Manhattan shopkeepers fear DA Alvin Bragg’s new policies will increase crime
Manhattan shopkeepers expressed fear and anger on Wednesday that the new district attorney’s progressive policies will only serve to embolden small-time crooks and put them in harm’s way.
District Attorney Alvin Bragg, in a memo issued Monday, instructed his staff to stop prosecuting many low-level offenses, to seek reduced charges for certain crimes and not to ask for bail except in the most serious cases.
“This is very bad for this neighborhood,” said Modou Wade, owner of Bakh Yaye, a clothing and food store in Harlem, the area where Bragg grew up in the 1980s.
Wade, a 61-year-old dad of three, said the area is already plagued by crime, noting that his and other shops have reduced their hours out of fear of getting robbed. He was threatened with a gun inside his store in September, he said.
“Every day they come in with a knife and say give me something! It is a ridiculous area,” he said. “If it gets worse I will have to close, my wife tells me.”
Mamadou Diallo, 35, a clerk at nearby TAF Phone Card and Clothing store on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. said the shop had been robbed twice in the last three years.
“This is going to make it much more dangerous,” he said.
But Bragg, in his policy memo, argued that “reserving incarceration for matters involving significant harm will make us safer.”
One of the aims is to significantly reduce pretrial detention, reserving it only for “very serious cases.”
His office will halt prosecution of several non-violent crimes including fare-beating, trespassing, resisting arrest and interfering with cops, unless they are part of a larger, felony case.
Prosecutors were also instructed to downgrade felonies to misdemeanors in certain cases. For instance, suspects initially charged with armed robbery of a store would get hit with petit larceny instead, a misdemeanor, provided no victims were seriously injured and there was no “genuine risk of physical harm,” the memo states.
“I think it’s the wrong way to go,” Mike Bonanza, 35, the manager of grocery store in Downtown Manhattan. “It really doesn’t matter — they are committing crime, they are robbing a store — whether somebody gets hurt or not.”
Michelle Ortiz, 47, a worker at Starbright Design Floral store in Chelsea agreed “the punishement doesn’t fit the crime.”
“Hey, I’m going to rob you, I’m not going to hurt you, I’m just going to take your hard-earned money! Where is the deterrent?,” she said.
The District Attorney’s Office clarified on Wednesday that it would still prosecute armed robberies involving a gun as a felony.
“We will be tough when we need to be, but we will not be seeking to destroy lives through unnecessary incarceration,” Bragg said in a statement.
“In practical terms that means: I’ve prosecuted gun cases and if you use a gun to rob a store, you will be prosecuted as a felony. I’ve prosecuted cases involving assaulting law enforcement, and if you punch a police officer, you will also be prosecuted as a felony,” he said. “But if you are houseless with an addiction problem and you steal toothpaste and some bread, you will be diverted for treatment to help break the cycle of recidivism.”
“These policy changes not only will, in and of themselves, make us safer; they also will free up prosecutorial resources to focus on violent crime and bigger cases that make us safer.”
While some public defenders, including the Legal Aid Society, welcomed Bragg’s changes, cops said the policies would only lead to more crime.
The head of the NYPD’s largest union, the Police Benevolent Association, also expressed “serious concerns about the message these types of policies send to both police officers and criminals on the street.”
“Police officers don’t want to be sent out to enforce laws that the district attorneys won’t prosecute,” PBA president Patrick Lynch said.
