Good morning. It's Monday. Today we'll find out why prosecutors are leaving the New York City district attorneys' offices in droves. We'll also look at the techniques other cities are using to persuade homeless people to leave the subways. |
 | | George Etheredge for The New York Times |
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The Great Resignation has now come to New York City's prosecutors' offices. |
Hundreds of them have quit in the past year. That includes about one-fifth of the prosecutors in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. This year alone, the Brooklyn district attorney's office lost 36; the Manhattan office, 44; the Bronx, at least 28; Staten Island, nine — a tenth of the office's prosecutors; and in Queens, prosecutors are leaving at twice the usual pace. |
Driving the departures, lawyers told my colleague Jonah Bromwich, are a combination of pandemic burnout, low salaries and ballooning workloads. The growing pressure comes partly from two new laws intended to make the judicial process fairer: They give defense teams the right to see more prosecution documents sooner, but that also mean prosecutors must work more, and faster, amid a court system already straining to function. |
Here, too, the story is in the numbers. |
- $72,000. That is the salary for a starting prosecutor in Brooklyn, the borough where real-estate prices are so notoriously high that lowballing them was enough to deal a death blow to Shaun Donovan's mayoral campaign. Pay in other boroughs is similar, in a city bristling with law firms offering entry-level six-figure salaries.
- 21. That's how many kinds of data prosecutors must obtain and share under new discovery laws in New York State. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, reported to the City Council that his office now uses 10 times as much data storage as it did in 2020: 320 terabytes of data, up from 32.
- 100. That is the number of cases that many prosecutors handle at once.
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All this comes, of course, amid the pressure facing all workers: New family responsibilities because of the pandemic, the trauma of losing friends, relatives and neighbors to the disease, the chaos and delays thrown into the court system by a long period of remote trials and the daunting challenges of trying to solve the system's problems with limited resources. It also adds to the lure of private-sector jobs where they could still work at home. |
"They just simply can't do it anymore," Darcel Clark, the Bronx district attorney, told The New York Times. "The money is not where it should be, and the work-life balance is just unmanageable." |
The new workload does underscore the need for competitive salaries for prosecutors — and public defenders — said Tina Luongo, the attorney in charge of the criminal defense practice at the Legal Aid Society. |
But, she said, "It cannot be the case and it must not be the case that the way you solve a workload problem is to diminish the rights of somebody accused of a crime." |
Enjoy a mostly sunny day in the mid-50s, New York. At night, it's mostly cloudy with temps in the mid-40s. |
In effect until April 14 (Holy Thursday). |
Preschoolers, keep your masks on |
Parents could be forgiven for losing track of whether small children will need their masks on Monday. The answer is yes: New York City's mask mandate is still on for children under 5 years old in day care centers and preschools. |
There has been a lot of back and forth over the past few days. Mayor Eric Adams had pledged to lift the city's mask mandate for that age group on Monday. But last Friday, he said the rule would remain, since coronavirus cases are rising again. Daily cases are now around 1,250, up from 500 in early March. |
Earlier on Friday, a judge on Staten Island had issued an order to strike down the mask mandate. But by Friday night, the city had won an appellate decision allowing the rule to stand. Adams's advice to city residents: "We want you to be prepared, not panicked." |
- A former Yale School of Medicine administrator pleaded guilty to defrauding the university of $40 million in computer equipment that she purchased and resold to pay for a lavish lifestyle that federal prosecutors said included the purchase of three homes.
- The days before an opening are always stressful for a Broadway producer. But few have been under a harsher spotlight than Garth Drabinsky, who served time in a Canadian prison for fraud.
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How other cities are tackling homelessness |
 | | Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times |
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Across the country, transit systems, with their vast enclosed public spaces, have long acted as de facto shelter for unhoused people who don't want to go to barracks-style shelters. New York City is no exception, and as Adams seeks to coax more riders back to the subway, a look by Michael Gold and Erin Woo at other cities suggests that they might provide a model that New York can emulate. |
Critics of the mayor's plan — to have 1,000 police officers intensify subway patrols and to add several dozen social workers to the 200 working on outreach there — say it hews too closely to what was long cities' default approach, using police to push the unsheltered out of subway cars and tunnels. |
Other cities are experimenting with proactive outreach, responding with social services for people who are living in the subway. |
In Philadelphia, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has handed over an 11,000-square space in a central subway station to a nonprofit that aids unsheltered people, providing on-site services within the transit system. It offers temporary shelter, medical services, restrooms, laundry and help finding housing. |
In Atlanta and San Francisco, as well as in Philadelphia, teams of social workers have been sent to respond to situations involving homeless or mentally ill people on public transit; in San Francisco, police officers are instructed to wait for social workers instead of immediately removing the people. |
But in all these cities, the biggest challenge is coordinating frontline efforts in the transit system with the harder goal of increasing safe, available shelters and affordable housing. |
"You need to be able to move people into housing and better shelters," said Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco. "If that stuff does not exist, then you're basically kind of managing the issue. And that's what I think most of the transportation systems are left with." |
I boarded the M104 and took a seat behind a gray-haired woman dressed all in black. The white tag on her sweater was sticking straight up from her neckline. |
I tapped her on the shoulder. |
"Excuse me," I said. "Would you like me to put your tag inside your sweater?" |
"Yes," she replied. "Where were you three hours ago?" |
"You should have called," I said. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. & A.B. |
Melissa Guerrero, Jeff Boda and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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