Ryan says he was there to monitor the police behavior toward protesters, standing removed from the gathering. “I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go watch,’ because police have a tendency to overreach to these little things,” he recounts. “I don’t think I should have been arrested. But I was.” The police initially accused him of resisting arrest but they later admitted that this characterization was incorrect and apologized; still, they maintained trespassing charges.

A few weeks later, Ryan announced his candidacy for Broome County district attorney. He says he’d bring into the office a more skeptical perspective toward the criminal legal system, born of his experience as a defense attorney and public defender. “We all know that they police certain communities and treat certain communities differently,” he told Bolts. “If you’re not in a position of power to change it, then it’s not going to change.” 

He added, “The only one who is a gatekeeper to make sure that horrible jobs aren’t done is the district attorney because he or she has the ultimate discretion on whether to prosecute and how to prosecute, and what justice to extract from each individual situation.”

Broome County’s DA race is among dozens this year that will decide who leads local prosecution and law enforcement in New York. Fifteen counties are electing their sheriffs and 24 their DA, and the filing deadline for candidates to run for a party’s nomination passed last month. 

Most counties drew just one candidate who’ll be facing no competition. They include conservative sheriffs who have resisted gun control, the high-profile DAs of Rochester and Staten Island, and a sheriff who defied calls to resign for sharing a racist social media post—and is now poised to stay in office for four more years. 

Still, a few flashpoints have emerged. Candidates are taking contrasting approaches on bail in Broome, discovery reform in the Bronx, and policing in Queens. Rensselaer County (Troy) faces another reckoning with its unusual decision to partner with federal immigration authorities.

Bolts has compiled a full list of candidates running in the June 27 primaries, which will decide the nominees of the four political parties that have ballot lines in New York State: the Democratic, Republican, Working Families, and Conservative parties. Candidates can still petition until late May to appear on the Nov. 7 ballot as an independent.

These elections are unfolding against the backdrop of reforms the state adopted in 2019 to detain fewer people pretrial and offer defendants more access to the evidence against them. Democrats earlier this month agreed to roll back those reforms after years of pressure by many DAs and sheriffs. Their new package, championed by Governor Kathy Hochul, gives judges’ more authority to impose bail, amid other provisions that will likely increase pretrial detention. Hochul also backed a push by New York City DAs to loosen discovery rules requiring that prosecutors quickly share evidence with the defense, but the final legislation did not touch those.

Tess Cohen, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who is running for DA in the Bronx, is one of a few candidates this year who is voicing support for the original pretrial reforms and distaste for the rollbacks. Cohen is running in the Democratic primary against Bronx DA Darcel Clark, who was reported by City & State to be the chief instigator in lobbying state politicians to  loosen discovery rules. (Clark and other city DAs flipped on their push in the final days.) Cohen faults state politicians for making policy based on the media blowing up specific instances of crime.

“The problem with people like the governor bowing down to press coverage that is sensationalist and fear-mongering, and almost always inaccurate, is that we actually make our communities less safe when we do that,” Cohen told Bolts. “We have very good data that shows that holding people at Rikers Island on bail or low level crimes does not make us safer.” 

A study released in March by the John Jay College found that people who were released due to the bail reform were less likely to be rearrested. 

Eli Northrup, a staunch proponent of the original reforms as policy director at the Bronx Defenders, hopes that the upcoming elections usher in more local officials who are “looking to change the system, shrink the system, work toward having fewer people incarcerated, rather than using it as a tool for coercing pleas.”  But he is also circumspect after the new rollbacks. Even if a reformer were to win an office, he says, they’d likely have to contend with police unions, mayors, and other entrenched powers looking to block reforms. “What we should be doing is spending less money on policing and prosecution and investing that very money into the communities that are harmed the most by violence,” he says.

To kick off Bolts’ coverage of New York’s criminal justice elections this year, here are five storylines that jump out since the filing deadline has passed.

1. Challenges from opposite directions for two New York City DAs 

Queens four years ago saw a tense Democratic primary for DA between Tiffany Cabán, a public defender who ran as a decarceral candidate, and Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, who prevailed by just 60 votes. Four years later, Katz faces a primary challenge from her right from George Grasso, a retired judge and former NYPD official, who is calling for harsher policing and thinks the city is waging a “war on cops.” Grasso is running with the support of Bill Bratton, the former NYPD commissioner and a frequent critic of policing reforms. 

Public defender Devian Daniels is running as well, saying she wants to fight mass incarceration from the Queens DA’s office after “years of witnessing abuses on the front lines as defense counsel.” The Democratic primary typically amounts to victory in this blue stronghold. 

In the Bronx, Darcel Clark’s sole primary challenger, Tess Cohen, says wants to take the DA’s office in a more progressive direction. She says that Clark’s lobbying to loosen the state’s discovery rules is emblematic of how prosecutors can coerce defendants into guilty pleas. “If you’re held in Rikers, and you can only get out if you plead guilty, and you can’t make that argument that you’re actually innocent because you don’t have the evidence, then you end up pleading guilty just to get out of Rikers,” she told Bolts. 

Cohen explained that she would also change how the office decides whether to recommend for pretrial detainment. “If we are in a space where our recommendation for sentence or our plea offer means the person is immediately going to be released from jail, they should be released anyways,” she said. “You should not be holding someone in jail that you plan to release the minute they plead guilty.” 

Clark did not reply to a request for comment.

2. North of New York City, the policy contrasts on pretrial reform are muted

Broome County, on the border with Pennsylvania, had the highest rate of people detained in jail as of 2020, the year the reforms were first implemented, according to data compiled by the Vera Institute for Justice. Ryan, the Democratic lawyer running for DA, told Bolts he supports the reforms, crediting them for helping slightly reduce the local jail population. 

But his two Republican opponents in this swing county disagree. Incumbent Michael Korchak has pushed for their repeal for years, while his primary rival Paul Battisti, a defense attorney, says the reforms were “extreme.” Neither Battisti nor Korchak replied to requests for comment. Their rhetoric is in line with the position of many, but not all, upstate DAs who have lobbied to roll back the pretrial reforms ever since they passed in 2019. 

But candidates have tended to converge on pretrial policy in the other DA races north of New York City. There are three such counties besides Broome with more than 100,000 residents. 

In Ulster County, Democrat Manny Nneji, who is currently the chief assistant prosecutor, faces Michael Kavanagh, who used to have the same job and now works as a defense attorney, and is running as a Republican. In interviews with Hudson Valley One earlier this year, both candidates largely agreed that the 2019 bail reform should be made more restrictive, and jostled about who is tougher on crime.

In Onondaga County, home to Syracuse, Incumbent William Fitzpatrick is running for re-election as a Republican against Chuck Keller, who filed to run for the Democratic nomination but also that of the Conservative Party, an established party in the state. (New York law allows candidates to run for multiple nominations at once.) The Syracuse Post-Standard reports that the local Conservative Party in March chose to endorse Keller over Kitzpatrick after Keller shared with them that he supports bail reform roll backs in line with what lawmakers ended up passing in early May. (Christine Varga is also running in the Conservative Party primary.)

In Dutchess County, Republican William Grady is retiring this year after 40 years as DA, a tenure during which he strongly fought statewide reform proposals. Democrat Anthony Parisi and Republican Matthew Weishaupt, who have both worked as prosecutors under Grady, are running to replace him; after he entered the race, Parisi faced a threat of retribution from Grady, for which the DA later apologized. Weishaupt has said he thinks the discovery reforms are “dangerous” in how they help defendants. Parisi did not reply to questions on his views on the reforms.

Six smaller counties—Columbia, Delaware, Hamilton, Lewis, Seneca, and Sullivan, with populations ranging from 5,000 to 80,000 residents—also host contested DA races this year. 

3. Half of this year’s DA elections are uncontested

A single candidate is running unopposed in 12 of New York’s DA races. Ten of them are already in office, but two are newcomers: Todd Carville ​​in Oneida County and Anthony DiMartino in Oswego County. Both are Republicans and currently work as assistant prosecutors.

Michael McMahon, Staten Island’s DA, is running unopposed for the second consecutive cycle: He is a Democrat in a red-leaning county, but the GOP did not put up a candidate against him. He has been very critical of the criminal justice reforms adopted by his party’s lawmakers, and has pushed for their rollback. Another prominent critic of the pretrial reforms, Monroe County (Rochester) DA Sandra Doorley, is also running unopposed. Doorley, a Republican who was the president of the state’s DA association back when the reforms were first implemented in 2020, faced a heated challenge four years ago but is now on a golden path toward a fourth term.

4. Will ICE’s 287(g) program retain a foothold in New York?

Rensselaer County, home to Troy, is the only county in New York State that participates in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents in county jails—and one of the only blue-leaning counties in the nation with such an agreement. Immigrants’ rights activists from Cape Cod to suburban Atlanta have targeted 287(g) by getting involved in sheriff’s elections in recent years, tipping these offices toward candidates who pledged to terminate their offices’ partnerships with ICE.

Patrick Russo, the Republican sheriff who joined 287(g), is retiring this year. The race to replace him will decide whether ICE’s program retains its sole foothold in New York.

But will anyone even make the case for breaking ties with ICE? The two Republicans who are running for Russo’s office, Kyle Bourgault and Jason Stocklas, each told Bolts that they would maintain their county in the program with no hesitation. 

The only Democratic candidate, Brian Owens, did not return repeated requests for comment. He said at a press conference last month that he had no position on the matter. “I’d want to educate myself a little more before I’d make any decision on that,” he said. Owens is a former police chief of Troy, a city that during his tenure saw local activism pressuring officials to not collaborate with ICE, so these are not new questions. Still, Russo coasted to re-election unopposed four years ago, and it remains to be seen whether the 2023 cycle gives immigrants’ rights activists any more of an opening. 

5. Most incumbent sheriffs are virtually certain of securing new terms

Albany Sheriff Craig Apple drew national attention in 2021 for filing a criminal complaint against then-Governor Andrew Cuomo for groping, but he also attracted criticism for fumbling the case. The New York Times reported at the time that Apple seemed to be made of Teflon, having rebounded from past controversies with multiple re-election bids where he faced no opponent. History repeated itself again—he drew no challenger this year. 

But judging by the lay of the land throughout the state, this says less about Apple than it does about a broader dearth of engagement in New York’s local elections: Overall, 80 percent of the state’s sheriff races are uncontested this year. 

This includes the sheriffs of Fulton and Greene County, who have fiercely opposed a new gun law banning concealed weapons in a long list of public spaces, alongside many peers who are not up for election this year. Fulton’s Richard Giardino took to Fox News to signal he’d only loosely enforce it. 

And it includes Rockland County Sheriff Louie Falco, who faced calls for his resignation in 2020 after he shared a link from a white supremacist website about Black people on Facebook. Three years later, he won’t even face any opponent as he coasts to a fourth term.

The post Tensions High on Bail and Policing as New Yorkers Elect DAs and Sheriffs appeared first on Bolts.

He joined ICE’s 287(g) program, which authorizes local officers to research the status of people held at the county jail and transfer them to ICE. Rensselaer is now the only New York county in this program. Russo then wrote in a local op-ed that he did not organize a forum on this because his “experience with public forums is that they become a platform for protests.” (He did go on Fox News, however.) He also traveled to the White House for an immigration event with Trump.

Immigrant rights groups have targeted 287(g) nationwide. In 2018, the officials in three populous Maryland and North Carolina counties lost their re-election bids in contests that were shaped bytheir decision to participate in 287(g). All three counties have since left the program.

But the prospect of Rensselaer County repeating that pattern dropped precipitously last week. Russo is up for re-election this year, but no one filed to challenge the Republican incumbent by the deadline. This swing county voted twice for President Barack Obama and then for Trump. Last year, the GOP District Attorney lost to a challenger endorsed by Democrats.

Russo, unopposed in his bid for a second four-year term, told the press this week that he intends to renew his county’s 287(g) agreement when it expires in June.

This series of events reflects an environment in which state and national party structures do not pay sufficient attention to local elections that are decisive for issues that are integral to the national discourse, such as ICE’s power. Presidential contenders, a few of whom have outlined platforms on immigration, attract immense attention, but their election is still a year away. Sheriff’s races will decide the scope of ICE’s reach in hundreds of counties this year.

Still, what paths remain for a change to Rensselaer’s immigration policy?

The door remains ajar for candidates critical of 287(g) to emerge. But this now entails more acrobatics than before. A party could nominate someone via write-in in the primary, but this first requires securing the opportunity to do so by filing a petition. The deadline is today, and no petition was filed with the county board as of writing. Alternatively, candidates have until May 28 to qualify for the general election ballot as independents.

The head of the county’s Democratic Party did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the difficulties of recruiting a candidate, and on whether it might assist a write-in or independent challenger. “It is curious that the Democratic Party in Rensselaer County couldn’t be bothered to run anyone against a sheriff who has clearly become an outlier,” Siobhan Burke, an organizer with ICE-Free Capital District and the Troy Sanctuary Campaign, told me.

These groups helped organize opposition to Russo’s decision in late 2017. 287(g) opponents like Burke argue that cooperating with ICE erodes the relationship between local law enforcement and county residents, and causes distress among immigrants. “I serve a congregation that includes a number of immigrants,” Gusti Linnea Newquist, a pastor at Troy’s First United Presbyterian Church, told me. “Even folks who are able to go through the hoops, even those who are American citizens and immigrants, find themselves fearful pretty much all the time.”

Russo has responded to such criticism by saying that 287(g) promotes security. “I do not see how removing illegal aliens with criminal records has any effect on public safety other than to make the community a safer place,” he wrote in the Troy Record. But 287(g) contracts also authorize sheriffs to notify ICE of people who are jailed but not yet been convicted of a crime.

In his Troy Record op-ed, Russo also noted that the 287(g) program only applies within the jail, and that it therefore does not impact other spaces in which local law enforcement interact with people. Zachary Ahmad, a policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, argues that what goes on in the jail has bigger ramifications. “It’s important to remember that correctional officers don’t work in a silo,” he told me. He added that the program “might encourage other officers to target immigrants and engage in racial profiling because you have set this tone that Rensselaer County is this place where local law enforcement has signed up to do ICE’s bidding.”

Also concerned about other levels of law enforcement, the Troy Sanctuary Campaign has called on the city of Troy, which is the seat of Rensselaer County, to adopt a resolution regulating how city employees and police officers interact with residents. The city council tabled the proposal in December amid opposition by the Troy Police Benevolent Association.

State politicians can also dictate reform. In 2017, California adopted a “sanctuary state” law that compelled local sheriffs to terminate their existing 287(g) partnerships.

New York’s legislature could emulate California in banning 287(g). Ahmad said that this could be done alongside other restrictions on ICE cooperation, for instance whether ICE can see when jails are releasing people. Democratic lawmakers José Serrano and Karines Reyes have introduced a bill that would prevent counties from entering ICE relationships including 287(g). It would also provide indigent immigrants threatened with deportation with a right to legal representation.

Similar legislation passed the state Assembly in 2017, but it has yet to make any progress this year. The legislature is entirely in Democratic hands since January. Another pending bill would help shield people who attend courthouse proceedings from arrest. Brad Hoylman, a Democratic Senator who filed the latter reform, told me in a written message that he remains “extremely concerned about the damage that President Trump’s racist immigration policy, carried out by ICE, is doing to our judicial system by discouraging the participation of witnesses and victims who may be undocumented.” The legislature did vote in March to shield some noncitizens convicted of misdemeanors from deportation.

A law that bans 287(g) contracts could have repercussions beyond Rensselaer. While that county is the only one in the program at the moment, two Republican members of Congress have urged other New York sheriffs to join.

This deficit of electoral contestation around Rensselaer County’s immigration policies echoes what happened earlier this year in another 287(g) jurisdiction, in Florida: Duval County Sheriff Mike Williams, a Republican, was up for reelection, but his Democratic challenger indicated that he would maintain the contract. Besides Rensselaer and Duval, four other counties with 287(g) contracts have local elections this year in New Jersey, Louisiana, and Virginia.

Burke of ICE-Free Capital District recounted that the “spike of awareness around immigration issues” that followed Trump’s election initially “focused on federal policy,” but that organizers then turned their attention to policies pursued at the municipal and county levels. Will that dynamic reverberate enough this year to affect ICE’s local reach in New York and elsewhere?

The post New York Sheriff Who Joined ICE Program May Coast to Re-Election appeared first on Bolts.