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      Running Against Hochul, Lee Zeldin Finds Another Target: Alvin Bragg

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      When he was running in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney in 2021, Alvin L. Bragg made a promise for his first day: He would stop prosecuting low-level crimes and incarcerate only people accused of the most serious offenses.Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor in 2022, has made his own Day 1 promise: If elected, he will inform Mr. Bragg that he is being removed from office for refusing to enforce the law.Mr. Zeldin has made that pledge repeatedly throughout his campaign, turning a local prosecutor into the unlikely focal point of a race for the state’s highest office, which has tightened in recent weeks. He used a debate Tuesday night against his Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, to attack Mr. Bragg for what he said was a failure to do the job of district attorney.But there is little that suggests that Mr. Bragg’s approach to serious crime differs significantly from that of other city prosecutors, including his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and the Brooklyn District Attorney, Eric Gonzalez. Murders and shootings are down in Manhattan this year; though some other major crimes are up, including robbery, burglary and grand larceny, those trends are broadly in line with crime trends citywide.Mr. Zeldin’s promise to remove Mr. Bragg, the first Black Manhattan district attorney, is representative of a dynamic informing races all over the country: As some types of crime have risen in cities nationwide, Republicans have sought to capitalize on some voters’ unease with calls from progressive Democrats to overhaul the criminal justice system.Mr. Zeldin would not simply be able to show Mr. Bragg the door. New York’s Constitution grants the governor the power to remove certain public officers, but it calls for those facing removal to be given the charges against them and an opportunity to defend themselves. Mr. Bragg’s office can be expected to fight any removal effort.The Republican candidate’s attack on the district attorney’s office has placed Mr. Bragg in an unusual position. Just a year ago, he was elected with 84 percent of the vote against his Republican opponent.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Bracing for a Red Wave: Republicans were already favored to flip the House. Now they are looking to run up the score by vying for seats in deep-blue states.Pennsylvania Senate Race: Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz clashed in one of the most closely watched debates of the midterm campaign. Here are five takeaways.Polling Analysis: If these poll results keep up, everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total G.O.P. rout becomes imaginable, writes Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst.Strategy Change: In the final stretch before the elections, some Democrats are pushing for a new message that acknowledges the economic uncertainty troubling the electorate.Mr. Zeldin’s pledge to push him out “is an authoritarian move,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government advocacy group. “If the voters recall a D.A., that’s the will of the voters. But for some other entity to override the will of the voters is antithetical to our system of governance.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin’s campaign did not return phone calls or respond to emails with questions about the pledge, including whether the candidate saw something uniquely improper about Mr. Bragg’s tenure. In an appearance on Fox News in July, Mr. Zeldin said that Mr. Bragg had been refusing to enforce the law since taking office, declining to prosecute some crimes while prosecuting others as lesser offenses.“Lee Zeldin is attempting to overturn the will of Manhattan voters one year after a local election that Alvin Bragg — a career prosecutor — won in a landslide,” said Danielle Filson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg. “This pledge, which is grounded in blatant fearmongering while deliberately ignoring facts and reality, is a direct attack on democracy.”Mr. Bragg’s campaign promise and the “Day 1 memo” that implemented it helped lock in public perception of his tenure, although he soon revised his policies to clarify that his prosecutors had the final authority when it came to decisions about charging and bail. But the memo has continued to define him in the eyes of skeptics, particularly after the Police Department commissioner, Keechant Sewell, sent an email to officers saying that she was concerned about the policies’ implications for public safety, officer safety and justice for victims of crimes.Mr. Zeldin, already a candidate, sent his first tweet calling for Mr. Bragg to be fired the day after Ms. Sewell sent her email and has since made the call a staple of his campaign.Until recently, he had promised to remove the district attorney on his first day in the governor’s office. During a Tuesday debate against his Democratic opponent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, he amended that, saying instead, “I’m going to remove him as soon as I can.”Lee Zeldin was already running for governor when Mr. Bragg took office, and pounced on an early memo that outlined the new district attorney’s vision.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesQuestions about his motivation may also complicate his plans: Mr. Bragg’s office is currently trying a criminal case against the family business of Donald J. Trump, an ally of Mr. Zeldin’s, and the district attorney’s investigation into the former president himself is “active and ongoing,” Mr. Bragg said last month.A spokeswoman for Mr. Zeldin, who has been a fervent backer of the former president, did not respond to a question about how the trial and investigation influenced his promise.There is precedent in New York for the removal of district attorneys. In 1874, and then again in 1900, a governor forced a New York City district attorney from office. And in the first half of the 20th century, several were either elbowed out of the way on specific cases or subject to hearings about whether they should be removed.Mr. Bragg, however, would be one of few to have his position challenged in the past 50 years.In 1973, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller began proceedings to remove the Queens district attorney after the prosecutor was indicted on charges of covering up a criminal investigation. (The district attorney resigned before the process ran its course.) In the 1990s, Gov. George Pataki removed the Bronx district attorney from a specific prosecution in a fight that reached New York’s highest court, which decided in favor of Mr. Pataki.The power to remove public officers is delineated briefly in New York’s state Constitution and elaborated on in the state’s public officers law. The measure appears to give the governor broad discretion in determining the process, outside of the hearing mandated by the Constitution. When past governors ordered removals, the process in most cases took several months, with a hearing involving witnesses, an accusation of wrongdoing and a defense.Prosecutors who share Mr. Bragg’s values say it is no coincidence that Mr. Zeldin has opted to challenge him.“Alvin’s a Harvard graduate, an accomplished lawyer, and now the city’s chief law enforcement officer, but he’s also a Black man from Harlem,” said Jarvis Idowu, a former Manhattan prosecutor. “That means, like Willie Horton and countless others, he’s easy fodder for this kind of dog-whistle scare tactic.”Victim rights advocates and others have said that Mr. Zeldin is well within his rights to remove Mr. Bragg — and that other sitting district attorneys should take note.“I’m in full agreement with it,” said Jennifer Harrison, the founder of Victims Rights NY, of Mr. Zeldin’s pledge. “Any district attorney that refuses to enforce the law or do their job should get their act together and be on notice if he gets elected.”Mr. Bragg is part of a movement of recently elected prosecutors who have pledged to adapt more lenient policies, saying that the impact of prosecution has fallen disproportionately on Black and brown people and arguing that harshly prosecuting petty crime is counterproductive. When Mr. Bragg announced his campaign in the summer of 2019, those candidates had won in Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.Many have since been challenged, either in recall elections or by other elected officials who disagree with their policies. In San Francisco, the district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled in June by a coalition of moderate voters incensed by the rise in property and quality-of-life crimes during the pandemic. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, suspended Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County state’s attorney in August, citing statements that Mr. Warren had made declining to prosecute those who sought abortions or gender-affirming health care.And on Wednesday, Republicans in the Pennsylvania House filed articles of impeachment against the Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, accusing him of failing to uphold the law.In an interview, Mr. Boudin said that Mr. Zeldin’s pledge and the other challenges to elected prosecutors all sprang from the same playbook.Republicans and police unions, he said, were “very intentionally deploying policies and practices to weaken and undermine and distract elected district attorneys who are part of a reform movement.”He added that he saw the trend as “intertwined with the Trump election-denying movement, that doesn’t care or respect the outcome of elections.”Michael Gold More

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      A Local Prosecutor Takes on Trump and Crime in Atlanta

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      ATLANTA — Fani T. Willis strode up to a podium in a red dress late last month in downtown Atlanta, flanked by an array of dark suits and stone-faced officers in uniform. Her voice rang out loud and clear, with a hint of swagger. “If you thought Fulton was a good county to bring your crime to, to bring your violence to, you are wrong,” she said, facing a bank of news cameras. “And you are going to suffer consequences.”Ms. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., had called the news conference to talk about a street gang known as Drug Rich, whose members had just been indicted in a sprawling racketeering case. But she could have been talking about another crew that she is viewing as a possible criminal enterprise: former President Donald J. Trump and his allies who tried to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss in Georgia.In recent weeks, Ms. Willis has called dozens of witnesses to testify before a special grand jury investigating efforts to undo Mr. Trump’s defeat, including a number of prominent pro-Trump figures who traveled, against their will, from other states. It was long arm of the law stuff, and it emphasized how her investigation, though playing out more than 600 miles from Washington, D.C., is no sideshow.Rather, the Georgia inquiry has emerged as one of the most consequential legal threats to the former president, and it is already being shaped by Ms. Willis’s distinct and forceful personality and her conception of how a local prosecutor should do her job. Her comfort in the public eye stands in marked contrast to the low-key approach of another Trump legal pursuer, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Ms. Willis, 50, a Democrat, is the first Black woman to lead Georgia’s largest district attorney’s office. In her 19 years as a prosecutor, she has led more than 100 jury trials and handled hundreds of murder cases. Since she became chief prosecutor, her office’s conviction rate has stood at close to 90 percent, according to a spokesperson.Her experience is the source of her confidence, which appears unshaken by the scrutiny — and criticism — the Trump case has brought.Poll workers sort ballots in Decatur, Ga., in 2021.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesShe tends to speak as if the world were her jury box. Sometimes she is colloquial and warm. In a recent interview, she noted, as an aside, how much she loved Valentine’s Day: “Put that in there, in case I get a new boo,” she said. But she can also throw sharp elbows. In a heated email exchange in July over the terms of a grand jury appearance by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, Ms. Willis called the governor’s lawyer, Brian McEvoy, “wrong and confused,” and “rude,” among other things.“You have taken my kindness as weakness,” she wrote, adding: “Despite your disdain this investigation continues and will not be derailed by anyone’s antics.”Understand Georgia’s Trump Election InvestigationCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      How This ‘Progressive Prosecutor’ Balances Politics and Public Safety

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      As his peers around the country face fierce criticism, Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, is navigating a narrow path so far.On the first Sunday in February, Eric Gonzalez, Brooklyn’s district attorney, sat in the front row at Antioch Baptist Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The visit was emblematic of Mr. Gonzalez’s approach to criminal justice: Alongside dozens of parishioners, he and several local officials and police leaders listened to music, prayer and a biblical account of healing by faith and touch.When the service was over, Mr. Gonzalez and a top police commander stepped outside and into a crime scene. Just down the street, at around 2 a.m. that day, an 18-year-old man had been fatally shot in his car — Brooklyn’s 11th homicide of the year.A few short hours and a few hundred feet apart, the two episodes illustrated the narrow path that Mr. Gonzalez must walk. First elected in 2017, he pledged to bring a modern, progressive approach — a prosecutor’s healing touch — to a criminal justice system that has long been seen as a source of inequity. But as he begins his second term, stubborn increases in shootings, gang violence and other crimes have focused the city’s attention on public safety and complicated Mr. Gonzalez’s ability to fulfill that pledge.Some New Yorkers — most notably, Mayor Eric Adams — have blamed the increases in everything from shoplifting to shootings on leniency in prosecuting lower-level crimes. Calls for a tough-on-crime approach have run up against efforts to reduce the city’s jail population and rectify decades of racially biased policing.Mr. Gonzalez joined other elected leaders at the Antioch Baptist Church in Brooklyn this month, a visit that was emblematic of this approach to criminal justice.Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesAcross the country, many of Mr. Gonzalez’s peers in what has come to be known as the “progressive prosecutor” movement — including Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s newly elected district attorney — have struggled to balance the competing demands. Although it is unclear what is causing the spike in shootings, their critics have focused on what they see as heightened scrutiny of the police, an emphasis on social services over prosecution and the easing of bail and sentencing laws.Faced with a spate of grisly crimes, rising public anxiety, relentless criticism from conservative commentators and open rejection by police unions, Mr. Bragg has spent his first weeks in the job clarifying and, in some cases, reversing some of his more ambitious proposals.Mr. Gonzalez has largely escaped such scrutiny, despite pursuing similar policies for years.How he navigates these at times conflicting priorities — reducing crime while making the justice system more just; responding to residents’ concerns without filling jails; serving victims while addressing the roots of criminal behavior — could be key in shaping the future of the city’s criminal justice system.“I know what works, and my strategy has not shifted,” Mr. Gonzalez said in a recent interview. “It’s my job to care about quality of life. What I am responsible for is safety — I am also a steward of public trust in our justice system.”He added: “Those are all things progressives have not gotten right in their messaging.”According to current and former colleagues, nonprofit leaders, academics, Mr. Gonzalez’s peers and other law-enforcement officials, his strategy boils down to this: Listen to the community. Work with the police. Do not speak in absolutes or make promises you cannot keep. Work quietly and steadily, making change case by case.A Career in BrooklynMr. Gonzalez joined the Brooklyn district attorney’s office in 1995. He rose through the ranks to become acting district attorney in 2016 and was elected to his first full term the next year. Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMr. Gonzalez, 53, grew up in the East New York and Williamsburg neighborhoods, at a time when violence and drugs plagued Brooklyn.He graduated from John Dewey High School in Coney Island, then went to Cornell University and the University of Michigan Law School. In 1995, he started working at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, rose through the ranks as a prosecutor, and never left. He lives with his wife and three sons in Williamsburg, less than a mile from where he grew up.He became acting district attorney in late 2016, after his predecessor, Ken Thompson, died of cancer.When he was elected to a full term the next year, Mr. Gonzalez pledged to lead “the most progressive D.A.’s office in the country,” promoting public safety and treating Brooklyn’s minority residents fairly.Mr. Gonzalez and his advisers put together a vision for the office, which was discussed widely within the office and shared with residents and the police. Early release from prison would be the default position in most parole proceedings; intervention efforts would be employed to drive down gang crime; prosecutors would be encouraged to resolve cases without jail time. The plan also called for more vigorous prosecution of certain sex crimes — such as so-called acquaintance rape — and the addition of a hate crimes unit.When the plan, “Justice 2020,” came out, it was “a non-story, because he had already sold it and begun to implement it,” said Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who served as general counsel under Mr. Gonzalez, and ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Bragg last year. She and several other former colleagues said the quiet, incremental rollout was typical of his style. “Not because you’re trying to hide the ball, but because that’s sometimes the best way for public safety,” she said.In his first full term, Mr. Gonzalez continued the work he began as acting district attorney: He dismissed tens of thousands of summonses for low-level offenses, and virtually stopped prosecuting marijuana possession. He expanded a mentorship program that allowed some young men arrested with a gun for the first time to avoid prison, and he reached plea deals with immigrant defendants that allowed them to avoid deportation.Yung-Mi Lee, the legal director of the criminal defense practice at Brooklyn Defender Services, said an important difference between Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Bragg was that Mr. Gonzalez did not come out of the gates with a sweeping set of changes.Instead, Ms. Lee said, he had been “quietly implementing his policies, in terms of what kinds of cases should be prosecuted, which kinds of cases he has been declining to prosecute” — with some getting “a very hard-line approach.”“It’s all about prosecutorial discretion,” she said.When residents of Bay Ridge were upset about a group of men who often lingered on a corner near a school, drinking and urinating, Mr. Gonzalez said, his office intervened. Instead of seeking charges, the office contacted a charity service, and got a couple of the men into shelters.“Eric Gonzalez, rhetorically, is very progressive,” said Carl Hamad-Lipscombe, the executive director of the Envision Freedom Fund, a Brooklyn nonprofit and bail fund that pushes for alternatives to pretrial detention.“What plays out in court is often very different,” Mr. Hamad-Lipscombe said, with prosecutors from Mr. Gonzalez’s office seeking bail in cases that might not call for it.Working With the PoliceAfter historic lows in the years before the pandemic, shootings and murders rose sharply in Brooklyn in 2020. Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesOne factor that contributes to Mr. Gonzalez’s ability to walk the line between progressive priorities and community calls to tackle public safety concerns more aggressively is his diplomatic relationship with the Police Department, which he cultivated over a quarter century as a state prosecutor.“They have always been given a voice at the table,” Mr. Gonzalez said of the police.In 2017, the city’s largest police union endorsed Mr. Gonzalez in the Democratic primary, saying he “demonstrated a clear commitment to justice and fairness, as well as an understanding of the difficult and unique nature of a police officer’s duties.”Still, Mr. Gonzalez has occasionally faced criticism from the police. In 2019, when his office released a list of officers whose credibility had been undermined through discredited testimony or workplace infractions, the police union that once endorsed him said he had “abandoned his prosecutorial role,” siding with “criminals, not crime victims.”The department also objected strongly to his approach to gun possession cases. The police started to send gun cases to federal prosecutors instead; one of Mr. Gonzalez’s former top aides recalled that he had to work hard “to rebuild those bridges.”Mr. Gonzalez’s delicate approach to working with the police is rooted, observers said, in a fundamental understanding of New York: When it comes to law and order, much of the city can be somewhat conservative. In last year’s Democratic mayoral primary, Mr. Adams — a former police officer who ran on a tough-on-crime platform — carried many of the districts hit hardest by violent crime.“I constantly hear people say they want more cops — they just want their cops to behave differently,” said Richard Aborn, the president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York, a nonprofit group that works closely with law enforcement and community organizations.Mr. Gonzalez, center, has forged collaborative relationships with the police while acknowledging that their approaches to reducing crime sometimes differ.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesBy the end of 2020, Brooklyn had tallied 175 murders and 652 shootings, compared with about 100 murders and 290 shootings the year before. Aggravated assaults also increased, as did burglaries and car thefts.Brooklyn reported some improvement last year: a 15 percent decline in murders and 20 percent fewer shootings. Robbery, rape and burglary also dropped. Mr. Gonzalez’s office worked with the police on four major gang takedowns.But there is more work to be done.“We became the safest large city in America,” Mr. Aborn said. “When you’ve had 15 years of those levels of safety, and suddenly random shootings and murders start to creep up — people being shot, people being pushed on the subway, bodegas broken into with guns, that is going to shake an already shaken city.”Mr. Gonzalez has argued that this is not a problem the city can arrest its way out of. Many of the concerns he hears, he said, are not about violent crime or gangs or gun violence, but about residents’ perceptions of an erosion of public safety.“You have to have your ear to the ground, because it really goes from community to community,” Mr. Gonzalez said.His office recently fielded a call from a chain drugstore in the Brownsville neighborhood that was being targeted regularly by several shoplifters who would get violent when confronted.“There are neighborhoods with one pharmacy,” Mr. Gonzalez said. If that branch shuts down, “Suddenly, that community doesn’t have a 24-hour pharmacy.”A woman in Mr. Gonzalez’s office who handles cases involving repeat offenders talked to the local precinct and set up a pilot program. Detectives in unmarked cars stationed outside the store arrested the shoplifters but, rather than jail or prosecute them, the district attorney’s office spoke with them about what was behind the thefts: Of the six who agreed to participate in the pilot program, two reported having mental health problems, three were homeless and all reported substance abuse problems.The six were referred to service providers, and Mr. Gonzalez’s office is tracking their progress.“To me, being progressive is not simply about not prosecuting cases,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “It’s about using the resources to protect communities.”Nicole Hong More

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      Atlanta D.A. Requests Special Grand Jury in Trump Election Inquiry

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      The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County, Ga., is investigating possible election interference by the former president and his allies.A district attorney in Atlanta on Thursday asked a judge to convene a special grand jury to help a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.The inquiry is seen by legal experts as potentially perilous for the former president. The grand jury request from the district attorney in Fulton County, Fani T. Willis, had been expected after crucial witnesses refused to participate voluntarily. A grand jury could issue subpoenas compelling those witnesses to provide information.The distinction of a special grand jury is that it would focus exclusively on the Trump investigation, while regular grand juries handle many cases and cannot spend as much time on a single one. The Georgia case is one of two active criminal investigations known to involve the former president and his circle; the other is the examination of his financial dealings by the Manhattan district attorney.“The District Attorney’s Office has received information indicating a reasonable probability that the State of Georgia’s administration of elections in 2020, including the State’s election of the President of the United States, was subject to possible criminal disruptions,” Ms. Willis wrote in a letter to Christopher S. Brasher, the chief judge of the Fulton County Superior Court; the letter was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Judge Brasher declined to comment.Ms. Willis added, “We have made efforts to interview multiple witnesses and gather evidence, and a significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony.”The inquiry is the only criminal case known to have been taken up by a prosecutor that focuses directly on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. It is set to play out in a state taking center stage in the nation’s battle over voting rights, and one where a heated Republican primary for governor is testing Mr. Trump’s strength as a kingmaker in the Republican Party.If the investigation proceeds, legal experts say that the former president’s potential criminal exposure could include charges of racketeering or conspiracy to commit election fraud.The inquiry centers on Mr. Trump’s actions in the two months between his election loss and Congress’s certification of the results, including a call he made to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to pressure him to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Ms. Willis said that Mr. Raffensperger was among those who had refused to cooperate without a subpoena.“We already have cooperated,” Mr. Raffensperger said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “Any information that they’ve requested, we sent it to them. And if we’re compelled to come before a grand jury, obviously, we will follow the law and come before a grand jury and testify.”Representatives for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday, but the former president did release a statement characterizing his phone call with Mr. Raffensperger as “perfect.” He has cast other investigations, including one being conducted by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, as politically motivated. Fulton is the most populous county in Georgia and a Democratic stronghold, and Ms. Willis is a Democrat.The Georgia inquiry is one of several criminal, civil and congressional investigations focused on Mr. Trump. He and his allies have been sparring in court with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee won a major victory on Wednesday when the Supreme Court refused a request from Mr. Trump to block the release of White House records, and on Thursday, the panel asked Ivanka Trump to cooperate in the inquiry.In addition to the criminal inquiry being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney, Ms. James is leading a civil fraud investigation into Mr. Trump’s business empire. She has issued subpoenas seeking interviews with two of his adult children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and her office previously interviewed a third, Eric Trump.In Atlanta, Ms. Willis said last year that she would consider racketeering charges, among others. An analysis released last year by the Brookings Institution that has been studied by Ms. Willis’s office concluded that Mr. Trump’s postelection conduct in Georgia had put him “at substantial risk of possible state charges,” including racketeering, election fraud solicitation, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Conflict Quickly Emerges Between Top Prosecutor and Police Commissioner

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      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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      Los Angeles Just Elected a Liberal D.A. He’s Already Facing a Recall Effort.

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      George Gascón is facing an intense backlash for enacting the sorts of policies demanded by protesters after the killing of George Floyd.LOS ANGELES — From inside the walls of Folsom State Prison, the two inmates, one a convicted murderer, clinked their cups of prison moonshine in a toast to the new district attorney of Los Angeles, George Gascón.A video of the celebration was released earlier this year by Mr. Gascón’s opponents — and there are many — who used it to attack what is perhaps the most far-reaching plank of his progressive agenda: the review of nearly 20,000 old prison sentences, many for violent crimes like murder, for possible early releases.Mr. Gascón, a Democrat, has brushed off the video as nothing more than a Willie Horton-style attack by get-tough-on-crime proponents that “plays well on Fox News.” But he doesn’t shy away from his belief that even those convicted of violent crimes deserve a chance at redemption.“There’s no way we can get to meaningful prison reduction in this country without looking at more serious crimes,” Mr. Gascón, who also supports ending cash bail and eliminating the prosecution of juveniles as adults, said in an interview. “The public stories you hear are the really scary stuff. You’re talking about the violent sexual predator. You’re talking about some sadistic murderer. The reality is those are really a small number of the prison population and violent crime.”But the prospect of convicted murderers getting out early, or getting lighter sentences than they would have received in a previous era, has fueled an effort to force a recall election next year and remove Mr. Gascón from office. More than a thousand volunteers, as well as dozens of paid workers, are collecting signatures for the recall at gun stores, bail bonds offices, and even outside Mr. Gascón’s home.A rally in support of Mr. Gascón on Friday in Los Angeles.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesAnd inside courtrooms, some prosecutors who believe Mr. Gascón’s policies will harm public safety are openly working against him by attempting to sabotage his directives to pursue lesser sentences and not seek cash bail.Mr. Gascón, 67, who was propelled into office by grass-roots activists in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, is one of the nation’s most progressive prosecutors in one of America’s most liberal cities, and yet he is facing an intense backlash in enacting the sorts of policies demanded by protesters last year and aimed at reducing the vast racial disparities in arrests and prosecutions.The pushback is a sign of the many challenges liberal district attorneys in big cities are facing, at a time when Republicans are increasingly trying to portray Democrats as soft on crime, amid a rise in gun violence and homicides across the nation that began during the pandemic and has continued into 2021. In Los Angeles, for instance, murders increased 36 percent last year.Mr. Gascón’s approach, and whether he can be successful, is being closely watched by activists who have led a national movement in recent years to elect prosecutors who promise to send fewer people to prison. They achieved early victories in 2016 in St. Louis and Chicago, and earned another one the next year with the election of Larry Krasner, a former civil rights attorney, as the district attorney of Philadelphia. (Mr. Krasner, who shares many of Mr. Gascón’s views, recently cemented his power by winning the Democratic primary by an overwhelming margin, all but ensuring another term in office.) But their most important victory has been Mr. Gascón’s election in Los Angeles, because of its size and its history of high incarceration rates.While in all of those places the newcomers faced intense resistance when they took office, perhaps none of them has faced as much pushback as Mr. Gascón, who has been hampered by Civil Service protections that largely prevent him from firing prosecutors and bringing in like-minded deputies.The recall campaign is supported by high profile figures like Sheriff Alex Villanueva and Steve Cooley, a former Los Angeles district attorney, as well as some victims of crime, including Desiree Andrade, whose son was killed in 2018 when he was beaten and thrown from a cliff after a drug deal. Some of the men charged in her son’s killing now face lesser sentences under Mr. Gascón’s policies — but still face decades in prison — and Ms. Andrade, at a recent news conference, described Mr. Gascon as pushing a “radical, pro-criminal agenda.”The recall push, which is funded in part by Geoff Palmer, a real estate developer and Republican megadonor who raised millions for former President Donald J. Trump, is still a long shot. Supporters need to collect nearly 600,000 signatures by late October to force a new election, and recalls are easy to start in California, but rarely lead to an officeholder’s ouster.A booth to collect petition signatures for the recall of Mr. Gascón at a farmers market in San Dimas, Calif.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesMr. Gascón said the efforts against him reflect the polarization of America’s politics, and underscores that California, while deeply blue, is not monolithic. “We have some counties that you could pluck them up and put them in the middle of Texas or Arizona and you wouldn’t see the difference,” he said.A Cuban émigré who moved to Los Angeles as a boy, Mr. Gascón started as a beat cop in South Los Angeles in the turbulent 1980s, a time of gang warfare and a crack epidemic. He went on to be the police chief in San Francisco, before being appointed district attorney there in 2011 to replace Kamala Harris, who had become California’s attorney general. He was elected to the job twice, and reduced the number of people San Francisco sent to state prison.Los Angeles, under Mr. Gascón’s predecessor, Jackie Lacey, maintained a more punitive approach to crime, and in recent years sent people to state prison at four times the rate of San Francisco.Mr. Gascón, who won the office from Ms. Lacey by a wide margin in November, speaks often about how, as an officer, he found himself locking up multiple generations of Black men from the same family. Over time, his views on crime and punishment changed, and he said he sees it as his job as district attorney to undo the damage of that time, especially for Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles.“Those days continue to haunt me,” he said of his time as an officer, in his inauguration speech.Mr. Gascón points to data that shows lengthy sentences increase recidivism and thus make the public less safe — a direct rebuttal to those supporting the recall in the name of public safety. He believes that most people, even some that have been convicted of violent crimes and especially those who committed their crimes when they were young, deserve second chances. He has also promised to do more to hold the police accountable for on-duty shootings, and is reviewing old cases in which Ms. Lacey declined to prosecute.Mr. Gascón said that his office will carefully weigh whether a person is suitable for release, either because of advanced age or because they are model inmates, and that people still believed to be dangerous to the public will not be let out early. And judges and parole boards would have the final say.Already, in his first three months in office, prosecutors have sought roughly 8,000 fewer years in prison compared to the same period a year ago through eliminating many so-called enhancements — special circumstances such as the use of a gun in a crime, or gang affiliations or prior felonies under the “three strikes law,” a pillar of an earlier era’s war on crime — that can add years to a sentence.The elimination of enhancements has perhaps provoked the most anger from his own prosecutors, who form the largest office in the country. A lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney’s Association resulted in a judge ruling largely in favor of the union, saying that in most active cases underway before Mr. Gascón took office he cannot order prosecutors to eliminate the enhancements.Richard Ceballos, a longtime deputy district attorney who prosecutes gang cases, said he was outraged when he was ordered by the new administration to remove a gang enhancement in a case in which an alleged MS-13 gang member was accused of stabbing a transgender woman in MacArthur Park. He briefly ran for the top job before exiting the race in 2020, and endorsed Mr. Gascón.“I so regret endorsing him or giving him any money,” he said. “I’m a progressive prosecutor. I don’t think he’s progressive. He’s reckless and dangerous.”Mr. Ceballos said he and other prosecutors opposed to Mr. Gascón are “smart enough” to figure out how to carry out his directives in ways that are not directly insubordinate but are unsuccessful in the courtroom. He said though he can no longer ask for gang enhancements, he can make it clear in court that he believes a suspect is a gang member, and leave it for the judge to decide. At the same time, while Mr. Gascon has directed prosecutors not to seek cash bail, Mr. Ceballos asks detectives to ask for bail on court documents.“We look for loopholes, just like any lawyer,” he said.The fact that inmates have taken notice of Mr. Gascón’s initiatives has been seized upon by those who believe the changes underway in Los Angeles are a threat to public safety.The California District Attorneys Association pointed to the prison video as evidence that “violent criminals” will be the biggest beneficiaries of Mr. Gascón’s “radical policies.”“We have multiple incidences of convicted murderers who are very aware of Gascón’s directives and are trying to take advantage,” said Vern Pierson, the president of the association.Mr. Gascón was embraced by a supporter after a rally in Los Angeles on Friday.Morgan Lieberman for The New York TimesFor the activists who helped elect Mr. Gascón, this is only the beginning of what they hope is a sustained push to transform criminal justice in Los Angeles. They say he is doing everything he said he would, and are rallying around him to oppose the recall. Ivette Alé, an organizer with Dignity and Power Now who advised Mr. Gascón, said the elimination of gang enhancements was something she had long pushed for, because they have led to severe racial disparities in sentencing.“That is huge,” she said. “That policy would do so much for racial and economic justice.”On Friday morning, allies of Mr. Gascón, including union leaders, faith leaders, Black Lives Matter activists and formerly incarcerated people, rallied in downtown Los Angeles. Robert Carson pointed to himself as an example of someone who changed in prison, and said he hopes others will get the same chance. “I did everything necessary to rehabilitate myself,” said Mr. Carson, 56, who left prison in February after serving 23 years for murder.If Mr. Gascón survives the recall and is able to push through his agenda, his goal over the long term is ambitious: that California can eventually close two or three state prisons by dramatically reducing sentences, especially for those who were young when they committed crimes.“I don’t think any of us would want to be judged by one of the dumbest things that we did, especially when it’s a young person,” Mr. Gascón said. More

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      No Prosecutorial Experience? These D.A. Candidates Say That’s an Asset.

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      Tahanie Aboushi, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart are running behind a broad rethinking of how the criminal justice system should work.The only two men who have led the Manhattan district attorney’s office over the last 45 years were scions of the establishment, leading the country’s most prominent local prosecutor’s office with a traditional emphasis on fighting crime.Yet Eliza Orlins, Tahanie Aboushi and Dan Quart, three candidates running to be the next district attorney, have consistently argued that if voters want the criminal justice system to change, they should be wary of anyone who has ties to the establishment — or any experience at all as a prosecutor.In cities around the country, a wave of prosecutorial candidates has won elections by pledging to do less harm to defendants who commit low-level crimes. The nonprosecutorial candidates in Manhattan have taken up that argument, and advanced it, adding that only a leader whose perspective is unblemished by a history of putting people behind bars can make the system less punitive and less racist.But with a week to go in the race, the trio of candidates have lagged in the fund-raising battle and in available surveys. They have had a hard time distinguishing themselves from one another, and from former prosecutors like Alvin Bragg and Lucy Lang, who have also pledged to help end mass incarceration while arguing that their experience will help them enact change.Some observers say that the trio’s unilateral criticism of prosecutors has been detrimental to the public’s understanding of the race. Zephyr Teachout, the anticorruption activist, has said that just because Mr. Bragg, whom she has endorsed, has been a prosecutor does not mean that he is not a reformer.“Some people want to say basically that if you’re a prosecutor you have no business here,” said Ms. Teachout. “This is just nonsense.”All three candidates have sought to claim the mantle of one of the country’s most prominent progressive prosecutors, Larry Krasner, who when he was first elected Philadelphia district attorney in 2017, had never charged anyone with a crime.But many of Mr. Krasner’s peers around the country who are considered progressive prosecutors — Kim Foxx in Chicago, Rachael Rollins in Boston, George Gascón in Los Angeles and others — had experience charging crimes before they were elected.Miriam Krinsky, the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that calls for shrinking the criminal-legal system and increasing transparency, accountability, and fairness, said in an interview that it had become increasingly common for those without any experience to be elected as prosecutors. She cautioned against drawing hard rules about candidates’ past experiences, no matter what they were.“Just as I would be reluctant to embrace the view that you have to have prosecutorial experience to run a prosecutor’s office, I similarly would reject the view that you can’t achieve reform and run a reform prosecutor’s office if you have been a prosecutor,” she said. “It’s the person. It’s their philosophy. It’s their vision that we should look at.”‘Rage at Injustice’Eliza Orlins has said she would halve the size of the office she is seeking to lead. Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesMs. Orlins, 38, has more criminal courtroom experience than Ms. Aboushi and Mr. Quart. A celebrity on Twitter thanks in part to her appearances on the show “Survivor,” she has been a public defender for the last decade.Born and raised on the Upper East Side of New York with stints in Hong Kong and Washington, D.C., Ms. Orlins has wanted to be a lawyer since she was a small child. She went to Fordham Law School, graduating in 2008, and joined Legal Aid as a staff attorney the following year.In her early years with the organization, she said, she was appalled at the machinery of the criminal justice system, which she saw as harshly punitive, particularly toward Black people. Her perspective has not changed.“I’m fueled by rage at injustice,” she said in an interview. “People say you can’t be motivated by anger and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah? Watch me.’”Starting in 2016, Ms. Orlins began to vent that anger at Donald J. Trump, then a candidate for president and now a subject of a major investigation within the district attorney’s office. “I DETEST TRUMP!!!!!!!!” she wrote on Twitter in March of that year.She blasted his supporters online, too, and in October 2016 dressed up as one of them for Halloween, complete with a red Trump campaign hat that she embellished so that it said “Make America White Again.” In August of last year, when she had already announced her campaign, she tweeted threateningly at Ivanka Trump.Asked about her tweets, Ms. Orlins has said that she does not regret them and will evaluate evidence against the Trump family without prejudice. But legal ethicists have said that her past statements could threaten Ms. Orlins’s ability to lead any potential prosecution of Mr. Trump were she to be elected.She has vowed to cut the district attorney’s office in half and said that she would decline to prosecute the vast majority of misdemeanors. She has been particularly outspoken about decriminalizing certain forms of sex work: When the district attorney’s office recently announced it would stop prosecuting prostitution, Ms. Orlins took partial credit for pushing them on the issue.She was narrowly supported by the Working Families Party chapter in Manhattan. But Ms. Aboushi won the group’s overall endorsement, which carries significant weight in New York, although arguably less in Manhattan than other boroughs.A Life TransformedTahanie Aboushi has said she would stop prosecuting certain low-level crimes.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesMs. Aboushi grew up in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, the sixth of ten siblings. When she was 13, her father was found guilty on federal conspiracy charges. Two years later, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Ms. Aboushi said that his conviction grants her an understanding of the justice system that other candidates do not share.“You try not to be defined by that, but it’s literally the center of your world,” she said.She sped through high school and college, and was 20 when she started law school at Syracuse University. She graduated in 2009 and a year later, started her own law firm.Through her firm, Ms. Aboushi has taken on more than two dozen civil rights cases. In 2012, she sued the New York Police Department for making a teenage girl take her hijab off after she was arrested. The suit eventually compelled a shift in the Police Department’s patrol guide. She also successfully sued the Fire Department on behalf of Black firefighters in 2018.Like Ms. Orlins, Ms. Aboushi has said she would cut the district attorney’s office in half and decline to prosecute a number of low-level crimes. Along with the Working Families Party, she has been endorsed by well-known local progressives including Cynthia Nixon and Jumaane Williams, as well as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.Former prosecutors have expressed frustration with Ms. Aboushi, who has never tried a criminal case, for the way she has characterized her father’s prosecution. They say that because he was convicted on multiple counts related to leading a violent truck hijacking ring and never claimed the conviction had been wrongful, it was misleading for Ms. Aboushi to suggest he was a victim of injustice.“If you look at the evidence presented in the trial and the charges of which he was convicted, it was a very serious case,” said Daniel R. Alonso, who worked in the prosecutors’ office that charged Mr. Aboushi but was not involved in the case.Ms. Aboushi said recently that she had never asked her father whether he was involved in a conspiracy but that she knew him to be innocent.“It’s not a conversation that we have to have,” she said.The AssemblymanDan Quart has emphasized his commitment to public safety in recent weeks.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesMr. Quart, 49, is the only white man running as a Democrat to lead an office that has only ever been led by white men. He is also the only candidate who has been charged with a crime, for smoking weed at a Phish concert in 1995.He grew up in Washington Heights and graduated from the law school at St. John’s University in 1997. In 2000, he caught the politics bug after helping a friend with an unsuccessful State Senate campaign. Eleven years later, he won a seat in the State Assembly that he has held since.Shortly after taking office, he was told by a constituent that young people were being arrested by the thousands for possessing small blades known as gravity knives. Mr. Quart took the issue on, and after seven years of fighting for it, the bill that criminalized the possession of such knives was repealed.Mr. Quart has not picked up many flashy endorsements like Ms. Aboushi, nor does he have the visible online support of Ms. Orlins. But he has been endorsed by a number of elected officials from Manhattan, as well as several Democratic clubs. He argues that his name recognition and proven support on the Upper East Side is a greater asset than Ms. Orlins’s Twitter army or Ms. Aboushi’s political allies.The most moderate of the trio, he has emphasized his commitment to public safety in recent weeks. Mr. Quart has limited experience in the criminal courtroom, something that his opponents have used against him.“There is no world in which he is qualified to be D.A.” Ms. Orlins said. “He shows such a deep misunderstanding of the law.”A campaign spokeswoman, Kate Smart, disagreed, making reference to Mr. Quart’s work in the Assembly.His “deep knowledge of the law helped him write and pass the only two changes to New York’s penal code in the past two decades,” she said. More

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      Lucy Lang Sought Change at the Manhattan D.A.’s Office. Now She Wants to Lead It.

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      Lucy Lang has spent most of her career as a criminal-justice reformer. But is she too close to the system to bring about real change?Lucy Lang is a squeaky wheel, a meddler, a self-described noodge.A granddaughter of the philanthropist Eugene Lang, she is bent on the constant improvement of her surroundings. In the dozen years she spent working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, she developed a reputation for pushing reforms that created new opportunities for those charged by prosecutors — but she was also stymied by a leadership team that did not always want things to change as fast as she did.Now Ms. Lang, 40, wants to be in charge of that change, running against seven other Democrats to replace her old boss, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., as the Manhattan district attorney. In April, she gave her own campaign half a million dollars, according to campaign finance reports, in hopes of staying competitive with two leading candidates, Tali Farhadian Weinstein and Alvin Bragg. While little quality polling has come out in the race, the few available surveys have shown her trailing only Ms. Weinstein in popularity.But as a longtime employee in the district attorney’s office, she is also the candidate who has worked most closely with Mr. Vance, who has been something of a punching bag for the other contenders. They have criticized what they say is his relative slowness in making the criminal justice system less punitive for lower-income New Yorkers, while being too lenient on the wealthy and powerful.All of this sets up an apparent contradiction for Ms. Lang’s campaign: She cites her experience working in the office led by Mr. Vance, even as she insists that she is the right person to reform that office.Veterans of the office characterized Ms. Lang as someone skilled at bringing about meaningful reform from inside the system. Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former deputy to Mr. Vance, said that while her old boss was more progressive than his critics say, Ms. Lang deserved praise for her sustained commitment to change, especially in seeking ways to reduce the reliance on jails and prisons.“She and a couple of other junior people took it upon themselves — and this is a highly unusual thing to do — they took it upon themselves to come to me and give me their ideas and thoughts and suggestions about how the office could be better,” Ms. Agnifilo said.But Ms. Lang’s opponents remain skeptical.“It’s not like she was an A.D.A. in this bureau or that bureau,” said Dan Quart, another candidate and a longtime state assemblyman who has been critical of Mr. Vance. “She was in the room when they made policy decisions.”Asked about her time at Mr. Vance’s office, Ms. Lang was diplomatic.“I could see that the world was changing and that the office wasn’t quite keeping pace,” she said. “Although there were respects in which there were great advances being made.”Ms. Lang, seen here greeting a voter in an apartment building, started at the district attorney’s office working under Robert Morgenthau.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesAn unusual curiosityThe oldest child of the actor Stephen Lang — perhaps best known for playing the vicious Col. Miles Quaritch in “Avatar” — and Kristina Watson, a painter, Ms. Lang was born in Manhattan and raised in the West Village and in Westchester.Early on she showed an unusual curiosity about other people. At her family’s annual Memorial Day picnic, she would go from blanket to blanket, asking strangers to share their food, then joining them to chat — an openness that friends say helps explain her later success at climbing the ladder at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.Like her grandfather and her father, she went to Swarthmore, where she studied political and legal philosophy and served as captain of the lacrosse team. (“I’m not a good athlete,” she said, “but I just like being on a team.”) Then, inspired in part by her aunt, the lawyer and philanthropist Jane Lang, she enrolled at Columbia Law School.Two experiences during her student years drove Ms. Lang to become a prosecutor: In 2004 she worked for Judge Jed S. Rakoff as he presided over a death penalty case, and the following winter, a childhood friend of Ms. Lang’s was killed by the friend’s own brother. She said that seeing her friend’s family take on dual roles — relatives of both the victim and the defendant — gave her a sense of how both groups can be harmed by prosecutors.“I just saw it as a real opportunity for public servants to do things differently, to support people better,” she said.After graduating in 2006, she went to work for Robert Morgenthau, the venerable Manhattan district attorney, starting in the appeals division. Along the way she built a friendly relationship with Mr. Morgenthau; she later co-wrote one of his final opinion articles.By 2010, when Mr. Vance took over the office, she was working in the trial division. It was there that she first noticed a small problem: Doctors were reluctant to testify in criminal court, concerned that doing so could make them subject to civil liability. It was the sort of specific, concrete issue she loved to tackle. Working with an emergency room doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine, Ms. Lang created a curriculum to teach doctors about criminal trials.Even as her cases became more intense — she started working murder trials in 2013 — Ms. Lang’s ambitions for improving the office became grander. After she won a wiretap case against 35 people for selling angel dust, heroin and cocaine, she successfully pitched the office’s leadership team on a program promoting alternatives to incarceration for young offenders. (It later became a unit that provides some defendants the chance to participate in community-based programs in lieu of prison.)By that time, Ms. Lang said, she was not nervous presenting to the office’s leaders; she knew them all.In January 2017, Ms. Agnifilo promoted Ms. Lang, giving her a special position leading policy at the office. That fall, Ms. Lang piloted the first version of what would become the Inside Criminal Justice initiative, a series of seminars that brought prosecutors and incarcerated people together to talk about the justice system and how to improve it.Jarrell Daniels, a participant in the initiative who had recently been released from prison, was so intrigued by the program that he asked to return to the facility to continue with it. He remembered sitting around a table in a cramped conference room, watching as the participants grilled Ms. Lang.“She’s either brave or she’s crazy, or she might be both,” he remembered thinking.“She sat there kind of poised as they gave it to her about the district attorney’s office and vented about their personal experiences with the justice system,” he said. “Although that wasn’t what she was there for, she kind of allowed them to share their piece.”‘What are we waiting for?’Ideas about the criminal justice system changed rapidly during Mr. Vance’s time in office.In 2010, he was seen as one of the more liberal district attorneys in the country. When he leaves office, at the end of this year, he will do so as a seeming moderate — not because he has necessarily changed, but because a wave of more recently elected prosecutors have moved aggressively to take on what they consider fundamental injustices in the system. (Mr. Vance’s defenders respond that he has cut prosecutions by nearly 60 percent and established one of the nation’s first conviction integrity programs, among other accomplishments.)More than a dozen of those recently elected prosecutors have endorsed Ms. Lang’s candidacy, including Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney in Baltimore. She said that Ms. Lang was one of the more prominent people behind the scenes in the progressive prosecutor movement, particularly through her work at the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, a role she took on in 2018 and left last year.Ms. Mosby said that Ms. Lang’s ideas tended to scramble the power dynamics of the system, bringing together prosecutors — those with the most power — and incarcerated people, who have the least.“Her having an understanding and appreciation for that was something I found rather compelling,” Ms. Mosby said. “Not a lot of prosecutors have that.”Ms. Lang insists that despite her years working within the legal establishment, she is no incrementalist — she argues that she has made “systemic” change. But opponents to her left, like Mr. Quart and another candidate, Tahanie Aboushi, have raised questions about whether she, or any experienced prosecutor, can be relied upon to uproot a system in which they thrived.“While I appreciate that Lucy is leaning into reform as much as a career prosecutor can, an entire career of inside-the-box thinking is going to get us minor refinements to what we already have,” said Ms. Aboushi’s campaign manager, Jamarah Hayner. “And that’s just not good enough.”Even Ms. Lang’s fans acknowledge that she was sometimes hampered by the inertia of the office bureaucracy. She is particularly closemouthed about her relationship with Mr. Vance — she declines to criticize him, but insists that had he decided to run for re-election, she would have run against him.Ms. Agnifilo said that while she knows Ms. Lang “respects” Mr. Vance, she understood why it was tricky for her, as a candidate, to be too associated with him, given some of the criticism he has faced. She added that when she and Ms. Lang would argue at work, it wasn’t about the direction that the office should head in, but the speed at which it should do it.“I appreciated the fact that some of these things were so important that she was like, ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s just do it,’” Ms. Agnifilo said. More