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      Why Police Accountability Is Personal for This Manhattan D.A. Candidate

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      Alvin Bragg has had encounters with the police both in the streets and in the courts. He wants to change the system from within.The first time Alvin Bragg began thinking about police accountability was not long after an officer put a gun to his head, when he was a 15-year-old in Harlem in the 1980s.Nearly 30 years later, as a prosecutor at the state attorney general’s office in 2017, Mr. Bragg found himself confronting the same issue, overseeing the case against Officer Wayne Isaacs, who was off duty when he killed Delrawn Small in the early morning in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn.The officer was charged with murder and manslaughter. Video of the shooting, prosecutors argued, appeared to contradict the officer’s account. The jury acquitted him anyway.“I felt dejected, demoralized, really upset for the family,” Mr. Bragg recalled. “I felt like our system had not worked.”Now, the issues of police accountability and public integrity that Mr. Bragg confronted as a prosecutor are at the center of his campaign to lead one of the most important district attorney’s offices in the country. Mr. Bragg, 47, a Democrat, is one of nine candidates vying for the office, and is among those seeking to balance concerns about public safety against a progressive push to make the criminal justice system less punitive.In seeking to position himself as the candidate most capable of changing the system from the inside, Mr. Bragg has leaned on his personal history — including both his street-corner and courtroom encounters with the police. And Mr. Bragg, who is the only Black candidate running, would be the first Black person to lead an office where, researchers have found, race continues to be a critical factor in nearly every part of the process.But his history leading the unit that tried Officer Isaacs — a unit charged with investigating police killings of unarmed civilians — undermines a record that sounds better than it looks, his opponents and their supporters charge. Under Mr. Bragg, the unit, then called the Special Investigations and Prosecutions Unit, investigated 24 cases and brought back zero convictions. (It has not fared any better since he left, three years ago.)Officer Wayne Isaacs, center, was found not guilty after a 2017 trial; Mr. Bragg said the verdict still troubles him.  Dave Sanders for The New York Times“The Manhattan district attorney needs to be able to manage the most complicated and difficult cases, and that includes holding police accountable,” said Lucy Lang, another candidate in the race, who at a debate last week attacked Mr. Bragg’s record on police accountability. “Unfortunately, in the 24 cases of police killings that came before him, Alvin wasn’t able to hold a single officer accountable.”Mr. Bragg said that his record leading the unit, now called the Office of Special Investigation, showed only that the law makes it extremely difficult to successfully prosecute police officers.Experts agree. Though there are exceptions, including the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Mr. Bragg’s record with the unit at the attorney general’s office is not unusual. It remains extremely difficult to charge, let alone convict, police officers.Peter Neufeld, head of the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions, said that Mr. Bragg was fighting within a system that was heavily weighted against him. (Mr. Neufeld endorsed Mr. Bragg last month.)“It doesn’t make sense when looking at somebody who is taking on an adversary with both hands tied behind his back to measure his win-loss record,” he said.Close to homeMr. Bragg grew up on 139th Street in the heart of Harlem. Born in 1973, on the cusp of the city’s fiscal crisis, he said he learned at an early age which blocks were safe and which were not, the places he could go and the places that were best avoided.His mother, a math teacher, kept a close eye on him and made sure he focused on school, drilling him on his multiplication tables on the M10 bus and asking him to stay within the confines of their block. His father, who worked for the New York Urban League, regaled him with stories about the Willis Reed-era New York Knicks and encouraged him to get outside.There could be trouble, even close to home. When Mr. Bragg was 10 years old, he had a knife put to his neck by some teenagers in the middle of the day, in what he described as a “hazing,” but a very scary one.And then there were the police. About five years later, he was walking with a friend when an unmarked police car began driving the wrong way on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, he said. Three officers emerged from the car. One put a gun to Mr. Bragg’s head. They asked if he was dealing drugs and started going through his pockets.“You didn’t need to go to law school to know this was unlawful,” Mr. Bragg said. His interest in criminal justice started there.He went to Harvard and Harvard Law School and clerked for the federal judge Robert Patterson Jr., where he first began to see the way that prosecutors could work on behalf of public safety. After several years working as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, he became a prosecutor at the New York attorney general’s office, looking at public corruption and white- collar crime. He later worked under Preet Bharara, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District, as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, before returning to the attorney general’s office, where he focused on police misconduct.Mr. Bharara, who has endorsed Mr. Bragg, said that he had been set apart while a federal prosecutor by his concerns about police accountability and public corruption.“He’s not jumping on the bandwagon in connection with the race for office,” Mr. Bharara said. “He’s cared about these things for a long time.”Mr. Bragg, who met volunteers in Union Square this month, has sought to balance progressive ideas about the criminal justice system with public safety concerns.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesCivil Rights and Public SafetyMr. Bragg is one of nine candidates, eight Democrats and one Republican, running to replace Cyrus R. Vance Jr. as the chief prosecutor in Manhattan, a position that carries immense power to affect the criminal justice system in New York City.He has said that his overall focus will be on decreasing the number of people behind bars, that he will create a new unit to investigate police misconduct, move resources toward prosecutors investigating economic crime and overhaul the sex crimes unit. He has proposed a plan that would work to stem the flow of guns into New York from out of state.Many of Mr. Bragg’s ideas reflect the move to the left in prosecutorial elections in cities around the country in recent years — a shift that has ushered in a new breed of progressive prosecutor.Initially the race in Manhattan seemed to follow that pattern, as the majority of the Democratic candidates promoted lenient approaches to certain low-level crimes.But in recent months, as gun violence has continued to rise in New York City and another leading Democratic candidate, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, has stressed the importance of prosecuting crime, tension has grown between those pushing for leniency and those emphasizing public safety. (As of January, Mr. Bragg had raised more money than anyone other than Ms. Farhadian Weinstein and on Saturday, a racial justice organization, Color of Change, said it would spend $1 million promoting his candidacy.)Mr. Bragg has found a synthesis, based on his biography, that he hopes will persuade voters.“People care about both,” he said. “They want civil rights and public safety. Being safe is your first civil right, and we can’t have safety without community trust, which is based on civil rights.”And so he relies on his record — even when his opponents say it is unflattering. Under pressure from Ms. Lang during last week’s debate, he called the unit that has garnered zero convictions “the most transformative, transparent unit in this space in the history of this country.”Mr. Bragg has argued that the way his office worked with the victims’ families marked the beginning of a productive alliance between prosecutors and protesters, both pushing for justice. The unit was created after Eric Garner’s death in police custody in 2014; Mr. Bragg has been endorsed by Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr.Mr. Small’s brother, Victor Dempsey, said that Mr. Bragg had consulted him throughout the case against Officer Isaacs. He has endorsed Mr. Bragg’s candidacy.“Alvin has been a tremendous part in my advocacy work and my family’s advocacy work because he kind of gave us the impetus to keep fighting,” he said.But not all of Mr. Small’s family has backed Mr. Bragg. Victoria Davis, his sister, has endorsed Ms. Lang, who worked as a prosecutor under Mr. Vance.In a recent conversation, Ms. Davis said that she did not feel Mr. Bragg had done everything he could for her brother, who she said was demonized during the officer’s trial because of a tattoo. “I think he wasn’t humanized,” she said of her brother.Mr. Bragg still dwells on the acquittal of Officer Isaacs. He agreed with Ms. Davis that the defense team had successfully dehumanized Mr. Small, transforming him into what Mr. Bragg called a “Black boogeyman,” a tactic that predated the modern criminal justice system.“The part that is sad is that it works,” he said. “That racial imagery is a tie that binds throughout our history. Ultimately that’s the original sin, and we’ve got to address that.” More

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      Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race

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      Rising concerns over crime have led candidates to issue strong appeals for public safety, less than a year after the city was under pressure to defund the police.A shooting in Times Square, a spike in gun violence and a spate of high-profile attacks on subway riders have pushed concerns over crime and public safety to the forefront of the New York City mayor’s race, altering the trajectory of the contest as the June 22 primary approaches.A year after the rise of the “defund the police” movement amid an outcry over racial injustice, the primary will offer one of the first tests of where Democratic voters stand as the country emerges from the pandemic but confronts a rise in gun violence in major cities like New York.The shooting on Saturday in Times Square, the heart of tourism and transit in New York City, injured three bystanders, including a 4-year-old girl, a woman from New Jersey and a Rhode Island tourist who had been hoping to visit the Statue of Liberty.Two of the leading mayoral candidates rushed to the scene.Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, held a Sunday morning news conference where he declared that “nothing works in our city without public safety, and for public safety, we need the police.” Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, went to Times Square twice: on Saturday, hours after the shooting, and again the following afternoon.On Monday, Raymond J. McGuire appeared there as well, walking a careful line between calling for stronger policing and discussing how, “as a 6-foot-4, 200-pound Black man in America,” he understands how the police can violate civil rights.The rising concerns over crime have given those candidates a fresh opening to make forceful cases for public safety and the role it plays in New York’s recovery from the pandemic.The moment is also testing whether the most left-wing candidates in the race, whose far-reaching proposals to rein in the power of the New York Police Department reflected widespread protests over racial injustice last year, will resonate in the same way when the city may be at a different kind of inflection point.As of May 2, 132 people have been killed compared with 113 this same time last year, a 17 percent increase, according to Police Department statistics. There have been 416 shooting incidents compared with 227 this time last year, an 83 percent increase.In one sign of just how central matters of public safety are becoming in the race, at least three different candidates plan to discuss the issue on Tuesday. Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, is slated to unveil her policing plan; the former federal housing secretary, Shaun Donovan, is expected in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, which has been hit especially hard by gun violence over the last year, to discuss “his plans to eliminate the out-of-state gun pipeline”; and Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, intends to roll out a gun violence prevention proposal.“We’re in a very precarious position,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader. “People are afraid of the cops and the robbers. We have both of them that we’ve got to deal with. And anyone that cannot come up with a comprehensive plan that threads the needle of both should not be running for mayor.”Mr. Sharpton said he intends to press mayoral candidates on issues of both overpolicing and gun violence at a forum in coming weeks.More than any other candidate in the race, Mr. Adams offers the clearest test of the potency of a message centered on public safety, which he describes as the “prerequisite” to prosperity. Mr. Adams, a former police officer who has pushed for reforms within the system and says he has been a victim of police brutality himself, has been vocal for weeks about the rise in gun violence. On Monday, he was talking about those issues again, standing outside a Manhattan subway station where a woman was recently assaulted.“This city is out of control,” Mr. Adams said. “That’s what has changed in this mayoral race: People are finally hearing me. We don’t have to live like this.”He and other Democratic candidates contend that there is no conflict between urging a robust police response to crime, and insisting on changes to regulate police misconduct and violence.Even before the Times Square shooting, there were mounting signs that public safety was intensifying as a concern in New York: a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll released late last month found that “crime or violence” was a major concern for New York Democrats, second only to the coronavirus.Jade Lundy, a child-care worker who lives in the Bronx, said she has begun taking more precautions because there seems to be an uptick in crime, which she blamed on economic hardship caused by the pandemic.“I don’t take out my phone anymore,” she said Monday afternoon as she headed for the subway to the Bronx, from Times Square. Ms. Lundy, who recently turned 18, said she plans to vote in the mayoral election and has just begun learning about the candidates.“I want someone who can make us feel safer,” Ms. Lundy said. “Especially for the women. We have it harder out here.”A spate of crimes targeting Asian-Americans have also alarmed New Yorkers across the city, some candidates say..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“That makes them very worried about the city, and particularly for people who have lived here a long time,” said Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner. For those New Yorkers, she said, some wonder, “Are we back in the ‘70s and ‘80s?”The incidents of violent crime are nowhere near the sky-high numbers of earlier eras in New York, and while shootings and homicides are up, other crimes have been down this spring. Nonetheless, other elected officials also reached for comparisons to the city’s so-called bad old days even as they stressed that they do not believe the current moment is equivalent.“Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, people that lived here, including myself, you know, we witnessed some pretty nasty stuff,” said Representative Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat. “We don’t want to slip back to that. So I think that that’s going to be a major issue with this year’s mayoral race.” Mr. Espaillat is currently neutral after pulling his endorsement from the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, following an allegation of sexual misconduct, which Mr. Stringer denies.Diana Ayala, a councilwoman representing East Harlem and the Bronx who also rescinded her support of Mr. Stringer, said the response from the mayoral candidates to addressing crime will determine if she endorses anyone else for mayor.“Citywide, people are alarmed at the numbers of shootings but quite frankly, those numbers have been pretty consistent in my district for the last three and a half years,” Ms. Ayala said. “Every summer, even as we speak, we are planning for what’s to come.”Ms. Wiley, who held a news conference on Sunday to decry gun violence, has already released a plan to combat that issue. Her policing plan, according to her campaign, will include proposals like a civilian police commissioner, and ensuring that “final disciplinary authority for police misconduct” will “be in the hands of a new all-civilian neutral body.”She also supports “cutting at least $1 billion from the N.Y.P.D. budget to fund investments in alternatives to policing,” her campaign says. Mr. Stringer has said he supports reallocating $1.1 billion in police funds over four years — while often saying that he does not want a return to the chaos of the 1970s. Mr. Donovan has pledged to cut $3 billion from the police and corrections budget by the end of his first term and direct the money to underserved neighborhoods; Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, wants to cut $3 billion and reallocate those funds as well.Ms. Morales, the most left-wing candidate in the race, was not available for an interview on Monday, but a spokeswoman, Lauren Liles, said Ms. Morales “stands by her emphasis that we need to move away from the false equivalency between policing and public safety.”Many Democrats have also pointed out that Times Square already has a significant police presence, noting that was not enough to prevent a shooting.Mr. McGuire called for a re-examination of bail reform laws in a way that doesn’t violate people’s civil rights.“There’s a difference between someone being thrown into jail for stealing a bag of potato chips and someone who has repeat arrests for gun possession,” Mr. McGuire said. “People arrested in possession of a loaded, illegal firearm cannot be detained by breakfast and walk out of the courthouse and be home by dinner.” More

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      After Times Square Shooting, Adams and Yang Stress Support for N.Y.P.D.

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      Eric Adams and Andrew Yang, among the front-runners in the New York City mayor’s race, said the shooting underlined the importance of public safety.Within hours of a shooting in Times Square that left three bystanders, including a child, wounded, two news conferences were held near the crime scene: one by the Police Department, one by an elected official.That official was not Mayor Bill de Blasio; the mayor, who is in his last year in office, does not typically appear at shootings where no one has died, a City Hall aide said. The official was Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president who is running to succeed Mr. de Blasio.The symbolism of the moment, and its political upsides, were not lost on Mr. Adams and a leading rival, Andrew Yang, both political moderates. Mr. Yang, the former presidential candidate, held a news conference in Times Square on Sunday morning. Not to be outdone, or even matched, Mr. Adams book-ended Mr. Yang’s appearance with a second Times Square visit on Sunday afternoon.Both men are running as Democrats in a primary that is likely to determine the next mayor of New York City and is just six weeks away. Though many New Yorkers have yet to pay attention to the race, recent polling suggests Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams are vying for first place.The shooting near Seventh Avenue and West 45th Street wounded a 4-year-old girl from Brooklyn in the leg. She was shopping for toys with her family. A 23-year-old Rhode Island tourist who had been hoping to visit the Statue of Liberty was also shot in the leg, and a 43-year-old woman from New Jersey was shot in the foot. The victims did not know each other, the police said.A police official identified the suspect in the shooting as Farrakhan Muhammad, 32, a seller of CDs, and said he had been shooting at his brother, who was not hit. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Muhammad had prior arrests in incidents in Midtown involving making threats in 2018 and grabbing a man by the neck and throwing him into a garbage can in 2020. It was not immediately clear how the cases were resolved.The shooting was frightening. But from a political perspective, it also seemed tailor-made for moderate mayoral candidates like Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang, who are eager to highlight their rejection of defunding the police, a principle that continues to animate the party’s left. In both candidates’ remarks, they also stressed their belief that New York City’s economy could not recover without public safety.“We’re not going to recover as a city if we turn back time and see an increase in violence, particularly gun violence,” said Mr. Adams, in a blue windbreaker with his name on it.Mr. Yang, who lives nearby, spoke on Mother’s Day, with his wife, Evelyn, in tow.At a Times Square news conference on Sunday, Andrew Yang said that “New York City cannot afford to defund the police.”Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“My fellow New Yorkers, if there’s one thing I want to say to you it is this: Nothing works in our city without public safety, and for public safety, we need the police,” Mr. Yang said. “My message to the N.Y.P.D. is this: New York needs you. Your city needs you.”“The truth is that New York City cannot afford to defund the police,” he added.Times Square represents the commercial and tourist heart of Manhattan, itself the financial capital of New York City and the nation. The shooting comes as the city is revving up its marketing engine, with the goal of reviving New York City’s tourist trade.In the year before the pandemic, 66.6 million tourists came to town, giving rise to 400,000 tourism-related jobs and an estimated economic impact of $70 billion. Last year, only 22 million tourists came to New York City, and officials estimate it will take years for the industry to recover.The police say more than 460 people have been shot this year in New York City as of May 2, compared with 259 last year and 239 in 2019 at the same point. Mr. de Blasio routinely attributes the rise in shootings to the societal upheaval wrought by the pandemic, which has created mass unemployment, and also blames a slowdown in the court system. Dermot F. Shea, Mr. de Blasio’s police commissioner, tends to blame recent statewide criminal justice reforms, which he says have made it harder to keep those charged with criminal offenses in jail..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang took the opportunity to highlight their policing agendas, which include reimagining plainclothes anti-violence units. Mr. de Blasio disbanded his plainclothes anti-crime unit, which had been involved in many police shootings, last year. Both also touted their commitment to criminal justice reform.Mr. Yang said he would ensure his plainclothes unit was populated by better-trained officers with clean records. Mr. Adams has said he would hire officers for the unit with the skills and temperament for the job.Other moderate candidates, like the former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and the former Citigroup executive Raymond J. McGuire, chimed in with similar themes — that public safety and strong policing need not come at the expense of criminal justice reform.Candidates further to the left talked about the importance of finding alternatives to traditional policing.At a press availability outside a church in Brooklyn, Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio who has embraced some of the defund movement’s goals, said she would invest in “trauma-informed” mental health care and summer youth employment programs.Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive who wants to more than halve the Police Department’s operating budget, said on Twitter that “we need bigger solutions than the police.”The incident prompted Bernard B. Kerik, the former police commissioner under Rudolph W. Giuliani, to suggest that an electoral triumph by either Ms. Wiley, who is Black, or Ms. Morales, who is Afro-Latina, would mean a “catastrophic implosion” for New York City.Ms. Wiley did not take kindly to the remark.“Giuliani’s ex-police commissioner — a convicted fraudster — isn’t even being subtle with a racist trope that Black women would unleash a crime wave if elected,” Ms. Wiley responded. “Don’t get it twisted — as mayor, I’ll move our city forward with an economy that works for all and safe & just streets.”Ashley Southall More

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      How New York’s Mayoral Hopefuls Would Change the N.Y.P.D.

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      Some candidates in the Democratic primary want to cut $1 billion or more from the police budget, while others have more moderate proposals, frustrating activists.When the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty this week of murdering George Floyd, the Democrats running for mayor of New York City, unsurprisingly, offered a unanimous chorus of support.The two leading moderates in the race — Andrew Yang and Eric Adams — said that justice had been delivered, but that the verdict was only the first step toward real police accountability. Maya Wiley and Scott Stringer, two left-leaning candidates, seized the moment more overtly, appearing with other mayoral hopefuls at a rally at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the site of many of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests.“For once, we got a little bit of what we deserve — to be seen as people who deserve to breathe,” Ms. Wiley said to a crowd, within hours of the verdict.But the candidates’ unanimity disappears when it comes to their approaches to running the New York Police Department, the nation’s largest. From the size of the police budget to disciplining rogue officers, the candidates offer starkly different visions.In the wake of the Floyd case and other recent police killings, several candidates on the left, including Ms. Wiley and Mr. Stringer, have adopted the goals of the “defund the police” movement and want to significantly cut the police budget and divert resources into social services.Another candidate, Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive who also attended the rally at Barclays, has embraced that movement more fully, calling for slashing the $6 billion budget in half and for eventually abolishing the police altogether. She and others argue that having fewer officers would reduce violent encounters with the police.But Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams, more centrist candidates, strongly oppose reducing the police force and instead are calling for more expeditious decisions on police discipline and for improving accountability.The debate is happening at a precarious moment for New York City, which is facing a troubling rise in gun violence: Last year was the city’s bloodiest in nearly a decade, and the number of shooting victims doubled to more than 1,500.Shootings typically spike as the weather gets warmer, and the coming months will reveal whether the increase in violence over the last year was an aberration linked to the pandemic or the beginning of a worrisome trend.If gun violence increases in May and June, in the weeks leading up to the June 22 primary that is likely to decide the city’s next mayor, it could have an outsize impact on the race. And it may help moderate candidates like Mr. Yang, a former presidential hopeful, and Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, who tied for first when voters were asked in a recent poll which candidate would best handle crime and public safety.Mr. Adams, a Black former police captain, has positioned himself as a law-and-order candidate, saying that he is far better equipped than his rivals to make the city safer — a key step in its recovery from the pandemic.“Public safety is the prerequisite to prosperity in this city,” Mr. Adams often repeats on the campaign trail.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, is a former New York City police captain who strongly opposes reducing the size of the force.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesMr. Adams is allied with moderate Black lawmakers who have criticized the defund movement and have argued that their communities do not want officers to disappear. Similarly, Mr. Yang supports some police reform measures but has not embraced the defund movement.Chivona Renee Newsome, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, said she feared that Mr. Yang or Mr. Adams would not bring meaningful changes to the Police Department.“I want a mayor who will listen,” she said, someone who was “not at the mercy of the N.Y.P.D.”Calls for sweeping changes and a push to defund the police last summer led to laws banning chokeholds, limiting legal protections for officers facing lawsuits and opening police disciplinary records to the public. But elected officials did not make substantial cuts to the police budget or limit the types of situations officers respond to.“We’re long past the time where people are going to be satisfied with cosmetic reforms or some attempts that really don’t get at the root question around reducing police violence and surveillance, increasing police accountability and transparency, and basically divesting from the N.Y.P.D.’s bloated budget and reinvesting that into our communities,” said Joo-Hyun Kang, the director of Communities United for Police Reform.Left-wing activists are already applying a fresh round of pressure on the City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio to reduce police spending in next year’s budget.The death of Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014 put a particular focus on holding officers accountable. Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who put Mr. Garner in a chokehold, was not criminally charged, and it took the city five years to fire him from the Police Department.Mr. Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, endorsed Raymond J. McGuire, a former Wall Street executive who has more moderate views on policing. Ms. Carr said the next mayor would only be able to tackle police reform if the city’s finances were stabilized. Mr. McGuire supports measures like increasing funding for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates accusations of police brutality and misconduct and makes disciplinary recommendations.The next mayor and his or her police commissioner will have to resolve a host of thorny issues: how to discipline officers; whether the police should respond to calls involving the homeless and mental health issues; and how to address protests over police brutality. To put it more simply, in the post-Floyd era, what is the correct form and function of the police force and its 35,000 officers?When it comes to firing an officer, Mr. Yang believes the police commissioner should continue to have final say; Mr. Adams argues it should be the mayor; and Mr. Stringer wants it to be the Civilian Complaint Review Board. Ms. Wiley has not given a clear answer.The left-leaning candidates want to prevent police officers from responding to mental health emergencies and remove them from schools; Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams are reluctant to do so.While Mr. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mr. de Blasio and former chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, have distanced themselves from the word “defund,” they both want to cut the police budget. Ms. Wiley has suggested cutting $1 billion per year. Mr. Stringer says he would trim at least $1 billion over four years and released a detailed plan to transfer 911 calls for issues involving homelessness and mental health to civilian crisis response teams.Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, has proposed removing police officers from public schools in New York City.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesMs. Morales has called for the most sweeping changes to the criminal justice system: She wants to decriminalize all drug use, eliminate bail and build no new jails. Two other candidates — Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary — have more moderate positions that are nuanced enough that activists have created spreadsheets to keep track of where the candidates stand.Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams have their own proposals, but activists are skeptical. Earlier this month, when Mr. Yang attended a bike vigil for Daunte Wright, a young man killed by the police in Minnesota, an organizer recognized him and grabbed a bullhorn.“You’re pro-cop — get out of here,” she said. “Boo! Shame on you, Andrew Yang.”Mr. Yang said in an interview that he decided to leave after that, and that he had spent more than an hour with the group biking from Barclays Center to Battery Park in Lower Manhattan.“I wanted to join this event in order to really have a chance to reflect and mourn for Daunte Wright’s unnecessary death at the hands of law enforcement,” he said.Mr. Yang said he supported measures like requiring officers to live in the city and appointing a civilian police commissioner who is not steeped in the department’s culture. He said officers like Mr. Pantaleo should be fired quickly. But he rejected the idea that he was pro-police or anti-police.“I think most New Yorkers know that we have to do two things at once — work with them to bring down the levels of shootings and violent crimes that are on the rise, and we also need to reform the culture,” Mr. Yang said.Andrew Yang has said that he would choose a civilian police commissioner if elected mayor.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesProtesters were upset that Mr. Yang called for an increase in funding for a police task force in response to anti-Asian attacks. They also have doubts about Mr. Yang because Tusk Strategies, a firm that advises him, has worked with the Police Benevolent Association, the police union, which embraced President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Adams attended the same vigil for Mr. Wright, and he was peppered with questions over his support of the stop-and-frisk policing strategy. Such stops soared under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and they disproportionately targeted Black and Latino men. Mr. Adams said he believed stop-and-frisk could be a useful tool, but that it was abused under Mr. Bloomberg.Mr. Adams has offered his own ideas: diversifying the Police Department, where Black officers are underrepresented; disclosing the department’s own internal list of officers with records of complaints and giving communities veto power over precinct commanders.He also argues that he is the only candidate with the credibility to transform the force. Mr. Adams has said that he was beaten by the police as a young man and that inspired him to push for changes when he later joined the Police Department.In an interview, Mr. Adams said that it took the city too long to fire Mr. Pantaleo and he would move more quickly on disciplinary matters if elected.“I’m going to have a fair but speedy trial within a two-month period to determine if that officer should remain a police officer,” he said. “And if not, we’re going to expeditiously remove him from the agency. The goal here is to rebuild trust.”Mr. Adams wants to appoint the city’s first female police commissioner, and he has spoken highly of a top official, Chief Juanita Holmes, whom the current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, lured out of retirement. Mr. Yang is also considering Ms. Holmes or Val Demings, a congresswoman from Florida and a former police chief, according to a person familiar with his thinking.Mr. de Blasio has praised a new disciplinary matrix that standardizes the range of penalties for offenses like using chokeholds and lying on official paperwork. But while current leaders settled on these rules, the agreement signed by the police commissioner and the chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board is not legally binding, allowing the next administration to set its own policies.Many of the mayoral candidates have called for changing how the city handles mental health emergencies. Since 2014, N.Y.P.D. officers have killed more than 15 people with histories of mental illness. The city is currently conducting a small experiment that sends social workers instead of police out on calls with emergency medical technicians in parts of Harlem.As the Police Department says it is trying to build trust with the community, one recent decision appeared slightly tone deaf: bringing a robot dog to an arrest at a public housing building. The candidates criticized the use of the device, which costs at least $74,000.Mr. Adams said the money would be better spent “stopping gun violence in communities of color.”“You can’t build the trust we need between those communities and police with a robot,” he said. More

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      Who Will be the Next Manhattan D.A.? 8 Candidates Who May Prosecute Trump

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      Who will be the next Manhattan district attorney? The race is dominated by low-profile progressives who could reshape law enforcement in New York City.The race to become Manhattan’s next district attorney is shaping up to be one of the most important in decades, a watershed contest that is likely to fundamentally change the mission of the prominent office and may affect the future of former President Donald J. Trump.Yet the eight candidates are all relative unknowns, and, with no public polling, there is no clear front-runner. The victor is likely to win the general election in November without having received a majority of votes in the Democratic primary.Most of the candidates believe prosecutors should be sending fewer people to prison, especially for minor crimes, and that the office should play an active role in creating a less punitive, less racially biased criminal justice system.The election is being watched as a test of what a borough considered to be a liberal bastion wants from its head prosecutor, and just how deeply voters want the criminal justice system to change.“The Manhattan D.A.’s office is justifiably seen as one of the premier offices in the country,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the United States attorney general under President Barack Obama. “What happens in the D.A.’s office will have an outsized influence on the path of reform around the country.”The current officeholder, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., announced earlier this month that he would not seek re-election.Mr. Vance, who has no plans to endorse a candidate, has held the position for three terms and was the handpicked successor of Robert M. Morgenthau, who over four decades built the office’s reputation as one of the largest and most ambitious prosecutorial agencies in the country.Mr. Vance’s announcement catapulted the race into the national spotlight, as his successor stands to inherit an investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his company committed fraud to obtain loans and tax benefits.The race can be divided into two camps, with three candidates who have not worked as prosecutors and five who have.The candidates who have never prosecuted a case — Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — have argued that the core work of the district attorney’s office needs to be revamped, shifting toward reducing incarceration and cutting back prosecution of low-level crimes.Four of the former prosecutors — Alvin Bragg, Lucy Lang, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Diana Florence — largely agree. But they have pitched themselves as occupying a middle ground, focused on less sweeping changes. A fifth former prosecutor, Liz Crotty, has been less vocal in calling for systemic change.Ranked-choice voting — which allows voters to express who they would support if their top choice does not win — will not be used in the primary on June 22.That means whoever gets the biggest slice of votes in the Democratic primary, even if far from a majority, will go on to the general election. There, victory is almost certain because so far there are no Republicans on the ballot.The ‘progressive prosecutor’ movementIn the decade since Mr. Vance took office in 2010, views of criminal justice have shifted in many urban centers, transforming elections for local prosecutors.Activists — most prominently those in the Black Lives Matter movement — have used social media platforms to raise awareness of police violence, mass incarceration and racial bias in the justice system.“We as a general society are seeing on a larger scale how things like police violence are impacting people’s lives,” said Nicole Smith Futrell, a law professor at the City University of New York.Starting with the election of Kenneth P. Thompson as the Brooklyn district attorney in 2013, voters have rewarded candidates across the country who have focused on prosecutorial and police misconduct.These politicians — often grouped together as “progressive prosecutors” — have included Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago and George Gascón in Los Angeles.Tali Farhadian Weinstein, right, was general counsel to the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, left.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesIn New York City, Eric Gonzalez, who was elected as Brooklyn district attorney in 2017, said he wanted to lead “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country.” A former public defender, Tiffany Cabán, who pledged to stop prosecuting low-level crimes, lost the race for Queens district attorney by the slimmest of margins in 2019.The candidatesMost of the candidates competing to succeed Mr. Vance said that they will redirect the power wielded by the Manhattan district attorney. Others have pledged to fundamentally reduce it.Ms. Aboushi, 35, has pointed toward her adolescent experience of seeing her father convicted on federal conspiracy charges related to the theft of trucks transporting cigarettes. He was sent to prison for 22 years. Ms. Aboushi has said she wants to keep the district attorney’s office from harming families like her own.Along with Ms. Orlins, she has committed to cutting the office in half. She has also stressed the use of alternatives to prison. She has won support from the left and has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, a power player in New York.Ms. Aboushi, who has worked at her family’s law firm since 2010, would be the first woman, Muslim and nonwhite candidate to hold the office. (Every contender except for Mr. Quart would break at least one such barrier.)Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart are running campaigns in a similar vein. Ms. Orlins, 38, a longtime public defender, has a fiery social media presence and often mentions the damage that she said prosecutors did to her clients. She has pledged not to prosecute the majority of misdemeanors.“I saw clients getting cycled through the system, getting locked up, getting bail set, getting offered ridiculous plea deals, spending a month or two months in jail for these low-level minor offenses,” she said.Mr. Quart, 47, a seven-term assemblyman and the only candidate with any previous political experience, has argued that he is the only person running who has already changed the system. He points to his role in successful efforts to repeal laws that protected police from accountability and put thousands of people in jail for low-level crimes.“My experience is about not just the rhetoric of reform, but actually achieving it,” Mr. Quart said.Assemblyman Dan Quart (D-Manhattan) is the only candidate with experience in politics.Patrick Dodson for The New York TimesAll three have argued that it is a virtue never to have prosecuted anyone, suggesting that the very act of prosecution should bear some stigma. By contrast, the ex-prosecutors in the race sprinkle suggestions for change with specifics on how to curtail certain crimes.Alvin Bragg, 47, the only Black candidate, seems comfortable running both as a reformer and a career law-enforcement official. Mr. Bragg, who was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and later chief deputy attorney general in New York, was the only candidate to appear at both a “decarceral debate” held by public defenders and a forum organized by alumni of the Manhattan district attorney’s office — audiences with opposing viewpoints..css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Your Questions About Donald Trump’s Taxes, AnsweredYes. Hours after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s final bid to defy a 2019 subpoena, millions of pages of records were turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is now combing through them.The investigation is wide-ranging, but one particular area of concern is whether Trump’s company manipulated its property values, inflating them to obtain favorable loans while lowballing them to reduce its taxes. Investigators have also focused on the company’s long-serving chief financial officer.The records turned over to the district attorney’s office will remain private unless they are presented as evidence at a trial, but The Times has already uncovered a variety of potential financial improprieties, based on more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax data.If the district attorney were to indict Mr. Trump — far from a sure thing — the result would be the potential criminal trial of a former president. For his part, Mr. Trump has dismissed the investigation as a politically motivated “fishing expedition” and vowed to “fight on.”Mr. Bragg has leaned on his roots in Harlem. He often brings up the half-dozen times he has had a gun pointed at him, including three encounters involving police officers. He has said he wants to reduce unnecessary incarceration and fight crime.“One thing we need to reject is this false dichotomy that you’ve got between civil rights and public safety,” he said.Mr. Bragg’s closest competitor in straddling the two camps is Lucy Lang, who worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office for 12 years. Ms. Lang, 40, is steeped in policy and has released the outlines of her approach to dozens of issues, from sex crimes to restorative justice. She presents herself as someone who would change the office but also has the experience to manage high-profile cases.Tali Farhadian Weinstein, 45, a former federal prosecutor and general counsel in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, is running a more conservative campaign than her colleagues and has a substantial lead in fund-raising. She has been endorsed by Mr. Holder, with whom she worked at the Department of Justice.Though she emphasizes her experience in Brooklyn, where she led a unit that reviews convictions, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has also been direct in describing her approach to prosecution. “You can’t just identify the problem,” she said. “You also then have to have a positive agenda about what the solution is.”The final two candidates stand apart from the field for different reasons.Ms. Florence, 50, is also a veteran of the Manhattan district attorney’s office and spent much of her career prosecuting fraud and corruption cases. She wants the office to refocus its energy on cases against the powerful.But she must overcome a significant hurdle: She resigned from the office after a judge found that she had withheld evidence from defense lawyers in a major bribery case, a serious ethical violation. A spokeswoman for Ms. Florence’s campaign said she has taken “full responsibility” for the mistake.Ms. Crotty, 50, a former assistant district attorney under Mr. Morgenthau, has conformed least to the blueprint set by the other contenders. Though she acknowledges systemic racism, she is loath to call for systemic solutions, saying instead that she will evaluate matters on a case-by-case basis. She has pledged to strengthen the office’s investigations of white-collar crime.The Trump investigationMr. Vance is likely to decide whether to seek an indictment against Mr. Trump before he leaves office. If he does, the next district attorney will have to handle the prosecution of a former president.The candidates have been reluctant to discuss the case in detail, saying it would be unethical to offer an opinion without seeing the evidence firsthand.It is unclear how the prospect of a trial of a former president might influence voters. Some strategists say it would matter little. Others say it favors experienced prosecutors.“This is Manhattan,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mr. Vance’s former deputy. “You’re going to have high-profile, high-interest, serious crimes. You need people who know how to handle those cases.” More

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      Cyrus Vance Will Not Run Again for Manhattan D.A.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Trump’s TaxesWhat’s NextOur InvestigationA 2016 WindfallProfiting From FameTimeline18 Key FindingsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNew Adversary Looms for Trump as Vance Exits Manhattan D.A. RaceThe decision by Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney since 2010, sets off a scramble for the office and makes it likely a new prosecutor will inherit an investigation into the former president’s business.Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who has been Manhattan district attorney since 2010, has told his staff he will not stand for re-election.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMarch 12, 2021Updated 9:21 a.m. ETCyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, announced on Friday he would not run for re-election, setting off a wide-open race to lead one of the most important crime-fighting offices in the country and making it highly likely that any potential case against President Donald J. Trump will be left in a newcomer’s hands.Mr. Vance made the long-expected announcement in a memo to his staff early Friday morning, just weeks before the filing deadline for the race. The many candidates clamoring to replace him are, with few exceptions, seeking to fundamentally reshape the office.A scion of one of Manhattan’s well-known liberal families, Mr. Vance is one of only four people to be elected Manhattan district attorney in nearly 80 years. He took office in 2010 and presided over the office during a decade when crime numbers plummeted and attitudes toward the criminal justice system changed.Mr. Vance was the handpicked successor of Robert M. Morgenthau, who served for 35 years and built the office’s reputation as one of the largest and most ambitious prosecutorial agencies in the country. When Mr. Vance took the helm, he vowed to stick to the practices that he said had served the office in good stead for years. He said while campaigning that he would not attempt to fix what was not broken.But at times, Mr. Vance, 66, seemed to be swimming against the current of public opinion in his liberal district, as the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements raised awareness of ingrained biases in the criminal justice system and led to calls for wholesale reform.The eight-way race to succeed Mr. Vance reflects those newer political currents. Three of the candidates running to be New York County’s lead prosecutor have no prosecutorial experience at all. The five others in the race have distanced themselves from Mr. Vance, including two who worked in his office, Lucy Lang and Diana Florence, who rarely mention his tenure in a positive light.Mr. Vance’s announcement, first reported in The New Yorker, was widely expected. He had not been actively raising money or campaigning.During his three terms in office, Mr. Vance won praise for pioneering data-driven methods to more effectively target violent crime, but was faulted in some quarters for being too tentative when investigating powerful figures.“He was cautious in what high-profile cases he brought,” said Marc F. Scholl, a veteran of the district attorney’s office who left for private practice in 2017. “He was more interested in not making mistakes than anything else.”Mr. Vance’s critics have focused on his handling of sex crime investigations, starting with the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper in 2011. Mr. Vance dropped the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn after prosecutors in his office raised questions about the victim’s credibility.After the case against Mr. Strauss-Kahn fell apart, Mr. Vance said that his success or failure could only be measured over time. Some of his most notable victories have involved the same figures whom critics said he had treated leniently earlier in his tenure.For instance, in 2015, Mr. Vance chose not to press charges against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, whom an Italian model had accused of groping her during an interview in his SoHo office. She later obtained an incriminating tape of him talking about the incident, but charges were dropped over prosecutors’ concerns a jury would not believe her.But in 2018, the year after decades of allegations against Mr. Weinstein set off the Me Too Movement, Mr. Vance brought the first criminal charges against him. Mr. Vance won a major victory in February 2020 when Mr. Weinstein was found guilty of felony sex crimes against two women. The following month, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.Mr. Vance also drew fire, then praise, for his dealings with Mr. Trump.After Mr. Trump rose to power, the district attorney was criticized for a 2012 decision to end a criminal investigation into fraud allegations against Mr. Trump and two of his children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.Prosecutors had been looking into whether the Trumps misled investors in a condominium project. Mr. Vance said the investigation ended in part because victims would not cooperate after having reached a civil settlement with the Trump family.For many Democrats, however, few of Mr. Vance’s triumphs loom larger than his dual wins at the Supreme Court as he later sought to investigate Mr. Trump and his business. Prosecutors are examining whether Mr. Trump fraudulently manipulated property values to obtain loans and tax benefits.In July of last year, the justices declared that Mr. Vance’s office — and by extension, all state prosecutors — had the right to seek evidence from a sitting president in a criminal investigation, setting a lasting limit on the scope of presidents’ powers and immunity from prosecution.And last month, the justices rejected in a brief unsigned order a last-ditch attempt to block Mr. Vance’s subpoena for Mr. Trump’s tax and financial records.“I don’t know how many local prosecutors could do that,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mr. Vance’s longtime deputy. “Just the ability to bring that case, go to the Supreme Court and now to be in possession of Donald Trump’s tax returns and doing a sweeping criminal investigation into the former president of the United States.”Mr. Vance was slower than some other big-city prosecutors when it came to certain reforms popular with progressives — Manhattan prosecutors were still taking on low-level marijuana cases as late as 2018 — but he did seek to reshape the office.In response to crime dropping to lows not seen since the mid-20th century, his office cut total prosecutions by more than half and invited the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, to examine its record on racial disparities in prosecution..css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Your Questions About Donald Trump’s Taxes, AnsweredYes. Hours after the Supreme Court rejected Mr. Trump’s final bid to defy a 2019 subpoena, millions of pages of records were turned over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is now combing through them.The investigation is wide-ranging, but one particular area of concern is whether Trump’s company manipulated its property values, inflating them to obtain favorable loans while lowballing them to reduce its taxes. Investigators have also focused on the company’s long-serving chief financial officer.The records turned over to the district attorney’s office will remain private unless they are presented as evidence at a trial, but The Times has already uncovered a variety of potential financial improprieties, based on more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax data.If the district attorney were to indict Mr. Trump — far from a sure thing — the result would be the potential criminal trial of a former president. For his part, Mr. Trump has dismissed the investigation as a politically motivated “fishing expedition” and vowed to “fight on.”He also poured money into community organizations that helped with crime prevention, and re-entry for those who had been incarcerated.The funds came from the $800 million Mr. Vance obtained for the office through asset forfeiture — money reaped from settlements with big banks accused of violating federal sanctions. He used the windfall as seed money to fund various programs.Perhaps the most expansive use of that money was its funding of a program to eliminate the nationwide backlog of rape kits — which preserve DNA evidence left by an assailant — in more than a dozen states. The push to clear that backlog has led to hundreds of prosecutions in unsolved cases and more than 100 convictions.Mr. Vance also put to rest an older case that had haunted the city for decades. In 2017, a jury convicted a former bodega worker of killing Etan Patz, a boy who disappeared in SoHo on his way to school in 1979, changing the way many American parents thought about protecting their children.The campaign to replace Mr. Vance has been dominated by talk of deep changes to the criminal justice system. Two of the candidates, Tahanie Aboushi and Eliza Orlins, have vowed to reduce the size of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, currently the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country, by 50 percent or more in order to limit its power.One potential strike against those candidates — as well as Dan Quart, a state assemblyman — is their lack of prosecutorial experience, which each has touted as a virtue. When it comes to a possible case against Mr. Trump, veterans of the office have argued, there is little substitute for having handled complicated investigations and high-pressure prosecutions.But some progressive Democrats say that the candidacies of Ms. Aboushi, Ms. Orlins and Mr. Quart reflect a hunger for changes in how prosecutors handle cases in Manhattan that acknowledge the harm the system has done to Black people and other marginalized communities.Janos Marton, a leader in New York’s movement to reduce incarceration, was a candidate to replace Mr. Vance until he dropped out of the race in December. He said Mr. Vance and his assistants, despite having tried at times, had not kept pace with reforms prosecutors were adopting elsewhere, like in Philadelphia, Chicago and even Brooklyn.“They enacted really punitive policies against low-income communities of color and even the reforms that they occasionally would embrace were quite far behind the curve,” he said.The investigation into the Trump organization is ongoing. Last month, The New York Times reported that Mr. Vance had enlisted a former federal prosecutor with expertise in organized crime and white collar crime to help with the inquiry. If it results in charges, Mr. Vance’s successor will almost certainly oversee the case.Mr. Vance’s announcement will inevitably prompt considerations of his legacy. But if he does bring charges against Mr. Trump, that action, and the success or failure of the resulting case, may single-handedly determine how Mr. Vance is remembered.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More