LETTER FROM NEW YORK
He is the man who can bring down Donald Trump. Alvin Bragg, a 50-year-old African American, is the Manhattan District Attorney. A major post, at the heart of the American financial empire. An elective position, where one lasts: only four prosecutors have held this position since 1942. He could, in the coming days, indict and present to a judge the former President of the United States, a first.
When he was elected in November 2021, Alvin Bragg had not campaigned on the Donald Trump case, then totally discredited by the attack on the Capitol on the previous January 6. He embodied the left of the party and wanted to reconcile, a year after the demonstrations caused by the murder of the African-American George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, “equity and security” At New York. A contrast with Eric Adams, a former Brooklyn police officer, elected mayor of the city on the same day: the latter had campaigned mainly on security and business, in a city hit by the resumption of crime since the Covid-19 pandemic. and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Alvin Bragg is a child of Harlem, where he was born in 1973. This is the time when the city, bankrupt, descends into violence, which will culminate in the drug war in the late 1980s. Bragg experiments street violence, with a knife held to his throat by teenagers in broad daylight. And that of the police, who put a gun to his head at the age of 15, asking him if he had drugs and searching him. Incidents that will repeat themselves several times. “You didn’t need to have studied law to know it was illegal”commented Mr. Bragg at the New York Times. From there is born his passion for the law and the fight against injustice, in a city where the authorities throw in the sinister prison of Rikers Island the young blacks and Latinos by the thousands at the first indiscretion.
Sensitive files
Unlike many African-Americans, Alvin Bragg grew up in an academically supportive home environment – a mother who was a math teacher who kept an eye on him and a father who worked for the New York Urban League, a charity for children. Black. He follows the course of the American elites: Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, master’s degree at Harvard then a doctorate in law at the prestigious Harvard Law School, where a certain Barack Obama preceded him.
From 2015, he heads a cell responsible for prosecuting police violence. In 2017, he brought to justice a police officer, Wayne Isaacs, accused of having killed an unarmed African-American. Isaacs says he was attacked, the videos seem to attest to the contrary and yet the jury acquits the policeman (himself African-American). “I was demoralized, I had the feeling that our system was not working”, confides Mr. Bragg. The system continued to fail. His cell won no convictions in twenty-four trials. The man sees in it the need to continue the fight.
You have 49.84% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
