, who won the race for mayor on Tuesday night. Mr. Adams and Mr. Bragg have some policy disagreements — Mr. Adams, a former police officer, has called for the restoration of the department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which Mr. Bragg opposes.In an interview earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Bragg pointed toward experiences that he said would inform his work and set him apart from his predecessors.“Having been stopped by the police,” he said. “Having a homicide victim on my doorstep. Having had a loved one return from incarceration and live with me.”Mr. Bragg’s election follows that of like-minded prosecutors around the country. His experience in law enforcement separates him from some of his peers in what has come to be known as the progressive prosecutor movement, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. But Mr. Bragg’s policy positions are largely in line with others who have won office over the past decade, including Rachael Rollins in Boston and Kim Foxx in Chicago.His victory comes as Democrats are seeking to balance sweeping changes to the criminal justice system with some voters’ concern about rising gun crime. In 2020, millions of people around the country took to the streets to protest the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and called for change. But after rises in homicides and shootings in New York and other cities, voters have expressed fears about public safety.Those fears may have influenced two prosecutorial races in Long Island, the results of which were far less decisive on Tuesday night. In Nassau County, with about 13 percent of the vote counted, the Republican candidate, Anne Donnelly, was leading her opponent Todd Kaminsky, a Democratic state senator, 51 to 49 percent. In Suffolk County, the Republican challenger, Ray Tierney, was leading the incumbent district attorney, Timothy Sini, 54 percent to 46 percent with about 31 percent of the vote accounted for.But Mr. Bragg won handily, and The Associated Press called the race for him just before 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Mr. Bragg held a commanding 68-point lead late Tuesday night with more than half of precincts reporting.At an election night party at Harlem Tavern, a crowd roared its approval when he arrived several minutes after the race was called. “We have been given a profound trust tonight,” Mr. Bragg said. “The fundamental role of the district attorney is to guarantee both fairness and safety.”He said that under his administration the racial disparities in the criminal justice system would be “shut down”; the trauma of sexual assault survivors would be a central focus; and those suffering from mental health issues would not be prosecuted.“The Day 1 job is guns,” Mr. Bragg said, mentioning shootings that had occurred nearby in the last several weeks. He said he planned to address the problem with “new tools,” not with the tools of the past.Mr. Bragg said getting people out of jail was another urgent priority, making tacit reference to what he called “a humanitarian crisis” on Rikers Island.On Twitter on Tuesday night, Mr. Kenniff congratulated Mr. Bragg. “While we may have competing visions on the role of D.A.,” Mr. Kenniff wrote, “we are aligned in our commitment to public safety and a fair criminal justice system.”Thomas Kenniff, who spent election night at the Metropolitan Republican Club on the Upper East Side, congratulated Mr. Bragg on Twitter.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesBy far the most high-profile case confronting Mr. Bragg is the investigation into Mr. Trump and his family business. Over the summer, the business and one of its top executives were charged with running a yearslong tax scheme that helped executives evade taxes while compensating them with off-the-books benefits.Mr. Vance’s investigation into Mr. Trump and his business is ongoing; Mr. Bragg has faced questions about it throughout his campaign and will continue to do so. Though he cited his experience of having sued the former president over 100 times while at the state attorney general’s office, Mr. Bragg has said he will follow the facts when it comes to the current inquiry.A lifelong resident of Harlem, Mr. Bragg began running for district attorney more than two years ago and slowly accumulated support from local political clubs and unions, and from figures including Representative Jerrold L. Nadler and Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District who hired Mr. Bragg as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.In the primary he was flanked on his left by three candidates who argued against electing anyone with prosecutorial experience. Still, he was able to win important endorsements from progressives like Zephyr Teachout after releasing detailed plans about his vision for a new sex crimes unit and an expansion of the bureaus that oversee economic crimes. He beat out another former federal prosecutor, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, for the nomination, in a close race that came to focus more on public safety as gun crime rose.A sign of Mr. Bragg’s success at unifying Democrats came on Saturday when two other Democrats who ran in the primary, Eliza Orlins and Liz Crotty, showed up at a campaign stop in Union Square to lend him their support.Ms. Orlins was among the candidates who had argued that no one with prosecutorial experience should hold the job, while Ms. Crotty emphasized the need for public safety from the start of the race and won endorsements from several police unions.In interviews, both said that while they disagreed with Mr. Bragg on certain points, they trusted him to do the right thing.“He’s had experience of seeing loved ones incarcerated and their lives destroyed by the criminal legal system,” Ms. Orlins said. “He understands those things fundamentally.”Ms. Crotty said it was important for Mr. Bragg to have a holistic vision of public safety for every neighborhood.“I think that that’s a responsibility he’s always taken seriously,” she said.On Tuesday, a number of voters in Harlem who said they had chosen Mr. Bragg described being impressed by what they perceived as his fundamental decency. Mimsie Robinson, 58, said that he heard Mr. Bragg speak at his church and had been struck by his integrity.“For me, a lot of times that’s what I’m looking at,” Mr. Robinson said. “Is this person sincerely committed to helping this community, this city, move forward?”Mr. Bragg, a graduate of Harvard Law School, began considering a career as a prosecutor while working for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he saw how influential those in the role could be. He worked for several years as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer before being hired by the New York attorney general’s office, where he investigated public corruption and white-collar crime.After a stretch working for Mr. Bharara in Manhattan, he returned to the attorney general’s office, where he led a unit responsible for investigating police killings of unarmed civilians. He spent the final week before his election in a virtual courtroom, questioning members of the Police Department in a judicial inquiry into the circumstances that led to the killing of Eric Garner in 2014. More

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    One Final Day of Campaigning

    The elections for mayor in New York City and Buffalo could signal the direction of the Democratic Party in the state.It’s Monday. We’ll take a last look at the campaigns and the candidates. Did I mention that tomorrow is Election Day?Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFrom Buffalo to Brooklyn, the contests voters will decide tomorrow pose fresh tests and create fresh tension about the identity and direction of the Democratic Party in New York.Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York City, has presented himself as both a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” A former police captain who fought for reforms from within the system, he disdained the “defund the police” movement. He has said that public safety was a prerequisite to prosperity and has reached out to the city’s big-business community. And he defeated several more liberal candidates in the June primary.A different face of the Democratic Party has emerged in the closely watched contest for the mayor of Buffalo. India Walton, a democratic socialist, defeated the incumbent, Byron Brown, in the June primary. Brown is now running as a write-in candidate in what has become a proxy battle between left-wing leaders and more moderate Democrats. Walton has referred to Brown as a “Trump puppet” who has become complacent about Buffalo. His campaign has questioned her character and painted her proposals as “too risky,” a message that she countered was fearmongering.My colleague Katie Glueck writes that power dynamics are now being renegotiated at every level of government. “There’s a battle of narratives in New York,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a Brooklyn socialist. “New York is in the midst of finding itself.”Curtis Sliwa as the Republican in the raceIn New York City, Adams’s opponent is Curtis Sliwa, who presents his main qualifications as his decades of patrolling the subways and leading the Guardian Angels, the beret-wearing vigilante group he founded.What a Sliwa mayoralty would look like is an open question, a question that also trails Adams. Sliwa is a Republican newbie — he registered as a Republican only last year — and when he announced his candidacy, some people wondered whether it was just another publicity stunt.Attention-getting soon defined Sliwa’s campaign. He went to an apartment building in Fort Lee, N.J., where Adams co-owns an apartment with his partner, to suggest that Adams did not live in New York. On Twitter, Sliwa called Adams’s residency “the biggest unanswered question since Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster & Bermuda Triangle combined.” (Adams has said that his primary residence is a townhouse he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.)Sliwa’s tactics were no surprise to those who have followed his career. “For the most part, the person you see in public making bad rhymes before the camera is now the actual person,” said Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who once co-hosted a talk-radio show with Sliwa and is now a trenchant critic. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention.”A likely district attorney who has been a police adversaryAlvin Bragg, who is favored to be the next Manhattan district attorney, spent time last week in a virtual courtroom. He was questioning a police lieutenant about the day that an officer held Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold.For the last several years, Bragg has represented Garner’s family in their continuing fight for details about what happened before Garner, who was accused of selling untaxed cigarettes, died in 2014. The Garner case underscored some of the messages of Bragg’s campaign. He has said that he will not pursue some low-level crimes.He has also spoken frequently about police accountability. The district attorney typically works closely with the New York Police Department. Bragg’s involvement in the Garner inquiry — which highlighted a shameful episode for the department — suggested that his relationship with the police is likely to be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.Where Republicans stand a chanceIn some New York City Council races, Republicans are trying to win over voters who cast their ballots for Republicans for president and Democrats in local races. In a race in a Brooklyn district that is home to many Orthodox Jews and Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a robocall for the Republican City Council candidate, Inna Vernikov.“They’re trying to make it about the presidential election,” said Steven Saperstein, the Democrat in the race. “People in this district understand and they know that national elections are one thing, but on the local level you have to vote for the person.”In Queens, Democrats hope to flip the last Republican-held City Council seat in the borough. The Democrat in the race is Felicia Singh, a teacher who has been endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party. She is running against Joann Ariola, the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party.Voting maps and environmental rightsThere’s more on the ballot than the mayoral elections. All 51 City Council members will be chosen in New York City. And five potential amendments to the State Constitution are also on the ballot.One would redraw the state’s legislative maps, which occurs every 10 years. Among other things, it would cap the number of state senators at 63. Michael Li, a senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told my colleague Ashley Wong that the cap was necessary to prevent gerrymandering.Another ballot measure — a so-called environmental rights amendment — would enshrine a constitutional right to clear air, clean water and a “healthful environment.” The language is vague on just what a “healthful environment” is or how such a standard would be enforced.WeatherIt’s a new week, New York. Enjoy the sunny day in the high 50s, with clouds moving in at night and temps dropping to the mid-40s.alternate-side parkingSuspended today (All Saints Day) and tomorrow (Election Day).The latest New York newsSexual harassment and assault by detainees are compounding the crisis at Rikers Island.And in case you missed it …Complaint against Andrew Cuomo: Craig Apple, the Albany County sheriff, defended the decision to file a criminal complaint against Cuomo, who resigned as governor in August. Apple said he was confident that the district attorney would prosecute even though Apple had not coordinated the filing with prosecutors. The district attorney, David Soares, has not committed to going ahead with the case.Apple also rejected accusations that the filing was a “political hit job.”Cuomo was charged with forcible touching, a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to one year in jail, in connection with allegations that he groped a female aide’s breast. Cuomo’s lawyer, Rita Glavin, said he had “never assaulted anyone.” Cuomo is scheduled to be arraigned on Nov. 17.Letitia James’s candidacy: James, the New York attorney general who oversaw the inquiry into the sexual harassment claims that led to Cuomo’s resignation, declared her candidacy for governor. She begins the campaign as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most formidable challenger. Others, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, may throw their hats in the ring, too.James, the first woman of color to be elected to statewide office in New York, is seeking to become the first Black female governor in the country. As attorney general, she made headlines for suing the National Rifle Association and investigating President Donald Trump. “I’ve sued the Trump administration 76 times — but who’s counting?” James said in the video announcing her campaign.Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and is white, was the first governor in more than a century to have deep roots in western New York. Either would be the first woman elected governor.What we’re readingNew York’s Irish Arts Center is moving from a former tenement to a $60 million state-of-the-art performance facility.Inevitably, the last of the authentic delis have been joined by an increasing number of designer delis.MetROPOLITAN diaryDiscovering schavDear Diary:I was shopping for groceries with my mother at a supermarket in Riverdale. I noticed a dozen or so jars of something called schav lined up against a wall in the Jewish food section.I had never seen it before. It looked like a greenish vegetable soup.When we got out to the street, I asked my mother what it was.Before she could answer a man who was walking in front of us turned around.“What?” he said, looking me right in the eye. “You don’t know what schav is? You eat it with a cold boiled potato and it’s delicious!”— Nancy L. SegalIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.Melissa Guerrero, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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    Alvin Bragg, Manhattan's Likely Next D.A., Questions NYPD Over Eric Garner

    Days before the election, Alvin Bragg, who is heavily favored to win office, is participating in an inquiry into Eric Garner’s killing by the N.Y.P.D.It was the week before Election Day, but Alvin Bragg was not glad-handing or fund-raising, not out on the campaign trail or meeting with veterans of the office he hopes to run.Instead, he was in a virtual courtroom, questioning a member of the New York Police Department about the events of July 19, 2014, the day that Eric Garner told a police officer who held him in a chokehold that he could not breathe.Mr. Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney who is heavily favored to win the office in the general election on Tuesday, has, for the last several years, represented the family of Mr. Garner as they have continued to seek details about the lead-up to his killing that day, an event that brought urgent attention to the way that Black men are policed in New York City and around the country.This week, that fight culminated in a judicial inquiry during which Mr. Bragg and others closely questioned members of the police department, shedding more light not only on Mr. Garner’s death but the departmental focus on fighting low-level crimes that led the police to pursue him in the first place.While Mr. Bragg could not have planned for the election and the judicial inquiry into Mr. Garner’s death to coincide so closely, the case drives home some of the key messages of his campaign: He has said that he will cease to pursue a number of low-level crimes, and has spoken frequently about police accountability.The district attorney works hand-in-hand with the New York Police Department and Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry — which highlights anew a shameful episode from the department’s recent past — indicates that his relationship with the department will be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.“I think that there are risks involved for him, because he is going to need to work with the police department as district attorney,” said Jessica Roth, a director of the Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law at Cardozo University.But, she added, Mr. Bragg’s involvement in the inquiry was consistent with priorities he had articulated throughout his campaign.“The inquiry is to try to find out what happened, and whether people acted consistently with their duty,” Ms. Roth said. “Bragg has worked in law enforcement for most of his career and worked productively with police. Holding people accountable and thinking about issues systemically does not necessarily put one at odds with the police department.”Gwen Carr, center, the mother of Eric Garner, said she was grateful that Alvin Bragg, left, has stayed with the case. Andrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Bragg, 48, is a former federal prosecutor who also worked at the New York State attorney general’s office, where he rose to become chief deputy attorney general. He is running to lead an office that handles the cases of tens of thousands of defendants each year, the majority of them built on arrests made by the New York police.Though the office can decline to charge defendants arrested by the police, it does not do so often: In 2019, under the current district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the office declined to prosecute 9 percent of all the arrests it evaluated.That number is low in part because the Police Department responds to policy decisions made by the district attorney. When prosecutors in the office stopped charging defendants with fare evasion, for example, arrests on that charge dropped.While that responsiveness is likely to continue if Mr. Bragg assumes the office, any disagreement between him and the department — or the likely next mayor, Eric Adams, who plans to restore the police’s anti-crime unit — may lead to public friction of the type that has become more common between prosecutors and police representatives, particularly in cities like Philadelphia where the police union has actively campaigned against the sitting district attorney, Larry Krasner.Mr. Bragg’s Republican opponent, Thomas Kenniff, has also called for the restoration of the anti-crime unit, and for a renewed focus on low-level crimes.Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former police officer, said in an interview that both prosecutors and the police had become more politicized in recent years, a dynamic that can stoke tensions, but that the police would respect a judicious approach from Mr. Bragg.“He has to be an honest broker,” Mr. O’Donnell said of Mr. Bragg.Mr. Bragg has made his own fraught encounters with the police a foundational part of his campaign narrative, and police accountability is at the heart of his résumé.During his second stint at the New York attorney general’s office, he led a unit charged with investigating the police killings of unarmed civilians, which was created in part as a response to Mr. Garner’s death. (Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, was present when Mr. Cuomo signed the order that led to the creation of that unit.)Upon taking office as district attorney, Mr. Bragg plans to establish a Police Integrity Unit that will report directly to him, siloed off from the rest of the office to avoid any conflict with other bureaus.Mr. Bragg has a long history of working with law enforcement agents. He is not widely seen as a bomb-thrower, but instead, a coalition-builder with an ability to make varied parties feel as if their concerns have been heard.“I say what I don’t want officers to do, but I think it’s important in the next breath to say what I want them to do: to be our partners in fighting against gun trafficking and sexual assaults,” Mr. Bragg said, adding that he had always been “profoundly aware” that he stays at his desk while law enforcement agents are in the field.“The police officers I work with are the ones who will then go do the arrest or do the search warrant and that’s challenging, profoundly important and can be dangerous,” Mr. Bragg said.Mr. Bragg did not grandstand or otherwise draw attention to himself during the judicial inquiry this week, as he questioned Lt. Christopher Bannon, the police commander who, after being told of Mr. Garner’s death via text message, said that it was “not a big deal.”Still, Mr. Bragg fought to nail down every last detail, asking a number of questions about a meeting at which the police department discussed cracking down on the illegal sale of cigarettes and the protocol of filling out a memo book. The judge, Erika Edwards, who has referred to the inquiry as a “trailblazing” effort at transparency, was occasionally compelled to hasten him along.Mr. Bragg mentioned his representation of Mr. Garner’s family with pride throughout the campaign and Ms. Carr has, in return, expressed her gratitude toward him, particularly for his presence in the courtroom over the course of this past week.“I am truly pleased he chose to represent me in this inquiry when he could be out campaigning,” she said. “He said he would see this inquiry through to the end. My family and I are grateful for that.”Troy Closson More

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    Thomas Kenniff, Manhattan D.A. Candidate, Sees a City on the Brink

    Thomas Kenniff, who is facing Alvin Bragg in the Nov. 2 election, has focused his campaign on a recent increase in some types of crime.Thomas Kenniff believes that New York City is teetering on a precipice.Mr. Kenniff, the Republican candidate for Manhattan district attorney, is not referring to Covid-19 or climate-related disasters, like the flooding that killed 13 people in the city last month.No, it is crime that worries Mr. Kenniff — crime, and progressive policies that he believes have contributed to its rise, particularly the bail reform law that went into effect in January 2020, which stopped criminal courts from setting cash bail on most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.Though legal experts who have studied the matter say there is no clear connection between that law and the rise in some categories of violent crime, including murders and shootings, Mr. Kenniff, 46, is convinced that a link exists.“As a result of misguided criminal justice policies that embrace criminals at the expense of victims, we are seeing an increase in violent crime and a decrease in quality of life like nothing we have experienced in years,” he said in a recent debate with his Democratic opponent, Alvin Bragg. The election, on Nov. 2, will determine the leader of an office that handles tens of thousands of cases a year and conducts many high-profile investigations, including an ongoing inquiry into former President Donald J. Trump and his family business.Mr. Bragg, 48, has an overwhelming advantage. Democrats outnumber Republicans in Manhattan by nearly eight to one, and residents of the borough — which Mr. Kenniff left for Long Island about four years ago — have not elected a Republican as their district attorney since 1937.Alvin Bragg, the Democratic nominee for Manhattan district attorney, supported the bail reform law that Mr. Kenniff has criticized.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut Mr. Kenniff, a major in the Army National Guard and veteran of the Iraq War, says he expects to compete with Mr. Bragg given the number of Manhattanites he hears from who are concerned about crime.“I do think there is something fermenting in response to what is happening on the street level that Alvin Bragg has not condemned in any meaningful way,” Mr. Kenniff said.Asked to respond, a spokesman for Mr. Bragg, Richard Fife, said that Mr. Kenniff had spent the campaign “making ridiculous attacks playing on people’s fears.”“Alvin Bragg understands from personal experience the safety concerns families face and the inequities embedded into our system,” Mr. Fife said.Mr. Kenniff has consistently asserted — as have other law enforcement figures, most prominently Commissioner Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department — that the bail overhaul is partly behind the spike in certain categories of gun crime, which began in the summer of 2020.Experts disagree, and point toward similar spikes in murders and shootings in cities around the country, regardless of their bail laws.“There is no evidence linking the bail reforms to the uptick in shootings and homicides,” said Michael Rempel, the director of jail reform at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with the mayor’s office, the state courts and other institutional players in the criminal justice system.Mr. Kenniff, who now works primarily as a defense lawyer, said that he sees a correlation and rejects arguments like Mr. Rempel’s.“I reject it based on what I’ve seen in my own practice and the people I’ve represented,” he said. “I reject it based on what I see on the streets.”From Long Island to IraqMr. Kenniff was born in Brooklyn in 1975 and grew up in Massapequa, in a waterfront house on the South Shore of Long Island. He attended the University of Rochester, where he majored in history. And he began to consider the possibility of being a lawyer, in part because of the unlikely influence of the actor Tom Cruise.“Whatever part he was playing, you wanted to do that,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I saw ‘Days of Thunder,’ I wanted to be a racecar driver. I saw ‘Cocktail,’ I wanted to become a bartender.”The movie that really influenced Mr. Kenniff was “A Few Good Men,” in which Mr. Cruise plays a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, military lawyers who prosecute and defend members of the armed services.After graduating from Hofstra’s law school, and spending several years at a law firm and the Westchester district attorney’s office, Mr. Kenniff began the commissioning process. In early 2005, he was deployed to a military base right outside of Tikrit, Iraq.While abroad, he defended soldiers who were charged with violations of military law and provided counsel to soldiers and civilians. He also sweated out a number of rocket attacks, said his roommate, Major Robert Kincaid, who added that Mr. Kenniff soon got used to the strikes.“We heard the alarms go off and I was like, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go to the shelter,’” Mr. Kincaid recalled. “And he looks at me and goes, ‘Are you going to do that? I think it’s safer in here.’”Mr. Kenniff returned to the United States toward the end of 2005 and after about six more months as a prosecutor in Westchester, he left the office to start a law firm with another veteran, Steven M. Raiser, where over the past 15 years he has done defense work for a wide range of clients.Mr. Kenniff spent long stretches of the pandemic housed at a hotel in Manhattan, like other service members, and on active duty at the Javits Center, which was transformed into a field hospital. During that time, Mr. Kenniff began following the nascent Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney and grew alarmed at what he was hearing.A Return to ‘Broken Windows’Eight candidates ran as Democrats to become Manhattan district attorney, including three without any prosecutorial experience.But as murders and shootings continued to rise in the early months of 2021, voters leaned toward more experienced contenders like Mr. Bragg, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Bragg won a close primary, leaving him poised to become the first Black Manhattan district attorney.Mr. Kenniff said he is concerned that Mr. Bragg — who supported the bail law and has pledged to dedicate new units in the office to hold the police accountable and to review the office’s past convictions — will implement lenient policies that will encourage crime.Asked about his own priorities, Mr. Kenniff said that he wanted to focus on reducing gun crime, which he believes means also cracking down on misdemeanors, including fare evasion and graffiti-related crimes.He said he believes in the merits of “broken windows” policing, the idea that actively policing and prosecuting petty crimes will have a healthy effect on the overall crime rate. The theory has been called into question by a number of criminologists and others, who say it naturally leads to discriminatory overpolicing.“I’m not trying to upend the whole concept of a prosecutor’s office,” Mr. Kenniff said. “I don’t need 20-page manifestoes about how I’m going to do this, this and that.”Mr. Kenniff has reserved much of his energy for criticizing the bail law, which was passed in an effort to ensure that poor people were not disproportionately penalized because they could not afford bail. The law effectively eliminated money bail and pretrial detention for almost all misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, but allowed for bail to be set on virtually all violent felonies.It was met with immediate resistance from opponents, who argued that it would lead to the release of dangerous criminals. In April 2020, the law was amended to allow judges more discretion to jail defendants. (It remains illegal in New York for judges to consider a defendant’s threat to public safety in setting bail, as it has been for the last 50 years.)The law remains a target of conservatives, including Mr. Kenniff, who says that along with the disbandment of the police’s anti-crime units and local politicians’ lack of support for the police, the law was key to rises in gun crime. He argues that the pretrial release of those charged with crimes like gun possession and misdemeanor assault has endangered communities.As of yet, there is no evidence of that. The mayor’s office of criminal justice has found that the bail law had no discernible effect on the rate of rearrest. And studies conducted in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Jersey, which made similar changes, found that their rates of recidivism had not gone up.None of that carries weight with Mr. Kenniff.“The notion that these policies haven’t contributed to what is going on on the street is just utterly counterintuitive,” he said. “So would I be skeptical, am I skeptical, of studies and statistics that say otherwise? Sure.” More