Gonzalez for Brooklyn DA
The race to succeed the late Ken Thompson as Brooklyn’s district attorney has become, for much of the large field, a breathless rush to demonstrate who can prosecute the fewest crimes. Which is the biggest reason why the best candidate for the job is Thompson’s designated No. 2 and the current acting DA, Eric Gonzalez — a criminal-justice reformer whose feet are firmly planted in the office’s core job, which must remain getting dangerous people off the streets.
New York City is the nation’s crime-cutting miracle, and Brooklyn the borough where the phenomenon is most pronounced. With homicides and shootings seeming to drop to record lows every time you turn around, many would-be top prosecutors seem to assume that job is on autopilot.
But Brooklyn has stubborn pockets where violent death and injury remain routine. The overall lifesaving trendline must not be taken for granted by those whose job it is to ensure that it continues.
You wouldn’t know it from the platforms of most of Gonzalez’s Democratic primary rivals. (A notable exception: the capable Anne Swern, a take-charge prosecutor whose credibility is damaged for having been second-in-command to the corrupt 24-year-incumbent Joe Hynes.)
They foreground sweeping plans to eliminate the use of cash bail wherever possible; to decline to press criminal charges for quality-of-life transgressions, and to step up offers of alternatives to incarceration for those facing criminal sentencing.
Taken together, these pledges add up to what sounds like a faith-based catechism, not a pragmatic toolbox to drive down crime while ensuring justice for all.
No more clearly is the problem expressed than in attitudes toward the holy grail of New York City criminal justice reform: to so scale back the use of pretrial detention that Rikers Island, its jails still holding nearly 10,000 inmates mostly awaiting trials, closes for good.
Just six months ago, an independent commission laid on the table the ambitious goal, dependent on a series of complicated and risky policy shifts, to shutter Rikers in 10 years.
Now, just about every Brooklyn DA candidate save Gonzalez sees it as a moral imperative to close the jail complex in two or three or five years, tops — never mind the consequences.
Gonzalez is no criminal-justice-reform slouch. Hurled into the role last year when an ailing Thompson appointed him to serve, he has kept on pace with a Conviction Review Unit that so far has vacated 23 wrongful Hynes-era convictions.
He has meanwhile carried on Thompson’s signature reforms rebalancing a system that can be needlessly punitive, especially toward black and Latino men, while adding measures of his own.
He led the smart charge in four boroughs to purge decade-old ticky tack misdemeanor warrants, cleaning hundreds of thousands of records that were tainted to no avail.
But in crucial contrast to the pack, Gonzalez is a realist about the obstacles to releasing, through unproven programs, the vast numbers of defendants that would be necessary to shutter Rikers.
Gonzalez has the gumption to say that public safety, not an arbitrary timetable, must hold sway.
He’s been doing the job ably for more than a year, and has shown the wisdom to continue. Vote for him in Tuesday’s Democratic primary.