Underpaid prosecutors overwhelmed by a mammoth backlog of cases are quitting in droves when their work is needed more than ever, the city’s district attorneys told the City Council on Friday.
“Former staffers cited the responsibilities of discovery, managing the backlog of cases, and increased night and weekend shifts among the reasons why they leave,” Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark told the council’s Public Safety Committee at a virtual budget hearing.
“People are in tears when they leave because they love the work they do for the Bronx community, but the job is now overwhelming.”
Clark said 104 attorneys and 90 professional staff had quit her office by the end of February, surpassing the 96 attorneys and 51 professional staff who left in all of 2021.
Clark said the departures come as the Bronx DA faces 1,270 open gun cases.
Molly Crane-Newman
March 18, 2022
Overwhelmed prosecutors quitting ‘in tears’ amid staffing crisis, NYC district attorneys say
[The answer is right in front of them and they refuse to see it. Stop prosecuting people for having open guns! Or is it that nearly 1,300 people have shown the Bronx DA their open gun cases and the DA is paralyzed with fright?
Regardless, this is an indicator of things to come and the opportunities opening up. If the anti-gun laws are not quickly struck down or repealed people will ignore them and start normalizing gun ownership in self defense.
We live in interesting times. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]
New Yorkers love their defenseless status like Brits love the National Health Service. It’s killing them but ideology is more important.
Not sure if you’re joking, but I don’t think they’re talking about “open carry” – it’s about unresolved “gun crime” cases.
Many of which, of course, are only crimes in the legal arena (not in the moral or ethical sense).
It was an attempted joke.
City slickers lie, also. Could it be some of those that left in tears were from being fired over vaccine mandates?
Could many of those 2021 losses be people that refused to take the vaccine?
Could many of those people quitting just by fed up with revolving door criminal policies?
Hell, with a no-bail system being imposed. 1,270 open cases could be from the same 10 criminals.
And it matches the left perfectly to whine about a problem they dreamed up, built, and maintained completely on their own.
Sorry, I’m going ZFG on this one. (Zero F–k’s Given).
Joe at 7:40am: I hoped you were being tongue-in-cheek. Glad you clarified.
Tangent: Madison, WI had its first murder of the year. A guy was shot multiple times on the sidewalk between the entrances to the sheriff’s office and the downtown precinct police station. No suspects.
DA Clark’s next line in that article says a lot about their priorities: “Gun violence is a blight on the Bronx that highlights a need for resources,” Clark said. “We must save a generation of boys and young men, predominantly of color, from death and prison.”
It’s the DA’s Office’s responsibility to “save” men and boys from “gun crimes”? Shouldn’t that be the responsibility of the men’s and boys’ families? (Oh, right. Those would be the families that generational poverty, crappy education, and endless welfare — of which single parents with estranged partners receive more — have disincentivized and/or torn apart.)
I also thought it was interesting that out of all the crimes his office should be investigating and prosecuting, “gun crimes” is the one category he focuses on enough to call out. Not murders, rapes, or assaults. Not robberies or looting. “Gun crimes.” Either that, or he’s citing that category hoping the residents fear guns enough to reflexively vote to give his office more money.
(It’s also possible that he mentioned several, and Yahoo! News is choosing to focus on that specific one.)
But it’s true that if New York (city and state) didn’t have so many victimless “gun crimes” on the books, their backlog on them would likely be considerably smaller. And if the fed.gov AND New York (city and state) weren’t subsidizing single-parent households so much more generously than two-parent homes, more families would stay together.
Yes, but but but — taking away the free money for homes where the dad is encouraged to skedaddle would be systemic racism. Can’t be having that now….
I have my issues with having all these entitlement programs in place, too. That said, at this point they’re too entrenched — with too many citizens dependent on them — to just remove them entirely. I wouldn’t propose that even if I were in a position to make such proposals.
So since we’re stuck with them for now, I would instead propose some tweaks to the rules. Families that stay intact (i.e. two-parent homes) should be rewarded, not punished with reduction or loss of benefits. Single mothers should not be continually rewarded for having yet more children out of wedlock.
I’m not saying we should remove benefits from people who currently receive them. I’m saying that for a generation or two, families that set their kids up to break the cycle of generational poverty should be eligible for more, in the hopes that within that generation or two, more families will be able to survive with fewer entitlements — or ideally, be fully self-sufficient, without any entitlements at all.
What was sold as a publicly-funded, short-term safety net has instead become a permanent lifestyle, and I don’t see any way out of the current cycle without some painful changes. Yes, my idea, if implemented, will cost more for a while, but simply cutting off or drastically reducing benefits will result in actual harm to the people who legitimately do need it, and that’s a bridge I’m not willing to cross.
“I’m not saying we should remove benefits from people who currently receive them.”.
Then how about eliminating benefits to people who have not yet received them, or even established eligibility, because they have not been born?
If a date was set – as in “no one born after April 01 2024 shall be eligible to receive Benefits X, Y and Z…” does not punish existing recipients, does not punish anyone who is living in conditions that may lead to justifying receiving benefits, and exceeds the human gestation period by a substantial enough period to avoid claims of “pregnancy discrimination.” If two years is “insufficient planning time” to avoid pregnancy then pick a date three years, or five years, in the future.
Such a policy has the added benefit of establishing a numerical cap on the maximum number of potential recipients, a useful financial planning tool, and actuarial tables can predict the potential future cost reduction with reasonable accuracy.
If this is an acceptable way to limit expansion of welfare programs and control expenditures, the same procedure could be used to establish limits on social security, medicare, et al.
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