The New York City Campaign Finance Board just announced the general-election debates: Mayoral candidates will slug it out Oct. 16 and 22, comptroller candidates Oct. 14 and 23 and public-advocate candidates Oct. 21.
Yet there’s radio silence on a debate for the Manhattan district-attorney race.
Why the cowardice, Alvin?
Back in 2021, incumbent Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg duked it out with other “Defund the Police” radicals in Democratic primary debates hosted by heavyweights like New York Law School and Citizens Union.
But he chickened out of a direct face-off with GOP candidate Tom Kenniff, only agreeing to a pathetic 30-minute Zoom call where they never shared the screen while speaking. Talk about gutless!
The contest matters more this year with Democratic Socialist and wannabe police-defunder Zohran Mamdani leading the mayor’s race.
Why should Bragg serve four more years when subway murders skyrocketed from zero in 2017 to 11 in 2024 during his term, when his refusal to prosecute fare evasion is bleeding the Metropolitan Transportation Authority dry to the tune of $700 million a year and when he dismisses 14% of all arrests and downgrades a whopping 60% of all felonies?
I call on Bragg to agree to a public debate and defend his disastrous record.
As a battle-tested public defender with over 20 years in the trenches, an education advocate fighting for fairness and justice in our city and a mom of four kids who take the subway to public school, I am not afraid to defend my record of fighting for our city or my vision for a safer New York.
Why is Alvin Bragg ducking a debate?
Maybe Bragg does not want to answer questions about whether or not he agrees with his party’s mayoral nominee, frontrunner Mamdani, about not prosecuting misdemeanors, legalizing prostitution, sending social workers to respond to domestic-violence calls and decommissioning the NYPD Strategic Response Group.
Mamdani and Bragg are both supporters of extremist policies like “de-carceration” — a real mouthful just to say “Keep as many people out of jail as possible.”
For a lifelong Democrat like me, someone who switched parties to hold on to my progressive values, not to reject them, I don’t recognize this brand of so-called liberalism because it puts people who cannot afford private security — like Mamdani and Bragg use — at risk.
As a public defender at the Legal Aid Society I represented many mentally ill people who were literally dying in the streets before they got arrested.
Sometimes I was able to get my clients into treatment programs as part of a plea bargain. Arresting the drug-addicted, mentally ill street homeless who commit crimes to get them the help they desperately need is not a perfect system, but it offers some of the most hard-to-treat individuals a true chance at recovery.
Unlike Mamdani and Bragg, I never looked at a man lying in his own filth on a park bench with a needle sticking out of his arm and thought, “Good thing no one has the authority or responsibility to help this man.”
The blinkered policies and radical ideologies that Mamdani and Bragg promote and impose on all of us tie the hands of the police to make arrests and block one of the only real paths to helping desperate people who cannot help themselves.
They also make our streets, parks and subways unusable, unsafe and unclean.
It’s a lose-lose to pretend the police and the criminal-justice system are always the bad guys, but that is what Mamdani and Bragg believe, and that is what they want to impose on all of us.
They call it harm reduction, but it is really harm amplification.
The wretched souls who are dying in the streets and those of us who have to navigate around their psychoses as we walk our children to school or try to get home from work all suffer.
A lifelong liberal like me believes we have an obligation to help those that are suffering the dual affliction of mental illness and drug addiction while also acknowledging that everyday New Yorkers who pay taxes, go to work and walk our streets deserve better than the Mamdani-Bragg dystopia their DSA crime agenda creates.
Sixty-seven percent of Manhattan voters believe that the city is headed in the wrong direction.
And if Gotham elects Mamdani — a frighteningly real possibility — getting rid of Bragg in Manhattan is even more important.
A Bragg-Mamdani Big Apple will increase the chaos on our streets, close down more businesses, keep the toothpaste locked up and the criminals free, while driving New York state’s record-breaking outward migration — decimating our tax base and communities.
Mamdani and Bragg want us to pay for the goods that others steal, and they want us to pay the costs of their failed ideas, but that cost is too high.
It robs us of true safety, usable public transportation, clean parks and streets and the city we know and love.
Alvin Bragg has had four years to do the job of Manhattan’s top prosecutor.
He should defend his record, in public, by agreeing to a debate.
Maud Maron is a former Legal Aid lawyer and the GOP candidate for Manhattan district attorney.
