With Alvin Bragg’s re-election under a Mayor Mamdani, ‘justice’ in NYC is about to get worse

While Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has gotten the lion’s share of the media attention these last several weeks, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg quietly sailed through his reelection bid, securing more than 70% of the vote.

Bragg’s win reflects a bucking of what some might have been tempted to call a national trend of so-called “progressive” prosecutors around the country being made to suffer the electoral consequences of going soft on crime.

Recent examples include LA’s George Gascón, Oakland’s Pamela Price, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, and Athens, Ga.’s Deborah Gonzalez, defeated in the wake of Laken Riley’s murder.

Bragg has drawn an enormous amount of criticism since first taking office — largely in response to his infamous “Day One” memo outlining his vision for prosecuting (and not prosecuting) criminals in Manhattan.

Yet his 2025 vote total was more than three times the share secured by his closest challenger, Maud Maron, who received just 20% of the votes cast.

The question is: Why? And the answer is relatively simple.

Alvin Bragg’s radicalism was overshadowed by misguided state-level reforms — and an even more insane mayoral candidate leading the ticket.

Bragg was able to effectively deflect when confronted with concerns about public safety by pointing to some of the more misguided criminal justice reforms enacted by Albany Democrats prior to his taking office — particularly the state’s 2020 discovery reform, which Bragg sharply and repeatedly critiqued.

Between that, the 2020 bail reform, the 2018 juvenile justice reform, and the 2021 parole reform, Bragg had plenty of scapegoats to point to if ever he was accused of doing too little enforcement.

And the truth is, even had he wanted to be a true law-and-order DA, the reforms enacted in Albany would have prevented him from doing so effectively.

But if pointing to the state-level reforms proved to be an effective deflection tactic before now, just imagine how much bigger the shadow cast by a Mamdani administration will be over what the Manhattan DA does or doesn’t do moving forward.

It’s one thing to say that reforms to bail, discovery, or juvenile justice prevented the district attorneys of New York City from sending as many people as they would have liked to jail.

It’s quite another for them all to be able to say that there simply isn’t enough space in whatever jails remain after Rikers Island shuts down in August of 2027 to detain even the most hardened offenders.

Consider for a moment some of the other initiatives Mamdani is likely to act on as mayor.

He has committed to abolishing the city’s gang database, the subject of pending legislation the city council will likely pass next year.

He has promised to strip the NYPD’s commissioner of her authority over police officer discipline and hand it to the anti-cop Civilian Complaint Review Board.

And he has vowed not to add to the already understaffed NYPD’s quickly dwindling ranks.

With a mayor and City Council well to his left, Alvin Bragg will spend the next four years presiding over a decline in enforcement that he won’t have to take the political heat for.

In Mamdani’s New York, more (or more-aggressive) enforcement of the law simply isn’t going to be on the menu — whether the DAs like it or not.

If there is a downside in this for Alvin Bragg, it’s that a soon-to-be neutered NYPD will be less likely to pull his chestnuts out of the fire by keeping crime under control through stepped-up enforcement, as it has over the last few years.

The truth is that Bragg and Mamdani are two sides of the same coin.

But it’s going to be hard for the public to point a finger at anyone other than Mamdani when public safety begins to deteriorate.

And who could blame them?

Rafael A. Mangual is the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of “Criminal (In)Justice” (2022).