Alvin Bragg does not like to, well, brag about his record as Manhattan District Attorney, but the numbers don’t lie.

“The ultimate metric is that shootings are down during my tenure, down 70 percent in Manhattan. That’s the ultimate output,” he told me. Murders are down 52 percent. “I think the four-years-plus body of work speaks for itself.”

The stats are part of New York’s contribution to the national debate over whether so-called progressive prosecutors like Bragg can keep communities safe. Gotham often operates under the illusion — encouraged by the NYPD — that cops possess a unique understanding of public safety and should be allowed to enforce the law as they see fit. In reality, criminal-justice policy in a democracy is set by elected leaders — lawmakers, judges, mayors, and prosecutors — whom we should expect to direct the cops, not simply to defer to them.

Mayor Mamdani occasionally has to remind members of the media that, as the elected leader of the city, he is not averse to overruling NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch on matters like having street protests policed by the Strategic Response Group or maintaining a database of suspected gang members. A similar logic applies to prosecutors, who are elected to make hard choices about how and when to prosecute crimes, even if the cops find those decisions unwise or inconvenient.

More than a decade ago, a wave of elected prosecutors were thrown out of office by voters who had grown sick of seeing vast amounts of energy and legal resources used for marijuana possession and other low-level crimes while cases involving misconduct by police or prosecutors were largely ignored.

As law professor David Sklansky has noted, decades of mass incarceration during the War on Drugs led to local prosecutor races in which “candidates competed to see who could sound the toughest. The favored policy prescription was almost always more: more prosecutions, more prisoners, more years behind bars. Criminal-justice policies seemed governed by a one-way ratchet.........

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