Editorials of The Times: Tiffany Cabán for Queens district attorney

In 1991, the year Richard Brown began a nearly 28-year tenure as Queens district attorney, crack had turned New York neighborhoods into battlegrounds and 2,154 people were murdered in the city. Brown and other law enforcement officials responded with, among other tactics, aggressive prosecutions that filled prisons and devastated generations of black and Hispanic families.

Communities ravaged by mass incarceration are still trying to recover from this approach. A national movement has demanded a new vision of justice to keep the public safe without the kind of excessive sentencing that was once considered tough on crime. A growing number of prosecutors, in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere, have pledged to fight both crime and incarceration.

Their approach has begun to take hold in New York City, particularly with the work of Brooklyn’s district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, and his predecessor, Kenneth Thompson.

But when Brown died in May, the Queens district attorney’s office remained, in many ways, frozen in time, deploying practices other New York prosecutors now avoid.

Defense and other lawyers say Queens prosecutors sometimes interview defendants waiting for arraignment before they have obtained a lawyer, a practice rarely if ever used by other prosecutors in the city. Queens prosecutors are also said to regularly press defendants to accept plea deals before they have been indicted and can see the evidence against them. Unlike other boroughs, the office has no dedicated unit to address wrongful convictions. And it prosecutes low-level marijuana offenses, a practice that disproportionately affects black and Latino residents, at a much higher rate than Brooklyn or Staten Island. Racial disparities in prosecutions within the borough are high, too.

Next Tuesday, seven Democrats will compete in a primary to replace Brown, nearly all promising sweeping changes, like declining to prosecute marijuana possession, developing alternatives to incarceration, creating a unit to address wrongful convictions and increasing scrutiny on abusive landlords.

The choice is difficult. The field of candidates is big but disappointing. Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender, is the best pick.

Cabán does not have the managerial experience of Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, or the prosecutorial experience of Greg Lasak, a retired judge and former longtime assistant Queens district attorney. But Katz has no experience as a prosecutor nor long commitment to criminal justice reform, and despite Lasak’s tenure, he would not seem to be someone to bring change to an office where he served for years.

Unlike those two candidates, Cabán would come into office unencumbered by ties to the borough power structure and free to pursue her commitment to serve the community by doing more than just winning convictions. Her seven years as a public defender have given her insight into how the system works, and how it ought to be changed.

If she succeeds Brown, Cabán is likely to face resistance from prosecutors, investigators, the police, even some judges and defense lawyers. Reshaping any entrenched, calcified bureaucracy requires a balance of patience and determination. She will need to recruit qualified, committed lawyers and get the department’s best on her side. To overcome her lack of management experience she will also need to surround herself with seasoned prosecutors, as well as true believers, expertly guiding a staff of about 700 to carry out meaningful reforms.

Cabán has said she would increase funding for programs that provide alternatives to incarceration, like drug treatment and mental health counseling, and stop prosecuting many minor, so-called broken-windows offenses, like fare beating, drug possession, welfare fraud and loitering.

As Brooklyn district attorney, Thompson, among the first of the new breed of prosecutors, proved that a committed outsider could get the job done. Though he had served as a federal prosecutor, he was elected with little management experience. Thompson, who died in 2016, made welcome progress toward ending prosecution for low-level marijuana offenses and reviewing convictions that occurred under his predecessor.

With a focused, steady approach, Cabán can build on Thompson’s legacy of reform, and forge her own. If she wins the primary, she will most likely face Daniel Kogan, the only Republican in the race, in the Nov. 5 general election.

Cabán identifies as a queer Latina. She is of Puerto Rican descent and is the first in her family to graduate from college. She would bring a perspective suited to one of the world’s most diverse communities, one where elected officials have rarely reflected that reality.

The success of any prosecutor, and of the city itself, depends on keeping people safe. Cabán is the Democrat best poised to become one of a growing number of prosecutors to show that can be done without infringing on civil liberties, criminalizing black and Hispanic Americans and mistaking punishment for the only form of justice.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.