What are some of your proudest recent achievements? The achievements I am proudest of trace the arc of how thinking about crime and safety has evolved over the past thirty years. First, I am proud of path-breaking work that my colleagues and I in the U.S. Attorney’s office did in the early 1990s when murders reached an all-time high in New York City. Thinking through how the federal government had mobilized federal law to break the grip of La Cosa Nostra, we similarly began to build, painstakingly, cases against the groups that were holding neighborhoods hostage with violence. These groups also had complex histories and relationships, although law enforcement had not looked at them in an organized and concentrated way. Over a period of four years, the office charged over 200 murders that had been unsolved.

As crime dropped in the city, and as the often toxic impacts of overuse of incarceration became tragically evident, hollowing out city neighborhoods, a different approach and balance was needed. As the Mayor’s criminal justice advisor, I worked hard with incredibly talented partners to make sure that jail was used as a last resort and that other approaches that could build lives were substituted. A range of efforts resulted in the reduction of the jail population by more than half over six years while crime reached its lowest level for a three year period in the city’s history. These included providing judges with options such as programming and supervision for defendants in lieu of jail.

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