Saritha for NY Attorney General Interview and Q&A

is we have a small set of people who are responsible for much of the crime. It's a repeat offender problem. And that's a repeat offender problem that was brought on as a policy choice. In 2019 and 2020, you had folks like Latisha James and her allies in government say, you know what, we want to knock down the charges on criminal cases. We have whole categories of crimes that we're not going to bring charges at all or if we bring them or going to bring them on lesser accounts or any, when we do that, we're not going to ask for jail time. And then you had New York actually pass bail reform laws, which started with a good idea. I think it's important that no one be in jail because they can't pay. But the problem is it's missing something. Our New York laws missing something that every other state has, which is, sure, no one should be behind bars because they can't pay. But people should be behind bars if they're a danger to the community. And New York is the only state that does not allow a judge to consider, whether someone is a danger to the community, whether they decide whether they put the person behind bars or not. And so what happened with bail reform, I think it started with a good idea, but we over corrected and we're in a place that doesn't make a lot of sense because even judges will tell you, I'm looking at a person. I know there's a high risk that he will hurt someone else, but my hands are tied. I have to let him out. And that's a problematic place to be. So how do you fix that as age eight? What can you do? Well, first of all, because the problem is twofold. One is the application of prosecutorial discretion. The other is the bail laws. We have to take both. On prosecutorial discretion, you know, the Attorney General is a chief law enforcement officer of the state. He sets the tone. And I think it's important to have a culture and a practice of prosecuting cases, honestly. Charge someone with what they did. You don't have to overcharge them. You don't have to undercharge them. Just charge them with what they did. That's the prosecutor's job. Then let the jury decide whether they did it and let the judge decide what the punishment is. And I think we have to get back to that culture. I think we have to set that tone from the Attorney General's office. And the way that you can set that tone is to have those conversations with the DAs. And in situations where they're not doing that, to step in and do it for them to override them. Now, the DAs are on the front lines of criminal law enforcement in our state. And I have to tell you, by and large, I have spoken with many, many DAs across the state. Don't many DAs are actually trying to do the right thing, but they're short on resources. And that's another area where the AG's office can really help. The AG has more than 700 attorneys. And the New York Board of Appeals has said the AG can send her attorneys and designate them special ADAs and help criminal prosecution. We need to do that. The current AG doesn't do that at all, but we need to do that. We need to be a resource for the local DAs so that when they ask for help, they actually get that help. I've spoken with the DAs across the state who've said they've asked the Attorney General's office for help and they get declination letters. That's a problem. The Attorney General is supposed to be a law enforcement partner. It's supposed to be the chief law enforcement officer of the state. It's supposed to help out her DAs when they ask for help. And I will. The part of it is really making sure the prosecutor's offices are resourced and able and willing to do their job. And the other part on the bail laws is the AG's got to be a leader on this. Like I said, we don't have to have a situation where we're just at extremes saying, well, we have to keep bail reformer exactly like it is or we have to repeal the whole thing. We can find a common sense way forward. And that is to say we need one fix. We need to give judges discretion in every case and allow them to consider dangerousness. We are the only state that doesn't allow that. Even the federal courts in New York allow that we are out of line with what it is. I mean, it's insane. I think that the judge can't consider whether someone's a danger or a society whether they're determining the nature of bail. It's insane. I don't think a lot of people appreciate that fact. It is actually really that simple too. And you know, this is what I where I think it really is important to find places where folks agree this bipartisan support for this idea. There's people in Albany and across the state, who support this idea. We need to have leadership. Unfortunately, our current Attorney General doesn't support this idea. That was made clear at the debate last week. He wants to keep the bill laws exactly how they are even though we see repeatedly every time there's a crime in New York that's reported in the news, it just a couple of days later we learned the person had 15 priors, 17 priors, 51 praladaves. other days. Man with 51 priors had chased a woman down the street with a hammer. This is unfortunately becoming the norm. We don't have to live that way. We need to make one simple fix, and that will fix it. Maybe you can be a little more granular, kind of, compare and contrast, a vote for you versus of, you know, you as attorney general, like Tisha James as attorney general, clarify the differences. What do you, yeah? Sure. Well, so the way I think about it is my focus is really on making public safety the overriding priority of the attorney general's office, not politics. I'm someone who's worked for Democrats and Republicans. I've worked with Democrats and Republicans. I've worked under three administrations, ten U.S. attorneys, and I don't think that public safety is political. It's not. And so my focus is really making sure that there's a law enforcement professional as attorney general instead of a partisan politician because everyone in New York should feel assured that you have an attorney general who's looking out for your safety regardless of race, religion, or politics. And the way that plays out in the particular issues that I see as the important issues that are facing New Yorkers today, and it comes to crime, I'm committed to dealing with this repeat offender problem. We need to lock up repeat offenders. I'll be a leader in ensuring that prosecutors are actually prosecuting cases and that judges get to judge that we give them the discretion that they need. Attis James has stated that she won't do that. She had championed the current bail laws. She doesn't want to change them when the respects and crime after they passed. She told people not to overreact. When it comes to homelessness, I'm the only one who's talking about dealing with the homelessness crisis in New York. You know, homelessness has surged under test james, not just in New York City in every major city in the state across the state rural and suburban areas. It's a real problem. We have people suffering on the streets and it's bad for them and it's bad for the communities around them. And we really need to take care of people. I have a concrete plan forward for how to do that. I want to make sure we have a safe, you know, I've actually gone and spoken with the homeless on the street and I asked them, why are you sleeping? How would you rather sleep in five degree weather outside than be in a shelter? And they'll tell you straight up, the shelters aren't safe. We need to make sure the shelters are safe. They have become hubs for crime and drugs. That's a problem. So we need to enforce the law on a shelter just like you do in the street. We also need to make sure the shelters are effective. They have wraparound services, job training, childcare, therapy, whatever people need to go from the street to stable housing, not just cycle in and out of a shelter. To do that, the attorney general has really an interesting and unique authority because we have a charities bureau at the attorney's general's office that already supervises every homeless shelter nonprofit and estate. We need to they already get the annual filings. It's already supposed to be reviewing the use of funds and conflict of interest transactions. We currently spend $81,000 per homeless person in New York, which is crazy because the population is going down and homelessness is going up. You could give a guy $81,000 and he wouldn't be homeless tomorrow. So it really makes you think where's the money going? I'm not the only one asking those questions. We've had comp trollers at the state and city level say do a review of a number of these shelters and say there are red flags of fraud of embezzlement, of corruption, of kickbacks, of misuse of funds. You know, one homeless shelter CEO is making a million dollars a year. Another one is running a nonprofit and then starting for-profit companies and contracting with themself. I mean, these are real red flags. I've been clear. I'll audit and investigate every homeless shelter in New York state. Tissue aims hasn't done that. We won't do that. I'll make sure we support the ones that are doing good job, but the ones that are doing a bad job, give them a grace period to fix their operations and the ones who are committing crime will prosecute them. And in addition to safe shelters, we need to provide residential treatment for people. We have a shortage of psych beds in New York and what's happening is you see these stories of folks who are admitted to the hospital and they're ejected an hour later. It's like, instance earlier this year, a man who was the cops arrested, took it to the hospital, severely mental ill, was released an hour later and then pushed a retired public school teacher Ross Felzone down to stay or to his death and the attacker still had his hospital ban on his wrist. We actually need to have places to put people who are severely mental ill so that they can have access to care and we need to build residential treatment centers for them. There's resources in the AG's office to do that because there's $3 billion that we got from the opioid settlement funds and Purdue farmer shut down every state got some money and the AG has some sand where that money goes. Currently, it's being spent on things like lawn boars and snowblowers and a baby shower up state. The New York focussed it, attempted to track where it all went and they said they couldn't track it all. Well, $3 billion is more than the endowment of many colleges and universities. I think we should use it to provide residential treatment, build small residential treatment centers around the state. Now, what's talking about going back to the institutionalization of the 70s? We learned our lessons from that, but we shut those down for a reason. The problem is we didn't replace it with anything. And so we need to have small, 100 beds or less treatment centers around the state where we can take people and then we need to enforce the laws. We need to clearing campments and make sure people either have a safe shelter to go to or a residential treatment facility to go to depending on their circumstances so we can help them out and we can make sure our communities are safe. And that's again, that's a huge difference between me and Ms. James last week at our debate when confronted about the issue severely mentally individuals in our subways pushing innocent people onto the tracks. She said it was progress. She called it progress to have severely mentally ill people into our subways. She has no plans to change that. In fact, one of the first things she did as Attorney General was investigate the cops for enforcing transit laws. So she's part of why this all came about in the first place. Why we have so much chaos in our subways. And the third thing is fraud. You know, there's all kinds of fraud happening in New York, both inside and outside of government. I hear about scams all the time where seniors and others are getting hacked into or they're getting a knock on the door or a text or a phone call and they're put into the sort of confidence theme where someone convinces them to wire out money. Those scams are being perpetrated by organized cybercrime rings. No one's going after them. We need to do that. And then there's Medicaid fraud, which is in the billions of dollars. That is actually the Attorney General's job to go after Medicaid fraud. Every single state has a Medicaid fraud control unit for that reason. Hours used to be the best in the country and now it is the worst in the country. It's 51st in indictments and convictions. And let me explain exactly what that means. Under previous Democratic Attorney Generals, we used to get about $250 million a year back from criminals back to the taxpayers under Tish James that went down to 19 million. Under previous Democratic Attorney Generals, we got 100 criminal convictions a year. Under Tish James that went down to an all-time low of eight. He does one tenth of the work of her predecessors and it's New Yorkers who pay the price. It's the Patients, it's the taxpayers who pay the price of that. If we have a Attorney General who's serious about prosecuting fraud, which I will bring it back to being the best in the country, we'll be able to recover billions of dollars and there's not going to be an excuse for our state to raise taxes on us. We can bring money back from criminals, bring it back to the taxpayers. I use it for services that we need and hopefully put a back in taxpayers' pockets. Talk to us about how you're going to hit the ground running. What will be your, you know, it's your kind of 100 first 100 days. How do you move the needle? Well, on day one, there's a number of things we need to do right away. First is to restructure the office. As I mentioned, there's 700 assistant attorneys general. Right now, only a fraction of those individuals are actually assigned to prosecute crime, so less than 100. And many of those people are assigned to prosecute cops, but twice as many people, to James is assigned twice as many people to prosecute cops than criminals. So we need to move things around. We have an organized crime task force in the attorney general's office. It's been deprioritized. I will reprioritize it. We're going to relaunch that task force. We're going to staff it up. And we're going to make sure that we recruit talented ethical, good prosecutors from around the state and even out of state if people are interested to come and be part of the New York attorney general's office. The reality is over the last five to seven years, hundreds of people, hundreds of prosecutors have left them and hadn't de-ays office, the Bronx de-ays office, the Queens de-ays office, because they didn't feel fulfilled and they're working more because they weren't prosecuting crime anymore. We can bring those people back into government service if they have a leader who's serious about fighting crime. So that's the first thing. We're recruiting talent, making sure we restructure the attorney general's office to prioritize fighting crime and prioritize the organized crime task force. And then really making sure that we then go after the priorities I mentioned. Day one, we'll audit investigate every homeless shelter nonprofit in the state that will be the priority of the charity's bureau. Day one, we freeze the opioid settlement money, any more money from going out the door. And we repurpose that to be used for residential treatment centers. We make a plan to build those. Day one, we shut down the drug injection sites that we are currently funding with state money. We are currently funding these sites where the homeless go inside, are provided with needles and swabs and music to listen to as they shoot up on fentanyl and heroin. And then they're sent back out onto the streets and to the subways. We're actually making the problem worse right now because we're using a state money to fund drugs.