Incumbent Melinda Katz is facing challenges from former Judge George Grasso and lawyer Devian Daniels.
FOX 5 NY's Morgan McKay has the details on the candidates running in the Queens district attorney race vying for the democratic nomination.But it’s a borough that has also seen its share of major crime over the past few years, particularly retail theft. And now the fight to be the borough’s lead prosecutor is well underway, with three candidates vying for the position in the Democratic primary.
Katz has been a licensed attorney for 30 years. She served as a City Council member, State Assembly member, and Borough President of Queens before running for DA in 2019. In June, Katz won the tough, crowded primary by just 60 votes, giving Queens a new district attorney for the first time in almost three decades.
But Katz’s main challenger, former Judge George Grasso argues that she is not doing nearly enough to tackle crime in the borough, prompting Grasso to leave his judgeship to enter the race for District Attorney."She tries to say I'm cherry-picking when we're talking about major felony index crime," Grasso explained.
Grasso says his plan to tackle crime would be to create five community action boards throughout Queens made up of community representatives and NYPD commanders. These boards would advise the DA on strategies to reduce crime while increasing community partnership. "It’s actually working quite well," Katz said. "So for instance in Southeast Queens, we handed out what we call trespass affidavits about 26 of them. Only three people actually came back and were arrested after that. So we send the message out that this will not be tolerated."Critics to the left of Katz say she pledged not to prosecute sex workers while pointing to a number of these arrests.
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