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

A criminal defense and civil rights attorney who has represented victims of sexual assault, among others, both in civil and criminal court, Tess Cohen is challenging incumbent Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark for the role she has held since 2016 in the upcoming Democratic Primary on June 27. Cohen is broadly running on a platform of reforming criminal justice policy and prioritizing prevention over punishment.

Before working as a defense attorney, Cohen worked for 8 years at the NYC Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, where she held doctors accountable for prescription drug crimes, and worked to improve coordination between law enforcement and public health officials “to prevent further harm to those suffering from substance abuse.” She has also drafted policy documents and legislative improvements which seek to simultaneously end mass incarceration and protect public safety.

Given that existing laws governing criminal justice are made by legislators, not district attorneys, who must follow such laws, we asked Cohen what her motivation was in running for the role of Bronx district attorney and how much influence or leeway was available to the person holding that office in determining the outcome of cases.

“It’s true that you’re applying the laws that are made by other people but it’s that you have actually an enormous amount of discretion as to who you apply those laws to, how you apply them, and what the outcomes are afterwards,” Cohen said. She said alternatives to incarceration were working “very successfully” in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Monroe County, where prosecutors have the discretion to consent to people going into programming to address the reasons why they commit crimes, rather than going to jail.

“That’s all within the power of a prosecutor because of how the laws are structured in New York State,” she said. “For me, I very much want to be helping solve problems in the very immediate sense, getting people in need services, helping victims who need help, focusing resources on prosecuting the crimes that are hurting people the most.

When we spoke with Clark about her work as the borough’s DA, she highlighted to Norwood News the work carried out by the Community Justice Bureau she created, which it would appear works to address many of the issues Cohen references. Clark said there are issues that are “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.”

Cohen, meanwhile, said the DA also gets to set priorities and where resources are spent, saying it isn’t as though every City crime gets prosecuted. She said this was particularly the case with powerful people who “tend to hurt others, like landlords, employers.” She said “no one really pays attention” to what these people are doing because such cases do not typically stem from arrests, and have to be sought out and that it was up to the prosecutor to do that.

When we asked Clark to comment on her efforts to curb white-collar crime, she told Norwood News that in addition to the resources, preparation and willing complainants needed to prosecute such cases, “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.” To Cohen’s point about prioritization, Clark 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.”

Norwood News put it to Cohen that while we assumed nobody was opposed to crime prevention measures, her critics would argue that when legislators are soft on low-level crime, they feel it emboldens criminals, which they believe leads in turn to a cycle of criminality and recidivism. She replied, “I think what we have to think about is, ‘Is what we’re doing now working?’” She said people should ask what the alternative is – an endless cycle of poverty, trauma, incarceration, and convictions? “What we’re proposing is an alternative that is going to work better,” she said.

Cohen added nobody was being asked to justify the current norm but said they should be “because it’s not working.” She added that solving the root causes of crime was not an unachievable thing. “It’s not that people need every problem that they have solved to make different choices.” She said it can start with small things like “dismissing very, very low-level misdemeanors,” which she said made a person far less likely to be re-arrested in the subsequent three years. She said arresting people for such crimes decreased stability in their lives, when increasing stability was what was needed.

The former prosecutor for the SNP went on to say that some people feel that if legislative reforms are made, offenders won’t be held accountable, and that if they’re not held accountable, they will commit more crimes. “That’s just not what science really tells us happens,” she said. “What matters most in deterring someone from committing a crime is how likely they are to get caught, not what the consequences are longer term, because people don’t want to get arrested.”

She added, “If they think that they can deface all the property and knock out windows and cars and do all these things and never even get arrested….we’re going to deter that not by saying, ‘If you get caught doing this, you’re going to jail for this amount of years.’” She continued, “We deter that by saying we need to figure out who is doing this. We’re going to intervene with that person, whether [it’s] through an arrest and sending them to a program, or an arrest and going to jail if that’s what the right outcome is given the severity of the case.”

When we had asked Clark what her achievements were since taking office, she highlighted her support of recent legislative reforms. “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.”

Clark said her office does look at the root causes of why somebody is coming before the judiciary in the first place, “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 added, “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?”

On the topic of science and data that has been a bone of contention between different factions when it comes to the intersection of criminal justice reform policy and recidivism, we asked Cohen which data she was basing her analysis on. “The one about not prosecuting someone who did a low-level crime, that comes out of Boston,” she said. “The Boston DA’s office changed their policies, and they had data scientists on board who examined what the outcomes were when they shifted this policy and started declining to prosecute, and I heard the scientists interviewed, and she said that they reran the numbers over and over and over again because they couldn’t believe their eyes in terms of how positive the outcome was by not prosecuting.”

In 2020, bail reform legislation took effect in New York State, eliminating the use of cash bail for most misdemeanors and some non-violent felony charges. It was driven by the State seeing mass incarceration of mainly people of color and low-income people who could not make bail, and an acknowledgement that a person’s freedom should not be decided based on their wealth. These changes have since been rolled back and tweaked over the course of 2022 and 2023 to give judges more discretion when it comes to setting bail.

Cohen said the NYPD, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and others “blamed bail for the rise in crime a lot.” While there have been reported instances of crimes committed by people released without bail, when Norwood News reached out to both the NYPD and the Bronx District Attorney’s office to request any compiled data on this topic, we did not receive an immediate response.

Meanwhile, Cohen said shootings went up all over the country in recent years during the pandemic and not just in New York City and that that spike could not, therefore, be attributed to New York’s 2020 bail reform policy. “So, when we blame bail for this, that means we’re also probably not focusing on the right solutions,” she said in part.

We mentioned that NYPD data for both victims of shootings and shooting incidents showed a decrease during 2022 and that this trend seems to be continuing in 2023. We put it to Cohen that again her critics would say the latest bail reform roll backs in 2022 and 2023 have contributed to this drop in shootings. Cohen said in part, “It was already true that for every violent crime, someone could be held on bail before this change in the bail law…like the tweaks that were done were some like high-level drug stuff, and then this sort of harm provision that mostly was at people who stole repeatedly.”

She continued, “I don’t see any evidence that it was the change in the bail law that caused a decrease in shootings, but I think it’s more a sign of the stability that’s starting to take place as the pandemic starts to quell.”

In terms of her critique of Clark, we later put it to Cohen that notwithstanding the tragic Kalief Browder case which the district attorney has acknowledged could have been handled better, the incumbent has worked to provide alternatives to prosecution, has helped the formerly incarcerated with resources, including organizing job fairs, has supported those wishing to exit the sex industry by declining to prosecute them, and instead providing them with resources, and has organized various events to raise awareness about gun violence prevention, child safety and domestic violence.

In response, Cohen said the Bronx DA’s office had the highest rate of turnover among prosecutors at any of the City’s DA offices, which Cohen put down to “mismanagement,” though she acknowledged this was true before any of the most recent legislative reforms took effect, which have added to prosecutors’ workload. Cohen said conditions had deteriorated greatly to the point where prosecutors had threatened to walk out on the job.

The NY Post reported in November 2022 that during a City Council hearing, Clark testified that rising crime and stringent discovery reform, implemented alongside cash bail overhaul, had led to a “marked increase in attrition.”  The Post reported that Clark managed to stave off a potential walk-out at the time and responded in a staff-wide letter, acknowledging the workers’ complaints and promising a hybrid workweek and salary increases.

We asked Clark’s campaign for comment on this point and others raised by Cohen. Her spokesperson, Nathan Smith, replied, saying Cohen was “not a candidate with any real support.” Smith added, “Tess Cohen’s complete disregard for truth, data, and facts is much like the rest of her campaign, sad and pathetic. The criminal justice issues our city faces post COVID are serious and real.” He continued, in part, “While Tess Cohen spends her time making up facts and hurling accusations, Darcel Clark has rolled up her sleeves to make sure that safety and justice are being served in The Bronx every day.

Smith also referred to Clark’s “wide coalition, with dozens of organizations and unions supporting her,” referencing endorsements from the SEIU 1199, the UFT, various Democratic clubs, Congressman Ritchie Torres (NY-15), New York Attorney General Letitia James, and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

He said Clark’s support was also evidenced in terms of the most recent fundraising filings. “They are stark in the difference between these two candidates,” he said, in part. “Since January, Tess Cohen has raised $48,000. That is not a candidate with real support or a viable opportunity to win this election,” he added in part. “Darcel has raised $190,000 and has over $200,0000 on hand.”

Meanwhile, Cohen summed up her candidacy, telling Norwood News, “I feel very strongly that The Bronx is so consistently overlooked and left behind compared to other boroughs. That we don’t have these alternative mechanisms that are working in other counties that keep communities safer when we need them the most, it’s really disturbing.”

She added, “We have the highest rate of violence in the entire State. We have the highest rate of overdose in the City. We need these programs more than anyone else, and we don’t have them. I think there’s an opportunity here to make a real significant change in The Bronx by bringing in these proven reforms to make our communities much more safe, and increasing justice more generally is sort of a bigger picture idea of what I believe.”

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.

Polls are open on Primary Election Day, Tuesday, June 27, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Click here to find your Election Day poll site. Return your absentee ballot by mail (postmark required) or drop it off at a poll site by Tuesday, June 27.

Editor’s Note: The interview with Tess Cohen was conducted on Feb. 24, 2023.