Bragg vs. Trump: NYC Is Drowning in Crime. How Does Convicting the Former President Make Us Safe?

One wonders how, exactly, convicting a former president of felonies relating to how a financial transaction was documented serves public safety

From Chesa Boudin and Larry Krasner to George Gascón and Kim Foxx, proponents of the so-called "progressive" prosecutor project often defend broad non-prosecution policies and administrative restrictions on prosecutorial tools like sentencing enhancements and pretrial detention as reasonable exercises of discretion in a world of limited resources. 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a prime example, having leaned on this very rationale in self-defense after his infamous "Day One Memo" was met with nearly unanimous public disapproval. The argument goes something like this: Intelligent exercises of discretion 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 rigid, blanket policies of non-prosecution for long lists of offenses constitute mere exercises of "discretion" (as opposed to, say, the unilateral abrogation of duly enacted legislation), there’s still the question of whether "discretion" is being used wisely. In Alvin Bragg’s case, the idea that his broad non-prosecution policies are meant to facilitate the redirection of resources to more serious kinds of crime strains credulity in light of how much time and money his office has poured into the criminal prosecution of now-president-elect Donald J. Trump. 

Continue reading the entire piece here at FoxNews.com

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Rafael Mangual is the Nick Ohnell Fellow and head of research for the Policing and Public Safety Initiative at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is also the author of Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most.

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