Bragg vs. Trump: NYC is drowning in crime. How does convicting a former president keep us safe?

From Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner to George Gascón and Kim Foxx, proponents of the so-called “progressive” prosecutorial project often defend broad nonprosecution policies and administrative restrictions on prosecutorial tools such as sentencing enhancements and pretrial detention as reasonable exercises of discretion. world of limited resources.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a prime example. I relied on this logic in self-defense after the infamous “Day One Memo” was met with near-unanimous public disapproval. The argument goes something like this: Smart discretionary exercises that filter out low-risk and/or nonviolent offenders will allow prosecutors to focus on the real bad guys.

Leaving aside the question of whether strict and comprehensive policies of non-prosecution for long lists of crimes (as opposed to unilateral repeal of duly enacted legislation, for example) constitute mere exercises of “discretion”, there is still the question of whether there is “discretion” at all. ” is used wisely. In the Alvin Bragg case, the idea that broad non-prosecution policies were intended to make it easier to divert resources to more serious types of crimes strains credulity, given how much time and money his office has poured into the criminal prosecution of the current president. -Elect Donald J. Trump .

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Earlier this year, Fox News reported It is based on documents obtained by the Heritage Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request showing that the Manhattan DA set aside $1,000,000 from an office fund to hire outside counsel to conduct congressional oversight investigations into the case. While there is no publicly disclosed dollar amount showing how much the office spent on this case, one legal analyst estimated that security costs alone during the trial would exceed $50,000 per day. There is also the time and resources the office spends on the investigation and case.

Couldn’t those dollars have been spent, for example, to minimize the number of cases dismissed under Bragg’s tenure (no doubt due in part to the pressure placed on his office by New York State’s misguided discovery reform law enacted in 2020)? Couldn’t this money be going after, I don’t know, retail thieves, drug dealers, and domestic abusers all the time?

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Such questions are especially poignant when one wonders how exactly it serves public safety to convict a former president of felonies related to the documentation of a financial transaction. After all, Donald Trump had no criminal history, so no one could credibly argue that he should be incapacitated through incarceration.

Trump is also a rich man This must have been important to Bragg, who (despite the best efforts of New York Attorney General Leticia James) hinted at the belief that at least some criminal activity was motivated by poverty.

The soon-to-be 47th president of the United States is not a young man either, which is important because — and ask your nearest criminal justice “reformer” — the risk of recidivism decreases with age. Perhaps Mr. Bragg wanted to create an opportunity to rehabilitate Trump. No. The most plausible explanation for Bragg’s challenge is a political one: Taking this particular scalp is the kind of victory Democratic partisans can only dream of.

But the Man Who Got Trump apparently wasn’t counting on a successful re-election bid; which would prevent any penalties from being imposed until the president-elect’s next term in office ends; conviction.

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Bragg’s entry into law may have come at a cost that would not appear in the budget table; and New Yorkers may have had a taste of a madman going on a deadly rampage this week. stabbing spree He killed three people in the heart of Bragg’s Manhattan. The man accused of these murders has been arrested eight times in New York.

How were these cases handled? What will New Yorkers think when the perpetrators of heinous crimes are revealed to have extensive and current criminal histories? Could Bragg’s office have done more to protect Manhattanites from the violent impulses of a clearly unstable criminal with a history of recidivism? Does it improve Alvin Bragg’s chances of a political career?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg stands with his team at a press conference following the conviction of former U.S. President Donald Trump in the hush money case on May 30, 2024, in New York. Trump was found guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first criminal trial to go to trial. (Getty Images)

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As my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Hannah Meyers, wrote recentlyA decade ago, “only 45 percent of assault cases in Manhattan were dismissed,” but by 2023, that rate had increased to 66 percent. Add to falling conviction rates crime rates that are much higher than before. before the epidemic (especially one settings for changes in routine activities) and keeping deodorants under lock and key and clarifying the picture; But this is a picture that is not as beautiful as it was a few years ago. The question is what New Yorkers plan to do about it.

Will New York join other blue states and cities when some important elections are scheduled to be held next year? pushed back About the excesses of “progressive” criminal justice reform? One thing is (almost) certain: Come January 2025, when Mr. Bragg will undoubtedly be making preparations for his reelection bid, the man he declared Public Enemy No. 1 will be sworn in as the nation’s 47th president. The question voters should ask him is: “Was it really worth it?”

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