The following is an extended version of the story that appears in our latest print edition.

Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark made history in 2016 when she was elected as the first African American woman to ascend to the role of district attorney in the State of New York, as well as the first woman to hold the position of Bronx district attorney. As she runs for reelection for the third time in June 2023, we take a look back at her career to date, and her mission “to lead with empathy and compassion” while balancing safety and criminal justice.

Of her biggest accomplishments since taking office, Clark highlighted her support of recent legislative reforms. “I was not only supportive of the reforms, but I instituted reforms, even before the legislature had changed them,” she said in part. “So, my philosophy on bail […] was that if we are not seeking a jail term for someone, we should not be seeking bail.”

The district attorney, who was honored last year, along with her team, by Pace University for her prosecutorial work, said this meant changing the culture of her office. “The way to keep the communities safe was to put everybody in jail and to charge them with the highest charge that you could ask for, maximum sentences,” she said. “I don’t believe in that, and I think that my years as an assistant district attorney, my years as a judge, and the last eight years as DA has changed my philosophy on what makes community safe.”

Clark said The Bronx can have public safety, reform, and fairness at the same time. She said her office looks at the root causes of why somebody is coming before the judiciary in the first place and “determining what justice looks like in that case for the victim, for the community, as well as for the person accused, and doing what [is] right in that particular case.” She said it’s about transformative thinking. “So now, it’s not bail ‘em and jail ‘em. It’s who is this person, and what is the best outcome for justice for all those involved? So, that was a seismic change.”

Given the different datasets referenced by opposing parties on bail reform policy around recidivism rates, we asked Clark which dataset she used as the basis for her views on bail reform policy. She said her policies were based on the reality of what people are going through in Bronx communities. “This is not my issue,” she said, explaining that her office’s biggest challenge was around the existing discovery laws. Discovery is the formal process of exchanging information between the trial parties about the witnesses and evidence they’ll present at trial.

On recidivism, the district attorney said the biggest problem facing her office was not having “real pretrial services” available for arrestees to help prevent them committing another crime before they go to their next court date. “We don’t have that investment in New York City,” she said. Asked if such services should therefore be funded as part of the State or City budgets, she said she didn’t care who funded the services – State, City, philanthropists. “Anyone who wants to invest in it, that’s worth investing in, because that’s going to help communities be stabilized and safer,” she said, adding that this would help address the public safety dangers seen in The Bronx.

Clark said she also created a Community Justice Bureau which seeks to address the issues forcing people into the criminal justice system in the first place like poverty, lack of jobs, unstable housing or school conditions, mental health, and substance use disorders. “We should be looking at the whole person, the whole community, the whole issue, and it’s about justice,” she said.

Additionally, Clark said that amid a backlog of cases, she also started the Rikers Island Prosecution Bureau as an alternative to the DA’s prosecution unit located at 161st Street, to address “in real time” the violent incidents seen at the jail and to make it “a safer place for those who have to visit, work, or be detained there.”

She said she also started the Conviction Integrity Bureau to look at past convictions and “make sure that we’ve righted any wrongs, but also to learn from those mistakes so that we don’t do [them] again.” Examples included “review[ing] cases, to dismiss cases against cops that were bad actors, reviewing the marijuana cases, dismissals of those, and summonses, and all of those things: a holistic approach to conviction integrity.”

On the topic of Rikers Island jail, acknowledging it falls under the jurisdiction of NYC Department of Corrections (DOC), we asked the district attorney, nonetheless, for her thoughts on recent revelations around alleged drug smuggling by DOC officers into the jail. Under her watch, she said she partnered with DOC and NYC Department of Investigation, and that body scanners were instituted at Rikers Island to ensure visitors weren’t smuggling drugs to detainees, but that the system was never extended to the officers and DOC staff.

Clark said the current DOC commissioner (Louis A. Molina) is making this latter point a priority in order to root out any [DOC] corruption she said may be helping to fuel such drug smuggling. “I fought for those scanners,” she said in part. “If it weren’t for me working and pushing the [former] De Blasio administration and working with the state legislators that do the regulation of those scanners, [they] wouldn’t have been there, so I’m happy that I was a part of making that happen.”

Asked for her thoughts on the closing of Rikers, and the opening of the new city-based, Bronx County jail, slated to open at the former Lincoln Hospital and NYPD compound at 745 E 141st Street, Clark said she was one of three DAs who testified as part of the commission into the decision.

“I supported it for smaller jails, and I think it will be a good thing,” the district attorney said, adding that she wasn’t necessarily happy, however, with the new Bronx jail location. She said the new jail should be at the Bronx courthouse like in every other borough and that way family can visit detainees both when they go to court, and while their family members are being detained.

“But the bottom line is, the place has to be made safe and humane for anyone who has to be detained,” she said. “We have to fix the Rikers that we have now.” She added that she worked very hard with DOC during the pandemic to ensure some detainees were released [to curb the threat of COVID-19 spreading].

“My office continues to look [weekly] at the number of cases of people being detained at Rikers to make sure that if they have to be in jail, pretrial, that they’re there for a reason,” she said, adding that those open cases cover some of the most violent people she has on her dockets. “Nobody is there on any low level, non-violent crime,” she said. “If they’re there, they’re charged with some serious charges, and they’re bail eligible, and if I’m asking for bail, I’m asking for it on those cases that warrant it.”

We asked Clark, who was recently endorsed by the Benjamin Franklin Democratic Reform Club based in Kingsbridge, how she was addressing white-collar crime e.g. landlords who place their tenants in unsafe environments by not making necessary repairs or incurring other safety violations. She said the investigations her office conducts are primarily focused on the people causing the most harm to the community.

Referring to negligent landlords, in addition to the resources, preparation and willing complainants she said were needed to prosecute such cases, she added, “It takes time to build those kinds of investigations. We do prosecute those kinds of cases; it’s not just easy. Anybody who does this work would know that.” In terms of case priorities, she said, in part, “We have a high incidence of gang gun violence that I have to put resources in, we have domestic violence, sexual assault, and drugs; these are the kitchen table issues that people deal with each and every day.”

Asked what she has learned in her eight years, Clark said she makes sure to stand up for victims every single day, believes in holding people who are harming communities accountable, while also supporting intervention, giving people second chances, and building support structures with community-based organizations to transform people into productive community members.

Norwood News has reported in the past on some of Clark’s job fairs for the formerly incarcerated to help prevent recidivism, along with her other initiatives like gun buybacks, her annual child safety fair, her annual 5K run/walk/roll to raise awareness of domestic violence, and anti-gun violence marches.

Though she has previously addressed the matter publicly, we later asked Clark for her thoughts on the tragic case of Bronxite, Kalief Browder, who died by suicide post-release from Rikers in 2015, having been arrested at 16 and detained, at times in solitary, for a minor crime involving a stolen backpack for which he was never convicted.

“The Kalief Browder [case] was a tragedy that still haunts me and bothers me to this day,” she said in part. “I wasn’t the district attorney at the time, but I was one of nine judges on that case. There was a failure on so many levels, with so many stakeholders that were a part of that case. Bottom line, I have made sure in the eight years that I have been district attorney that there [will] never [be] another Kalief Browder again.”

On the charges imposed at the time, she said, “That wasn’t my decision.” She referred to the change in bail policy since then and the new programs built by her office to ensure young people under her administration are not charged in the way Kalief was. “I have made that promise not only to myself, but I’ve made sure that my office has done it. Most importantly, I’ve made that promise to the people of the Bronx, and I’ve kept that.”

To learn 10 facts about child trafficking, watch this 5-minute video by Love146, a nonprofit working to help prevent and address it.

If you are, or know, a victim of human trafficking, trained professional help is available from the Bronx District Attorney’s Human Trafficking Unit. They can be reached at (718) 838-7185.

Early voting takes place from June 17 to Sunday, June 25. Click here to find your early voting site and hours. Request an absentee ballot in person by Monday, June 26. To find your borough Board of Elections office, click here.

BronxNet will broadcast a debate between the candidates, moderated by host, Gary Axelbank, on Monday, June 19, 10 p.m.  It will be rebroadcast at the following times on BronxNet’s Optimum 67 and Fio 2133:

It will also be available on BronxNet.org and on YouTube after 10.30 p.m. on Monday, June 19.