In January of 2023, The New York Times will publish a major article noting how crime has dropped in Manhattan under new District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Manhattan DA to stop seeking prison sentences in slew of criminal cases

By Larry Celona, Tamar Lapin, Tina Moore, Reuven Fenton and Bruce Golding | January 4, 2022 | 11:32 AM EST

Who needs soft-on-crime judges when the district attorney doesn’t even want to lock up the bad guys?

Manhattan’s new DA has ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public Tuesday.

In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.

“This rule may be excepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on a holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victim’s input (particularly in cases of violence or trauma), and any other information available,” the memo reads.

Assistant district attorneys must also now keep in mind the “impacts of incarceration,” including whether it really does increase public safety, potential future barriers to convicts involving housing and employment, the financial cost of prison and the racial disparities over who gets time, Bragg instructed.

In cases where prosecutors do seek to put a convict behind bars, the request can be for no more than 20 years for a determinate sentence, meaning one that can’t be reviewed or changed by a parole board.

There’s more at the original.

The cited article is from not The New York Times, our nation’s newspaper of record, not the one with All the News That’s Fit to Print proudly emblazoned on its masthead, but the New York Post. Site searches of the Times website failed to turn up any stories on this. New York magazine, the Gothamist, amny and Fox News covered it, but it simply wasn’t news that the Times saw as fit to print, at least not if their site search engine works. Fox noted:

In a stunning reversal of traditional law enforcement procedures, Bragg sent a memo stressing “diversion and alternatives to incarceration,” in pursuing prosecutions … by not sending criminals to jail. The no-jail time exceptions are murder, a crime that involves someone’s death, or a felony. And several serious crimes, like armed robbery, are being reduced to misdemeanors, which could mean dangerous thugs will end up back on the streets without seeing the inside of a jail cell.

And even if you murder someone, Bragg says his office will limit sentences to 20 years. He is refusing to seek the state-mandated “life without parole” for murderers, which would include terrorists, cop killers and even serial killers.

It’s easy to see what will happen: people who are victims of crime will be far less likely to report those crimes, because Mr Bragg has just told everyone that he’s not going to prosecute crimes seriously. After all, why bother, if you know that your assailant will end up right back on the street, with zero punishment, and just might be in a position to seek retribution for reporting the crime in the first place?

Philadelphia voted in a “social justice”, George Soros-supported prosecutor in Larry Krasner, and the result has been 499 homicides in 2020, just one short of the record set in 1990, during the crack cocaine wars, and then blew past that with 562 killings in 2021. Mr Krasner claims that crime is down, overall, statistically speaking, but the probability is that fewer crimes that actually occur are being reported. After all, why bother?

So, Mr Bragg, like Mr Krasner, will report that his policies have reduced crime in Manhattan, when, in reality, they will have reduced the reporting of crime. That’ll make the numbers look better, but for the victims, perhaps not so much.