Prosecutors in New York City are leaving in droves because their work is being undercut by soft-on-crime district attorneys. So far just this year, the Manhattan district attorney's office has lost 65 assistant DAs (12% of its staff); in Brooklyn, 67 prosecutors (13%) have left since January – that's after 94 quit in all of 2021, after 84 resigned the year before. And in the Bronx, 59 prosecutors walked between January 1 and the end of May.
What do all those offices have in common? District attorneys who are letting criminals out on the street, undercutting the work prosecutors have put in on the cases. According to Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute, it's the brightest and best who are fleeing the city.
"Those prosecutors who are the most committed in fighting crime are going to be the most frustrated and the most likely to leave," he tells AFN.
On the West Coast, prosecutors in San Francisco almost unanimously supported the recall of DA Chesa Boudin and they're lining up in LA to help oust DA George Gascon. Dacus predicts the loss of so many prosecutors will gum up the case flow and frustrate crime victims who are waiting for justice. Some cases, he laments, won't even make it to trial.
"It's going to result in cases being dropped and people who would've been convicted being let go or let go on parole," says Dacus.
He also predicts that going into the midterms, voters will add the increasing crime in major cities to their concerns about the Biden economy. "These factors, without a doubt, are going to make crime a major element in this upcoming election," the Sacramento-based attorney contends.
But Dacus warns that the broken criminal justice system could have even more immediate consequences as communities already spurred on to violence by left-wing agitators come close to exploding: "Without a doubt, the tinder box is full and it's ready for a fuse to be lit," he says.
