On Saturday, a knife-wielding thief severely stabbed a security guard at a midtown Manhattan Duane Reade and threatened a shopper.
Roughly 12 hours later, a straphanger was shot in the hand as his train pulled into the 86th Street and Lexington Avenue platform.
That’s life in Manhattan, where transit crime, assault and shoplifting are raging.
“The city has changed so much,” lamented Ermal Gura, 35, of Staten Island, a passerby who barely escaped the drugstore thief. “We have to watch our backs in the stores and on the subway.”
That’s because Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg doesn’t have New Yorkers’ backs.
Thursday, minutes after securing a guilty verdict against former president Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, Bragg boasted, “I did my job.”
Bragg’s not doing his job. The mainstream media is gushing with adulation, but New Yorkers living in constant fear should find Bragg’s stardom nauseating.
He’s being hailed as a hero, but he’s a menace.
Bragg should prioritize jailing violent criminals and repeat offenders, including the shoplifting gangs that are forcing stores to close.
Since the year before Bragg took office, grand larceny crimes — the theft of goods worth over $1,000 from an individual or a business — are up 33%.
Here’s the zinger: Despite spending years and millions of dollars pursuing Trump, Bragg claims he lacks the resources to bring thieves to trial.
In December 2022, with the DA’s investigation of Trump in full swing, cops arrested Charles Lindsay, 22, and charged him with four heists in one week at high-end Madison Avenue boutiques, where he was alleged to have stolen nearly $25,000 in goods, including luxury handbags.
Four grand larceny charges. Lindsay was known to belong to a gang targeting the area and had a long rap sheet.
Yet the DA’s office let Lindsay off, dropping the charges if he consented to five counseling sessions. He didn’t even have to pay the stores for the goods.
Bragg’s office said prosecutors had too much on their plates to try the case.
Criminal lawyer and former Bronx Assistant DA Michael Discioarro said Bragg’s office has 300 prosecutors.
“What exactly is he working on?” Discioarro asked.
Definitely not getting criminals off the streets.
Two months after Lindsay got his sweetheart deal, he was nailed for packing a pistol and mugging a 14-year-old in a Brooklyn playground.
In that case, the Brooklyn DA’s office had the good sense to ask for $100,000 bail.
Bragg, though, sides with the criminals. That includes farebeaters.
People who dodge subway turnstiles often have rap sheets and open warrants for more serious crimes. Criminals don’t conscientiously pay the fare and then rob and assault other riders. Enforcing the laws on farebeating would keep crime down.
New York state’s bizarre criminal-justice “reforms” are partly to blame for Manhattan’s crime surge — but Bragg refuses to recommend bail or incarceration even when the law permits it.
Public anger against Bragg soared in February when the DA released four migrant teens charged with beating up two cops in Times Square. No bail required.
At that point, 20 Republican state senators sent a letter to Gov. Hochul urging her to remove Bragg as DA, explaining, “his incredibly poor judgment is matched only by his unwillingness to take criminals off the street.”
On April 16, in the midst of his own trial, Trump visited the scene of one of Bragg’s biggest mistakes in judgment — the Sanaa bodega in Harlem.
Showing total disdain for the right to self-defense, Bragg in 2022 charged Jose Alba, a clerk at the shop, with second-degree murder after he stabbed a career criminal who had attacked him over a bag of chips. When the public grew outraged, Bragg dropped the charges.
The bodega’s co-owner told Trump he’s still grappling with rampant crime.
Trump pledged to straighten New York out, adding “Alvin Bragg does nothing.”
Nothing, that is, to keep New Yorkers safe.
After Bragg won his case against Trump, the DA “watched his place in the history books take shape,” The Washington Post enthused.
That’s the problem. New Yorkers need a DA who watches out for them, not for himself.
