Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s reelection this week followed a first term that rarely saw him step out of the national spotlight, securing Donald Trump’s hush money conviction on 34 felonies and those of the president’s namesake real estate company and its top finance executive, indicting Mayor Adams’ right-hand Ingrid Lewis Martin, and trying a host of other high-profile cases.
But the DA told the Daily News he believes voters primarily credited him for the decrease in shootings and homicides since he took the helm at the 100 Centre St. prosecutor’s office. Bragg cruised to reelection Tuesday night, winning 74% of the vote, easily defeating his Republican contender, Maud Maron, and independent candidate Diana Florence.
“In certain parts of the island where shootings have historically been high, I get a lot of feedback about the work we’ve done,” the DA said. “The breadth of the office’s work mirrors the breadth of the vibrancy of Manhattan.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg speaks during a press conference related the indictment of Tabitha Bundrick for 36, for allegedly using fentanyl-laced drugs to rob four men, killing three of them Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025 in Manhattan, New York, New York. (Barry Williams / New York Daily News)
Raised in Harlem, Bragg, 52, became Manhattan’s first Black DA in 2022 after serving as the state’s chief deputy attorney general and a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York.
His stormy first year saw the city’s cop unions label him as “soft on crime” and wage war on some of the more lenient prosecutorial policies he outlined in his infamous “day one memo” to staff, including downgrading felonies to misdemeanors for offenses like wielding a toy gun during a robbery. The DA quickly walked some of them back.
In their unsuccessful bids against Bragg, hardline candidates Maron and Florence pointed to a decline in conviction rates as evidence that the DA was being overly lenient with the accused.
The DA said his body of work doesn’t bear out fears that he would let petty crime go unpunished; he’s blamed discovery reforms he advocated to roll back for a large number of case dismissals citywide.
Bragg also rejected the notion that he’d been shy to implement some of his progressive policy ideas, like seeking alternatives to jail wherever possible and never pursuing sentences of life without parole, when asked whether he’d reintroduce them after winning reelection.
“The north star is public safety — and I’ve been clear about this throughout — that starts with prosecutions,” Bragg said. “It also includes the things that [the Daily News has] covered, whether it’s our navigators and mental health interventions, it all advances public safety, reduces recidivism.”
Bragg’s office has invested millions of dollars seized from banks in a set of outreach programs still in their early stages, with the money aiming to connect resources to people who are homeless and people facing low-level charges for crimes of poverty. His Pathways division has assigned prosecutors to each of the office’s Trial bureaus to proactively identify people who would benefit from alternatives to jail or prison.
The DA doesn’t believe his initiatives have solved the crises of homelessness and mental illness and how the justice system responds to them. He pointed to a bill he’s co-sponsored with state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal that would connect people charged with low-level offenses whose cases are dismissed with psychiatric treatment and temporary and long-term housing.
“This is something that has been and will continue to be a significant priority, and I would think about it on a continuum,” Bragg said.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg addresses the Media) Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is pictured in Manhattan on Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
“We did 6,400 shoplifting prosecutions last year, so we will continue to bring those cases, but also bring to bear the mental health interventions for those kinds of cases in particular.”
Bragg said he considers another of his biggest challenges to be ensuring justice for the city’s renters and workers, issues Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani made central to his historically successful campaign for City Hall. The DA pointed to the office’s boost in prosecutions against bad landlords, corrupt developers, and wage-stealing managers following the launch of its housing and worker protection units.
“The biggest challenge is focusing on the disorder that we see,” the DA said. “If you’ll allow me to have a compound answer, I also do think our kind of, you might call it an ‘economic justice practice area’ … Obviously, there’s been a lot of discussion about affordability and costs, and I think on our docket, we see it manifesting in a number of ways.”
Bragg said he wasn’t concerned about his standing with the commander-in-chief, whose conviction he secured for the Stormy Daniels hush money scheme less than two weeks before Trump’s return to power. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the DA for positioning him as the only president to be convicted of a crime or to use the federal government’s enforcement powers against his perceived political enemies, like the recently indicted state AG Tish James.
“I just got the privilege of another four years,” the DA said.
“Seventy-four percent of the voters in Manhattan, and they elected me to focus on continuing to drive shootings down from 66% and homicides from 48%. That’s what I’ve been focused on for four years, the work is what I’ve been focused on for a quarter century now, and that’s where I’m gonna continue to focus.”