Manhattan’s Soft-on-Crime Soros DA
Mayor Eric Adams was elected to clean up New York, but the new district attorney has other ideas.
One week on the job, and the honeymoon’s already over for Eric Adams.
Adams, a pro-Second Amendment Democrat and a former NYPD captain, ran for and was elected mayor of New York City on a platform whose centerpiece was cleaning up the increasingly crime-ridden Big Apple and thereby undoing the damage done by his soft-on-crime predecessor, Bill de Blasio.
Unfortunately for Adams, Alvin Bragg also ran for public office. In a much lower-profile election, Bragg was elected Manhattan’s district attorney, largely with funds from billionaire anarcho-socialist George Soros, and largely on a platform of decarceration — which is to say, putting fewer bad people behind bars and instead employing “reformist” and “abolitionist” strategies to more gently encourage these wayward offenders to change their wicked ways.
Burglars, robbers, drug dealers, armed felons, and gang bangers with designs on unsuspecting Manhattanites are no doubt rubbing their hands together with glee.
But don’t take our word for it. “My commitment to making incarceration a matter of last resort is immutable,” Bragg wrote in his Day One memo of January 3 titled “Achieving Fairness and Safety.”
So now we know three things that are immutable: God, the destructive nature of leftism, and Alvin Bragg’s commitment to putting criminals ahead of public safety.
Bragg is yet another one of those hard-left Soros prosecutors — like Kim Foxx in Chicago, Kim Gardner in St. Louis, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, and George Gascón in Los Angeles — who’ve used campaign funding from Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC to win election as district attorneys and thereby pursue their “social justice” political activism with the power of law behind them. The Daily Signal reports that Soros has spent more than $17 million on campaigns such as these. And if anarchy is the desired result, he’s getting his money’s worth. Crime is way up in each of the above-mentioned cities.
Political and cultural observer Kyle Smith saw this coming. Back in July, he wrote:
Demoralized police are bound to hear all of this as a warning that the kind of dirtbags they arrest for low-level crimes will be dumped laughing back onto the streets the next day. New York City is currently spending $30 million of federal bailout money on its biggest ad campaign in decades to woo tourists back to a city where witnessing public defecation and veering around passed-out bodies on sidewalks has become the new normal.
Bragg’s memo sparked outrage from New York cops, who know exactly where this will lead. “Bragg gives criminals the roadmap to freedom from prosecution and control of our streets,” said the head of the NYPD Detectives’ Endowment Association.
“In Bragg’s Manhattan, you can resist arrest, deal drugs, obstruct arrests, and even carry a gun and get away with it,” said DEA president Paul DiGiacomo.
“Police officers don’t want to be sent out to enforce laws that the district attorneys won’t prosecute,” said Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch. “And there are already too many people who believe that they can commit crimes, resist arrest, interfere with police officers and face zero consequences.”
Perhaps this brief exchange between Bragg and Fox News’s Eric Shawn sums it up best:
Shawn: “Wouldn’t these policies give criminals the green light?”
Bragg: “No! I mean, it depends on your definition of ‘criminal.’”
Who knew the word “criminal” was open to interpretation? But here’s the thing: Adams and Bragg know each other. And Adams has had nice things to say about the guy who’s fixing to make his life miserable. “I have a lot of respect for DA Bragg, a former prosecutor,” said Adams. “He has a real vision.”
We’ll see about that “vision.” Something’s got to give, which means this won’t end well for either Adams or Bragg. And for the sake of New York City, let’s hope it’s the latter. Adams certainly won’t be the next Rudy Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg, but the city can ill afford another David Dinkins.