Alvin Bragg, Preet Bharara and criminal justice reform
By Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Jared Trujillo
Late last month, Preet Bharara endorsed Alvin Bragg for Manhattan District Attorney. If Bharara's past work as head federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York says anything about how Bragg would run the nation's biggest DA's office, there's reason to be concerned.
Despite Bharara's rise to liberal stardom after Donald Trump fired him in 2017, his record is anything but "progressive." Unfortunately, liberals and progressives frequently turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of their heroes when the harm they perpetuate is concentrated in low-income Black and Brown communities, especially when it involves the criminal legal system.
As a federal prosecutor, Preet ramped up the war on drugs by viciously punishing opioid dealers for overdose deaths; threw the book at young people for firearm possession; declined to prosecute the police officer who killed Ramarley Graham, and ensnared entire communities in overly broad and draconian gang conspiracy cases. Bharara's work as a federal prosecutor is so compatible with the Trump administration's war on drugs redux that it's difficult to understand how he earned national prominence as an anti-Trump pundit.
Preet Bharara and Alvin Bragg (Marcus Santos/Barry Williams/New York Daily News)
Most notably, Bharara collaborated with tough-on-crime dinosaur Bill Bratton to arrest and charge 120 largely Black and Latino men in what his office called "the largest gang takedown in New York City history." During the raid, police chased one unfortunate young man out of his window, and he fell to his death.
In the end, prosecutors only accused about half of those men of being gang members in court, about a third were ultimately convicted for charges relating to selling weed, and about half of those who had committed serious harms had already been prosecuted in state court for the same offenses. Since prosecutors made use of gang conspiracy statutes, however, they were able to detain most of the men pretrial and coerce plea bargains from them, a practice that is sickeningly commonplace.
Like Bharara, the Manhattan DA teams up with the NYPD and weaponizes gang conspiracy charges to target almost exclusively Black and Brown teenagers and young men, who often have only loose affiliations with alleged gang members (or are merely neighbors). The dehumanizing and racist enforcement of this statute has led civil rights and racial justice advocates to call on the DA to stop gang conspiracy prosecutions. Three candidates for Manhattan DA — Janos Marton, Assemblymember Dan Quart and Eliza Orlins — have pledged not to pursue gang conspiracy charges. Other candidates have not, including Bragg, Tahanie Aboushi and other candidates who were former prosecutors.
In his endorsement of Bragg, Bharara said he believed Bragg "will make the DA's office the leader it should be on criminal justice reform," but it's unclear what Bharara imagines criminal justice reform to be, or how it would differ from the status quo.
The Daily News Flash Newsletter
Catch up on the day's top five stories every weekday afternoon.
Bharara's record stands in stark contrast to many laudable parts of Bragg's proposed policy platform, which calls for increased police accountability, refusing to "bump-up" misdemeanor charges in order to coerce plea bargains and ending racial disparities in prosecution.
Still, there are also important overlaps between the two former prosecutors' policy goals. Bragg's platform echoes Bharara in calling for increased prosecutions of "large-scale narcotics operations" — while the evidence shows that efforts to crack down on opioid suppliers create new victims through needless incarceration and don't make a dent in overdoses. Though Bragg's platform suggests he would focus the office's resources on "deceptive marketing of opioids" and other corporate-adjacent drug crimes, it articulates no plan to dial down any of the Manhattan DA office's existing war on drugs-style policies.
Nevertheless, there's still a lot to like about Bragg's platform and history—declining to prosecute a wide range of offenses and aiming for the low end of the sentencing range would constitute improvements to Cy Vance's status quo. In addition, Bragg has sued the state police for using excessive force on protesters, and in September, Bragg won praise from civil rights advocates for successfully litigating a case that will require transparency from the city in the killing of Eric Garner. If he wasn't burdened by Bharara's baggage, Bragg's past legal work would solidify our perception of his commitment to police accountability.
This is why it's particularly important for Bragg to demonstrate that he wouldn't run his office like Bharara — that he would recognize the fact that prosecution alone cannot solve social problems. In the years since Bharara left office, New Yorkers have woken up to the racial inequities of the criminal legal system and demanded change: New York overhauled its bail system, reformed its discovery laws, and stopped punishing all 16-year-olds as adults.
Bharara's policies thrust too many low-income Black and Brown New Yorkers into a cruel and racist punishment system. If Bragg embraces those policies, or the former U.S. attorney's endorsement, he will fail a critical litmus test.
Trujillo is president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (UAW 2325) and a former Manhattan public defender. Ben-Menachem is a journalist and a Ph.D. student in the Sociology Department at Columbia University.