Bragg elected as first Black Manhattan DA
Democrat has pledged to change culture of prosecutor’s office
Democrat Alvin Bragg was elected Tuesday as Manhattan’s first Black district attorney, a position that will give him oversight of prosecutions and ongoing investigations involving former President Donald Trump.
Bragg, a civil rights lawyer and former federal prosecutor, defeated Republican Thomas Kenniff to join a growing wave of progressive, reform-minded prosecutors across the country.
He will take over in January from the current district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., who is retiring after a final term in
which he brought tax evasion charges against the Trump Organization and its longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg.
Trump himself remains under investigation by the office.
Trump and Bragg have history: As a top deputy to New York’s attorney general in 2018, Bragg helped oversee a lawsuit that led to the closure of Trump’s charitable foundation over allegations that he used the nonprofit to further his political and business interests.
Bragg grew up in Harlem during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. At age 15, a police officer stuck a gun in his face and wrongly accused him of being a drug dealer as he walked to buy groceries for his father. Bragg filed a complaint at his parents’ urging, sparking an interest in the law.
He has had a knife held to his throat. As an adult, he opened his home to a brother-in-law just released from prison. Sometimes, Bragg says, the warrant squad would show up looking for the brother-in-law.
Bragg, 48, spent the final days of his campaign participating in a rare judicial inquiry into the death of Eric Garner, whose pleas of “I can’t breathe” to police officers who hauled him to the ground in a chokehold became a rallying cry for Black Lives Matter protesters in 2014.
Bragg called it the most “emotionally significant” case of his career.
Bragg campaigned partly on a promise to change the culture of the D.A.’S office. He said wants to “shrink the system,” declining to pursue many lowlevel offenses and look for alternatives to prosecuting small “crimes of poverty.”