Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan

By Clio Chang, Jezebel

21 April 19

 

n February, a little more than a week after she officially announced she was running for president, Elizabeth Warren rolled out a sweeping proposal to make high-quality child care accessible to every family in the country by levying a tax on the ultra-rich. It would be a massive reinvestment, she said, because the problem demanded it: “This will be about four times more than we have invested in our children. But that’s exactly what we need to do.”

Two weeks later, at a rally in New York City, Warren introduced a plan to break up companies like Amazon and Facebook, telling the crowd: “We have these giants corporations... that think they can roll over everyone.” A week after that, she reintroduced a $500 billion plan to address the housing crisis over the next 10 years. A week after that, it was a proposal to break up agricultural monopolies. Earlier this week, Warren introduced a public lands platform.

Warren is telling a story about the country she wants to live in—and the country we currently live in: In the new gilded age, three of the richest people in America own more wealth than the poorest half of the rest of the country. Our current government’s cabinet is essentially just a wealthy cabal of privatizers and corporate raiders (a completion of form of our political system rather than an anomaly). While city officials across the country shell out billions in public dollars to attract corporate giants, low-wage workers in those places regularly toil under brutal and highly-surveilled conditions. People living in one of the richest countries in the world are turning to crowdfunding sites to pay for basic health care needs. The world is melting in ways both literal and metaphorical and, maybe more than any candidate running right now, Warren has a plan for it.

But in the world of political reporting, which often relies on high school taxonomies to describe candidates, the clarity of Warren’s vision is sometimes treated as a liability. She has been called the “wonky professor” by CNN; the New York Times described Warren’s 2020 strategy as “nerding out.” Her campaign is often compared to Hillary Clinton’s for its focus on the details—the Associated Press pointed out that Clinton’s experience should be a “cautionary tale” for someone like Warren, warning that “in 2016, Clinton put out piles of white papers, but her general election opponent hardly engaged in the policy debate.” This assessment of Warren is also, unsurprisingly, often incredibly gendered. However it’s delivered, the message is clear: Warren runs on policy at her own peril.

But unlike Clinton’s modest, technocratic approach to sweeping structural problems, Warren’s proposals offer a kind of moral urgency that seems primed for this moment. “She knows where the bodies of capitalism are buried and is not going to keep the conspiracy hushed up,” Marshall Steinbaum, an anti-trust expert and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told Jezebel. “What Warren represents is taking on that concentration of power. You can’t deal with the problem without confronting it.”  

Warren is running as a candidate who says she can see the country clearly. Can voters see her?

***

In many ways, Warren’s presidential campaign is a re-introduction of the issues she has been working on for decades. She is one of the few DC politicians who can truly claim the mantle of an “outsider,” which speaks as much to the lonely battles against Wall Street that Warren has picked as to her actual personal background. Growing up in a family in Oklahoma that Warren likes to describe as on the “ragged edge” of the middle class, she moved her way through academia—first at Rutgers University, then the University of Houston, and eventually Harvard Law.

But the fiercely progressive Warren of today is not the Warren who always was. As Politico recently reported, she was a registered Republican for many years of her mid-career life, only changing her registration to Democrat in 1996. Warren claims that she was “just never very political” and credits her eventual conversion to her academic research that brought her to bankruptcy courts around the country and in contact with struggling families, which upended her belief that families just needed to work harder or tighten their belts to pull themselves out of financial distress. With a boost from an appearance on Dr. Phil’s daytime television show, Warren ended up gaining a national profile as a bankruptcy expert in 2003 when she released The Two-Income Trap.

“She really did have a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion when she saw the bankrupt consumers really were suffering—forced into bankruptcy by illness, firing or divorce—and not predators,” one friend and early University of Texas colleague told Politico. (Others claim that Warren’s shift was less extreme than it appears.)

During the financial crisis, Warren was called on by Harry Reid to chair the congressional panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program and eventually pushed through the creation of her brainchild, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, building the agency up from scratch. “This agency is out here in a sense to try to hold accountable a financial-services industry that ran wild, that brought our economy to the edge of collapse,” Warren told Vanity Fair in 2011. “There’s been such a sense that there’s one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It’s so pervasive that it’s not even hidden.”

But in a move that angered progressives and spoke to the entrenched power of financial institutions in Washington, Barack Obama ended up passing over Warren to head the bureau she created. As Rebecca Traister put it recently in a New York Magazine profile, Warren was boxed out because “she was too outsider-y, too challenging a figure for some Democrats, let alone Republicans.”

Around this same time, a number of powerful Democrats, including Senators Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, encouraged Warren to run for the Senate against Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, a proposal which some saw as a ploy to shuffle her away from the CFPB. The plan may have been to send Warren to Massachusetts to head off her regulatory crusade, but if so, it failed miserably. In a video of her on the campaign trail that went viral, Warren made clear that she was still there to fight. “I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever,’” Warren railed. “No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”

For a first-time politician, Warren took seamlessly to campaigning, raising $5.7 million in the first quarter—nearly double the haul of her opponent. But her run had low moments, including the revelation dug up by Republican operatives that Warren had claimed Native American ancestry in the past, listing herself in law school directories as a minority, which opponents claimed was to help advance her academic career. Her years-long mishandling of the issue has meant that it followed her well into today. Still, Warren ended up unseating Brown anyway, a Tea Party hero with high favorability ratings whose surprise win two years earlier had derailed much of the Democrats’ agenda.

In her time in the Senate, Warren has focused, with varying degrees of success, on many of the same issues that had defined her career, such as student loan reform and pushing for the SEC to require banks to admit wrongdoing in many instances when settling cases with the agency. Despite having a lack of signature legislative accomplishments, it’s clear that Warren has exerted influence in Washington, especially when it came to financial reform. As Sarah Mimms wrote in The Atlantic in 2015, “Warren’s real power lies in her outsized influence, not just for a freshman senator, but for virtually any elected official in Washington. Her pen may not have touched many pieces of legislation that made their way to Obama’s desk since her election in 2012, but her fingerprints are all over them.”

Warren’s presidential campaign, much like her time in the Senate, has that same focus. “If you go back to what she was doing before she became a politician, it helps answer what the through line is in her policies now as she runs for president,” Heather McGhee, former president and now distinguished senior fellow at the progressive think tank Demos, told Jezebel. “She still sees that big corporations have too much power and that government should be on the side of working families.”

But more than just bringing massive corporations to heel, Warren’s proposals seek to address the trickle down consequences of those excesses. As corporate profits rise, wages for workers stall. Forty percent of Americans are one missed paycheck away from falling into poverty; half are one medical emergency away from financial ruin. More than a third of the country is considered “rent-burdened” or paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent. As Warren well knows, this precarity isn’t just a function of chance—it’s the system as it’s currently designed to work.

But as with most ambitious proposals, Warren’s have flaws. As Bryce Covert pointed out at The New Republic, Warren’s child care plan fails to adequately address the fact that access to child care is an infrastructure problem and that the federal government needs to get directly involved in ensuring that there are enough providers across the country. It also doesn’t offer anything for families with a stay-at-home-caretaker, as the progressive think tank the People’s Policy Project noted. And, when it comes to Warren’s sweeping housing bill, public housing seems mostly like an afterthought.

Still, in their design, the policies Warren is most focused on attempt to address the very mechanics of political and economic power—who has it, how it works, who it hurts, who it helps. While Warren has followed in the footsteps of other candidates’ agendas when it comes to sweeping policies like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, the slew of ideas that she’s put forward thus far offers something distinct: an aggressive, direct attack on that power.

Take, for example, her corporate governance bill, which would allow workers to elect 40 percent of the board of directors of big corporations (defined as those bringing in more than $1 billion in revenue). Rather than impose incentives for corporations to do better, Warren’s bill would instate a measure of democratic control, an effort to fundamentally change the way corporations operate.

“Warren’s through-line is not that these corporations should behave better, it’s that they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the way that they exist right now,” corruption expert and former New York Attorney General candidate Zephyr Teachout told Jezebel. “It’s corporate illegitimacy over corporate accountability.”

Warren’s bill to break up big tech companies—including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple—would restructure the way that 21st century monopolies operate, barring them from being both the biggest marketplaces in town while also participating in those same marketplaces. When it comes to government itself, she has put forward an ethics bill that would instate a lifetime ban on presidents, vice presidents, Cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and federal judges from lobbying and a ban for many of those same officials from holding stocks while in office. (The bill, however, says nothing about public financing of campaigns, perhaps one of the most pressing anti-corruption reforms.) She wants to abolish the Electoral College and earlier this month, Warren came out against the filibuster, a Congressional mechanism that, if left intact, would stymie most of the Democrats’ big policy priorities.

The details of the proposals may sometimes feel obscure, but the impacts are straightforward: Warren wants to, in her own methodical way, build out structures that better prevent inequality and massive abuses of power. It’s in some ways a subtle, long-game agenda, but so is spending your life dismantling a building brick by brick.

***

The pressing question for Warren is whether anyone will actually see the full picture she’s putting out. In the first quarter of the year, her campaign only brought in $6 million in donations, trailing behind Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, and even relative unknown Pete Buttigieg. While it’s still early in the race and there is time for Warren to make up the deficit, it’s clear that she still hasn’t captured the country’s imagination in the same way as some other candidates have.

It didn’t help that Warren, in one of the first moves of her campaign, ran straight into one of Donald Trump’s traps. After the president claimed that Warren was lying about her Native American ancestry and goaded her by calling her “Pocahontas,” she took and published the results of a DNA test, a move veering into race science that angered many in the Native American community. “Non-Indigenous Americans will never stop making claims to all things Indigenous: bones, blood, land, waters, and identities. The U.S. continues to appropriate every last thing,” Kim TallBear, associate professor on the Faculty of Native Studies at University of Alberta and member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe, said in response to an ad Warren put out about her heritage.

Despite these issues, for many, the political instinct is to ascribe Warren’s inability to breakthrough as the typical trials of a campaign built on policy—particularly when it’s a woman behind those policies. Clinton comparisons abound. As Elena Schor wrote for the Associated Press, “Warren’s approach is built on a risky bet: that voters will respond to her detail-driven effort when other Democrats are appealing to hearts as much as their minds and after a 2016 presidential campaign in which Hillary Clinton’s policy portfolio wilted in the face of Donald Trump’s personal attacks.”

But there is a difference between policy that is meant to obscure technocracy and protect power and policy as a direct translation of popular anger at unjust systems. “What stands out about Warren’s policies are how transformational they are,” Teachout said.

Yet many Americans hungering for change have found their transformational candidate in Bernie Sanders, not Warren. Since both entered the 2020 ring, Warren’s approach has often been defined as less radical than that of Sanders’s, particularly in that it seeks to reform capitalism. It’s a construction for which Warren, who has described herself as “a capitalist to my bones,” is as much to blame as anyone. The essential differences between the two was aptly described last year by David Dayen in The New Republic. “You can restructure markets so everyone benefits, or you can break down the market system, either eliminating the profit motive or giving everybody a public option,” he wrote. “The impulse is the same: The game is rigged and must be fixed. But there’s a long gap between re-writing the rules of the game, as Warren wants, and turning over all the chess pieces, as Sanders does.”

But in broad strokes, Sanders’s and Warren’s campaigns are more compatible than they are in competition—while Sanders spends much of his energy blowing up the idea that government can’t or shouldn’t directly provide people the benefits that they need, Warren is ready to sink the knife into the hearts of the institutions and systems that made government that way in the first place. Their campaigns may very well be, at least in a (hypothetical) healthy primary, in a kind of conversation with one another, pushing each forward, challenging blindspots, and forcing the other to speak to more issues. In the grand scheme of things, the fact that there are two candidates bringing forward progressive ideas that dramatically reform the role of government will only strengthen the 2020 field. And as we’ve seen before with the long tail of Sanders’s transformative 2016 candidacy, whether or not Warren wins while making her case to the American public may be entirely besides the point.

“She’s answering the question, ‘Who did what to whom?’ and what she is going to do about it,” Teachout said. “Most of the other candidates are using passive language construction about what happened and about what might be done.”

There is a growing sense of urgency across the country right now to try to answer these questions. “No bank too big too fail, no banker too powerful to jail,” became a catch all, anti-corruption, anti-Wall Street chant at Sanders’s and other progressive rallies in the years since the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s a sentiment that’s only grown in force since then. As with most things, Warren has a plan for that, too.

Why Anyone Who Cares About Criminal Justice Reform Should Keep an Eye on Brooklyn

By Dave Colon, Splinter

21 April 19

 

t the end of a mid-March press conference announcing Justice 2020, his new initiative to remake the role of the district attorney’s office, Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, got a question straight out of the era that gave us the East New York-set exploitation classic/nadir Death Wish 4.

“I guess for some people who are cynical, this is kind of a touchy-feely progressive program that is soft on crime. How do you respond to that?” a reporter asked.

Gonzalez told the reporter that he had been a part of the DA’s office for over 20 years and was not afraid to prosecute people. But he also used the question as an opportunity to reassess his own career, saying that a majority of the people he had imprisoned did not need to be there.

“The criminal justice system should be about accountability, and making sure that people are put on a path to succeed and not hurt other people,” Gonzalez said. “If we’re simply delaying it by putting them in jail for six months, a year, or two years and we send them home to be more dangerous, then we failed the people we serve.”

While Gonzalez’s platform in his first run for district attorney in 2017 was hardly as an avenging angel against crime, the answer was a striking capper to a press conference that acted as a 45-minute refutation of the role the state has traditionally been thought to have in the criminal justice system for decades. And in Justice 2020, Gonzalez is casting his office as a national model for people to rethink the way prosecutors work across the country. Many will be watching to see if he delivers.

***

Gonzalez’s proposal comes at the same time as district attorneys around the country and the city are embracing progressive reforms of their own offices. In Manhattan, District Attorney Cyrus Vance got good press for joining with Gonzalez to announce that his office would end the practice of requesting cash bail for most misdemeanors, and he also promised to stop prosecuting low-level cases as well (although Vance has been criticized for not following through on those promises). In Queens, public defender Tiffany Caban is nominally the most left-wing candidate in the first competitive DA’s race in the county in a generation, but almost the entire field is also running on decarceration and reform to one degree or another.

Brooklyn’s reputation as a bastion of progressive prosecution took a bit of a hit when reformer-turned-establishment figure Charles Hynes lost his election bid in 2013 under a cloud of scandal. Hynes’ replacement, Ken Thompson, was on his way to re-establishing trust in the office when he died in office in 2016 due to cancer. Gonzalez, who was Thompson’s deputy, became the acting attorney general. In 2017, five other candidates stepped forward to challenge Gonzalez in a primary. The race saw him pegged as the moderate in the sprint to the left despite his own promises of continuing Thompson’s legacy. With the blessing of Thompson’s family and the advantage of incumbency, Gonzalez won handily, and shortly after his first elected term began, he announced work on Justice 2020 would begin.

Even before Justice 2020 was announced, Gonzalez was continuing and expanding the work that Thompson was doing. Marijuana possession prosecution is down 98 percent in Brooklyn from 2019 so far compared to 2018, and Gonzalez pushed things even further than Thompson by declining to prosecute most cases of smoking in public as well. The number of defendants sent to Rikers Island fell by over 43 percent in 2018. Gonzalez expunged over 100,000 warrants through the Begin Again program, a Thompson initiative that he continued after taking over the office. The district attorney also hired attorneys to train his deputies on how to prosecute cases involving low-level charges and undocumented immigrants, so that defendants aren’t in added danger of getting deported.

***

In Justice 2020, Gonzalez is proposing to rework the role a district attorney’s office has in the criminal justice system, changing it from an office that relies on punishment and imprisonment as a first choice to one that sees prison as a last resort. To do that, the district attorney wants to change the way Kings County will do everything from the discovery process to the choice of charges prosecutors bring, from bail requests to sentence recommendations.

To that end, Justice 2020 was born out of a collaboration on a committee with over 60 members representing intersecting areas of the criminal justice system. Police and prosecutors were involved, but so were defense attorneys, academics, community clergy and community organizations and even defense attorneys and activist organizations who aren’t shy about criticizing the state.

I am proud to announce my #Justice2020 Action Plan, a groundbreaking initiative to transform our justice system into a progressive model designed to keep Brooklyn safe & strengthen community trust.

Full reporthttps://t.co/4BWgNCA9W8

Press Release https://t.co/LQaeIyVGjS pic.twitter.com/FbM5FsRa1r

— Eric Gonzalez (@BrooklynDA) March 11, 2019

There are steps in Justice 2020 that will sound familiar to the current thinking among law enforcement reformers, like sealing and expunging old marijuana possession convictions. But there are also more ambitious proposals, such as asking assistant district attorneys to consider non-jail options at every step of a case, to the point where incarceration becomes the exception, not the default.

“Jail needs to be reserved for the cases where we as a society say, ‘We can’t be safe unless this person is incarcerated,’” Gonzalez told Splinter in an interview in late March about the initiative. “The overwhelming majority of the work that we do in this office, the outcomes should not be [the] knee-jerk reaction ‘This person needs to be punished and sent to prison as a punishment.’”

It’s a plan that stresses work with community organizations to try to mitigate factors that increase criminality and recidivism, treat victims of sex crimes and hate crimes with more sensitivity and move the DA’s office from a horizontal prosecution method where ADAs each handle different sections of a case to a “vertical” method where each ADA handles every piece of the case. It will also create a whole new set of data to judge how effective prosecutors are beyond just the people sent to prison.

“Nobody’s saying that if somebody tortures and murders somebody they’re supposed to get out,” Lisa Schreibersdorf, the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services who served on the Justice 2020 Committee, told Splinter. “But if somebody steals a car, and they’re 17 years old, is jail, the only way that we can prove that we’re not soft on crime? It’s so much more powerful to be thoughtful and not [think] that mass incarceration is the solution. It’s not, it already hasn’t worked.”

***

While she called the overall philosophical goals of Justice 2020 “exciting,” Alyssa Aguilera, the executive director of VOCAL NY, an organization that advocates for people affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, homelessness and mass incarceration, said the initiative’s reliance on open data is something that particularly sticks out to her.

“There is just so much opaqueness in the way that a lot of prosecutors’ offices are operating,” Aguilera, who served on the Justice 2020 committee, told Splinter when she explained what she thought one of the most important pieces of the plan could be. “Part of the reason why we launched Court Watch [a volunteer organization that shows up to court proceedings in the city and tracks the actions of prosecutors] is because [a DA’s office] could say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to ask for cash bail on misdemeanors.’ But then [Court Watch] trains people to be [present at] arraignment [hearings], and we could see many times when people are asking for cash bail on misdemeanors. And so it’s really important that…robust data is not only collected, but it’s shared regularly. And from there, we can, you know, sort of really gauge what kind of progress is being made.”

Gonzalez said he wants to expand the way his office qualifies success in order to prove his ideas work. “District attorney’s offices do a great job in the metrics of measuring how many cases they’re prosecuting, what the win-loss ratio is how many convictions they get, the type of top count. But when you actually ask the DAs, can you prove that that disposition actually made a difference in public safety? There’s no metrics that exists for that, and when we do diversion of cases, are we keeping the community safer or not?”

Data will also be important to making sure that orders from the top of the pyramid filter down to action in the bureaucracy that’s further removed from the executive offices. “You know, some of those folks who have been here for a while have to make the change,” Gonzalez said. A culture change in an office as big as the DA’s office doesn’t happen overnight, and could be tripped up by bureau chiefs who don’t believe in the mission.

A former assistant district attorney under Gonzalez told Splinter that Gonzalez has the ability to move uncooperative middle management into other positions in the DA’s office, and that the attitude shift in the office started before Justice 2020 was even announced. “They asked you at every level, ‘What does it mean to be a prosecutor? What does it mean to do justice?’ And I think that they weeded out people who were all about putting people in jail,” the former ADA, who was granted anonymity because he now works in city government, said.

Vincent Schiraldi of Columbia Justice Lab, another Justice 2020 committee member, said that introducing new metrics which show decarceration is the right approach could wind up being the key to Gonzalez both keeping community support on his side and using that support to get political actors outside of his control.

“The city should want to play ball with [Gonzalez] because if they don’t you can put more people into Rikers Island and that costs them more money than a therapy program. And so by bringing the community along, he’s not alone. Because if I’m the mayor or the next mayor, I want to know what your constituents feel about this? Because I’m not diverting this population unless I know people are willing to accept that,” Schiraldi told Splinter.

“It’s a fact that we are going to save the system money if we’re not needlessly sending people to the jail or prison,” Gonzalez said. “The number that I heard for how much it costs to keep someone in our prison systems is something like $260,000 a year. I think a lot of that money could be better spent on working with community-based organizations and groups that provide social services and services so people won’t be offending in the first place and what dealing with the individual needs: drug treatment, mental health treatment, other kinds of social services.”

***

Of course, it’s easy for someone holding the district attorney’s office to make grand promises about a kindler, gentler prosecution team and not follow through. Since his announcement ending cash bail, Manhattan’s Vance has come under withering criticism from activists who have spent time in court seeing the DA’s words falling short in practice.

And a prosecutor, even one committed to a less punitive vision of public safety, can’t be a panacea for a community. “I’m wary of the title of a progressive prosecutor, and whether that’s an oxymoron, right? They still have a very distinct role in the justice system,” Aguilera said. “The thing that I’m really cautious about is I never want to see people only get access to services or resources they need because of their entanglement with the justice system. Poverty and homelessness, drug use, mental health, these are all drivers from incarceration. And the thing I would caution is entangling them too much with the justice system, and making sure people can get those resources anytime,” she told Splinter.

Progressive prosecution also has to be more about deeds than words. Professor Alex Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing, told Splinter that Gonzalez will have to actually show ways he’s turning these recommendations into action (something the Justice 2020 report promised), and avoid continuing some of the existing processes the office relies on right now.

“Is this going to be focused deterrence? Well, they’re already doing that,” Vitale said. “And I think it’s terrible. [The report] says we’re going to recommend services to these kids. But mostly, it’s punitive. Right now they’re doing these lists of high-risk kids, and then threatening them and surveilling them and subjecting them to enhanced penalties. And they give them some phone number hotline that they can call to get non-existent and social services.”

(For the uninitiated: “focused deterrence” is a strategy that identifies potential violent repeat offenders and subjects them to increased surveillance while attempting to move them away from criminal activities, and “enhanced penalties” are sentences that are increased based on prior convictions.)

With a move towards less expensive measures than Rikers, like drug treatment, supervised release and early parole, Gonzalez did say he wants to see any eventual savings put towards poorer neighborhoods. “You can look at someone’s zip code, where they’re born, you can often tell whether what chance they have of going to jail or not. Once you’re born in the wrong neighborhood, your likelihood of going to prison, is increased six-fold. And, you know, that means that there’s failures in that individual neighborhood and that’s where those criminal justice savings should be reinvested,” he said.

Vitale also said that when it comes to funding community organizations and neighborhoods, Gonzalez doesn’t need to merely rely on asking the city to give him less money. “Is the DA going to take asset forfeiture money and start putting it into community based services?” Vitale asked, an idea that Queens DA candidate Tiffany Caban has embraced. “That’s a lot more concrete.”

***

In the aftermath of the report’s release, Gonzalez has shown a willingness to continue hearing out his critics. Gonzalez didn’t initially embrace the recent effort in New York to decriminalize sex work, a notable difference from a pair of candidates in the Queens DA’s race have who said they’d decline to prosecute charges related to sex work, or even mention sex work in Justice 2020. When asked about it, his office told the Brooklyn Eagle that the DA was willing to “take a fresh look” at the enforcement of loitering laws, but that he didn’t support the proposal to decriminalise sex work because of concerns over human trafficking. Since then though, Gonzalez has said that he supports decriminalization, and also announced that he would meet with advocates for it to hear out if they have a “better way” to deal with trafficking while not punishing sex workers.

And as you might expect for a wholesale reinvention of a major government office, it’s going to take time to see what the ultimate payoff is from Justice 2020, especially since a huge factor in its success is outside of the DA’s control. “For any county prosecutor in New York City, the police really are autonomous,” Andrew St. Laurent, a former public defender now in private practice, told Splinter. “They do not answer to the DA’s office, they answer to the mayor.”

Both the NYPD and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association had representatives on the committee that built Justice 2020, but St. Laurent suggested there’s going to be the same challenge to get the buy-in from officers on the ground as the DA has in getting the mid-level bureaucracy in his office to go along with the plan. “Even if you have the police commissioner, and the captains and deputy inspectors all signing on, we’re talking about ground level decisions made by sergeants and police officers on the scene,” St. Laurent said, a phenomenon lawyers in the city continue to observe:

Broken windows policing is alive and well in NYC summons court. Most of the cases assigned counsel have handled this morning are fare beat or marijuana cases. The DA wouldn’t prosecute them, but NYPD keeps writing the summonses, and the Hearing Officers here won't dismiss them.

— Gideon Orion Oliver (@gideonoliver) April 17, 2019

For example, St. Laurent mentioned announcements from district attorneys that they would no longer prosecute marijuana arrests. The policy has resulted in fewer marijuana arrests over time but enforcement is still centered on black and Latinx New Yorkers. “That [policy is] fine. But for the people who are actually getting arrested and run through the system, and then getting their charges dismissed on arraignment, they’ve just spent, 12, 15, 24 hours in custody,” St. Laurent said. “They don’t necessarily feel like this was a great outcome for them, or that there was a real change in the marijuana policy of the city of New York, at least in the way they experienced it.”

Gonzalez said that he will be satisfied when people feel that the system is fair. “If they’re a victim of a crime, they’ll be treated by my office with respect, their cases will be taken seriously and prosecuted effectively. But if someone is accused of a crime, they’re not going to be treated unfairly. You’re not going to hear that someone is making a name for themselves by needlessly convicting people so that they can look good,” he said.