(CN) – New York City’s most ethnically diverse borough, the landing point for and home to many of the city’s immigrants, will head to the polls Tuesday for a primary that will help decide whether their next top prosecutor will target U.S. immigration officials who violate civil rights.
That is one of the headline-grabbing proposals on the platform of Tiffany Cabán, a public defender vying to replace late Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, who died in May at age 86.
Cabán, who also calls for decriminalizing sex work and ending the war on drugs, will be facing off against five other Democratic hopefuls in Tuesday’s primary, but in a sense each of the contenders will be running against Brown’s legacy.
Brown took office 28 years ago during a crime wave, practicing a harsh brand of criminal justice that has since fallen out of fashion in the Democratic Party for fueling mass incarceration. The most recently available data showed that Queens sent more people to Rikers Island for minor offenses than any other borough, prompting New York City Councilman Rory Lancman to dub the borough “the misdemeanor incarceration capital of New York City.”
Representing the most dramatic break from that tradition, Cabán has drawn acclaim and blowback from high places. Two Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have endorsed the 31-year-old for Queens district attorney, as have Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and The New York Times.
As a Latina woman in frequent conflict with the Democrats’ local political machine, Cabán has regularly been compared to Ocasio-Cortez, but she is more often compared to other former public defenders like Larry Krasner, who improbably took over and reshaped Philadelphia’s District Attorney’s Office. Cabán’s opponents are Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president; Jose Nieves, a former deputy chief in the New York State Attorney General’s Office; Greg Lazak, a former judge; Betty Lugo, a former Nassau county prosecutor; and Mina Malik, also a former prosecutor in Queens and Washington.
Councilman Lancman recently dropped out of the race and endorsed Katz. Previously though, he depicted himself as a candidate of reform.
“I am running to break that cycle of over-policing and mass incarceration,” Lancman declared in a debate on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” touting his record as a councilman in opposing cash bail and attacking so-called “broken windows” policing, where petty offenses like graffiti and subway-fare evasion are vigorously prosecuted.
When it comes to supporting Cabán's competitors, a former police commissioner who was one of the architects of broken windows appears to be on the same page as Lancman.
