Alvin Bragg has won the Democratic primary for D.A. of New York County (Manhattan) by promising not to prosecute minor crimes such as trespassing, resisting arrest, turnstile jumping, and traffic offenses. In a debate, Bragg (who previously prosecuted state crimes in the attorney general’s office and federal ones in the Southern District of New York) boasted that he had only ever prosecuted one misdemeanor, when he charged some men for blocking access to a Planned Parenthood office... In June of 2020, at the height of police-hating hysteria, Bragg called for “shrinking and re-imagining the role of police.” Broken-windows theory holds that getting minor criminals off the streets prevents things from spiraling out of control, and as Mayor Bill de Blasio has discouraged police, criminals feel emboldened to commit high-level, very violent conduct. “I grew up being stopped and harassed under a broken windows theory,” Bragg told the leftist site The Appeal. “And I can tell you, it alienated me and others like me who you might need later as a witness to something. You’re undermining community trust.” How about steadily rising crime, though? Does that undermine community trust? Bragg holds that locking up criminals does not make a city safer: “In the 80s when I was growing up, when we were incarcerating more, I was not safer.” He suggests “diversion” into therapeutic programs for those charged with drug offenses, but when asked whether the criminals in question should at least be forced to complete drug-treatment programs before their charges are dropped, he said merely that a “good-faith” effort is all he expects. He has also said that police should not be responding to “mental-health crisis calls,” so don’t expect the police to come by to deal with anyone who might be merely a ranting lunatic, until it’s too late.