While New Yorkers have been inundated with news about the Democratic primary for mayor, voters in Manhattan on Tuesday will also decide whether to re-elect their top prosecutor.
Alvin L. Bragg, the Democrat who has been Manhattan’s district attorney since 2022, is facing a sole primary challenger in the race to lead one of the country’s largest prosecutors’ offices.
His challenger, Patrick Timmins, a civil litigator who served in the Bronx district attorney’s office in the late 1990s, has said Mr. Bragg ushered in an increase in crime in Manhattan, especially in the subway.
Mr. Timmins, 69, said that he has heard a desire for new leadership during his conversations with Manhattanites in recent months.
“They fear crime, they fear where Manhattan is going, and so they want a change,” Mr. Timmins said. “They want a change from Alvin Bragg.”
Mr. Bragg’s campaign rejected the assertion that crime has risen. In Manhattan, the seven felony crimes that the New York Police Department uses as benchmarks — murders, rapes, robberies, felony assaults, burglaries, grand larcenies and grand larcenies of automobiles — are overall 13 percent lower this year compared with the same period in 2022, when Mr. Bragg took office, according to police data.
“We’ve prosecuted more gun cases and invested in smart prevention, launched new mental health initiatives to get help to those in need, held the powerful to account, and worked closely with law enforcement partners to prosecute those who threaten the safety of anyone utilizing our transit system,” Mr. Bragg said in a statement.
In 2021, Mr. Bragg won a heavily contested primary, effectively clinching the job in heavily Democratic New York. Only the fourth Manhattan district attorney in 80 years and the first Black person to lead the office, he is favored to win again.
However, in his three years, Mr. Bragg, 51, has weathered fallout from decisions that have angered conservatives, particularly after he revived a prosecution against President Trump and won the first felony conviction of a president last year. He found himself at the center of raging internet storms even as he amassed endorsements from Democratic leaders.
For Mr. Timmins, the Trump case is the past.
“We’ve got stuff happening now,” he said. “I mean, that, to me, is not anything.”
Other than a news conference after Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts, Mr. Bragg has avoided speaking publicly about the case. He has often tried to shift attention to other facets of his office’s work.
Mr. Timmins has sought to capitalize on some of Mr. Bragg’s more unpopular decisions. He criticized a memo that Mr. Bragg issued days after taking office that instructed prosecutors to avoid seeking jail time for people convicted of all but the most serious crimes.
Mr. Bragg faced weeks of backlash over the memo, leading him to pivot and revise several of the policies. He told his prosecutors that the document had been “a source of confusion, rather than clarity” and that each prosecutor should determine how to handle cases.
Mr. Timmins said the memo was a signal to criminals that Manhattan’s top prosecutor would be lenient. “He’s an ideologue to reduce the carceral state, to reduce incarceration,” Mr. Timmins said in a recent interview.
Mr. Bragg’s spokesman, Richard Fife, said in an email that the district attorney has earned broad support for his policies.
“Alvin Bragg has spent the better part of two decades standing up to the powerful and fighting to deliver safety and justice for all,” Mr. Fife said.
In 2017, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who was then the district attorney, said the office would not prosecute most people arrested over subway fare evasion. And while overall crime rates have fallen across the city in recent years, crime in the subway has remained a key concern for police and city leaders as riders have described feeling unsafe.
Mr. Timmins said that one of his first actions would be to create a transit crime division. “It’s so important to stop this fear of the subways,” he said.
Police data shows that major transit crimes fell by about 18 percent in the first three months of this year, compared with the same period last year. But a recent study showed that although the number of violent incidents remains low, the nature of crime in the subway has become unpredictable as felony assaults increase.
The victor of Tuesday’s primary will face the Republican Maud Maron, a conservative activist and self-described former liberal who once worked as a Legal Aid Society lawyer, in the general election. An independent candidate, Diana Florence, a veteran of the Manhattan district attorney’s office who ran against Mr. Bragg in 2021, is also running.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
The post Manhattan Democrats Will Weigh Tenure of District Attorney in Primary appeared first on New York Times.
