![\"tahanie-aboushie-city-hall-occupy\"](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn05.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2021\/03\/tahanie-aboushie-city-hall-occupy.jpg\")
\nManhattan District Attorney candidate Tahanie Aboushi visits the “Occupy City Hall” demonstration at City Hall Park, where hundreds of protesters call for the abolition of the New York Police Department and refuse to leave until the NYPD budget is dramatically cut, in New York City on June 26, 2020.<\/p>\n
\nPhoto: Elise Swain\/The Intercept<\/p><\/div>\u201cTahanie has demonstrated a deep professional and personal commitment to delivering justice for the Black and brown New Yorkers who have suffered most under the punitive prosecution of the current Manhattan\u2019s DA office,\u201d said New York\u00a0WFP State Director Sochie Nnaemeka. \u201cGiven her legal career holding the powerful in New York City accountable, vision and policy to build safety and community strength, and first-hand personal experience with our broken criminal \u2018justice\u2019 system, we have no doubt that Tahanie is the right candidate for the job.\u201d<\/p>\n
The endorsement comes as eight candidates are vying to replace District Attorney Cy Vance, who has held the position since 2010. Vance has faced criticism for his office\u2019s handling of sexual assault cases and was called on to resign<\/a> last January by a group of survivors who said he went easy on well-connected predators. Vance originally declined to bring charges<\/a> against Harvey Weinstein in 2015, only doing so after attention to the case had taken off with the #MeToo movement. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office holds particular significance, with the jurisdiction to go after special interests of importance to groups on the left, such as Wall Street, Manhattan real estate moguls and landlords, and even the Trump empire<\/a>, as Vance paved the way for<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n The WFP endorsement sets Aboushi apart from the remaining seven candidates in the field; it is one of the more important endorsements in a race where the differences between candidates are not always clear-cut.\u00a0\u201cThere were a lot of strong progressive candidates who were really clearly running to undo the years of harm that the Vance administration had perpetuated,\u201d Nnaemeka said. Aboushi, however, had the clearest commitment to reducing the size and the scope of the DA\u2019s office \u201cand anchored her candidacy in a really strong divest, invest frame, which is central to a lot of the work the party centers. How do we divest from the things that cause harms in our community and in invest in what actually leads to real safety and transformation?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u00a0also sets a precedent for how other local progressive groups, including New York Communities for Change and Community Voices Heard Power, may weigh in on the race. New York City\u2019s branch of Democratic Socialists of America held a forum with candidates who applied for their endorsement in November, but the organization ultimately decided to stay out of the race.\u00a0An endorsement from WFP helped propel the campaign of former Queens DA candidate Tiffany Cab\u00e1n<\/a> in 2019, leading to national coverage and an endorsement from the New York Times.<\/p>\n Other leading progressive<\/u> contenders in the race are public defender Eliza Orlins, state Assembly Member Dan Quart, and former federal prosecutor and former New York state Chief Deputy Attorney General Alvin Bragg. The field also includes several candidates with previous ties to the Manhattan District Attorney\u2019s Office, like former prosecutors Diana Florence, Lucy Lang, and Liz Crotty. Tali Weinstein, who worked in the Department of Justice under Barack Obama and as counsel to the Brooklyn District Attorney\u2019s Office, is also in the race and is the top fundraiser so far.<\/p>\n Crotty is the only candidate who has not styled herself as a \u201cprogressive,\u201d and the other seven candidates have only small differences in their platforms.\u00a0Weinstein is the only candidate who says she opposes decriminalizing sex work.\u00a0On the issue of whether candidates would support defunding the police, as discussed during a forum hosted by Color of Change in January, Aboushi, Quart, and Lang answered \u201cyes\u201d; Orlins said she would support cuts of 50 percent of the budget; Bragg agreed to $1 billion in cuts; Weinstein and Crotty said \u201cno\u201d; and Florence said she could not answer and did not believe in the word \u201cdefund.\u201d<\/p>\n New York’s primary election takes place on June 22; the candidate who wins is expected to take office in January, as the borough leans heavily blue. No Republicans are currently running for Manhattan district attorney.<\/p>\n If elected, Aboushi plans to decline as many charges as possible to change the culture of the DA\u2019s office:\u00a0move the focus away from\u00a0securing convictions and instead address the root causes of crime and invest in community groups to ensure that people have access to housing, health care, income, food, transportation, and utilities. Aboushi is also running on ending cash bail and decriminalizing poverty, mental health issues, substance abuse, and sex work.<\/p>\n She currently practices law at the Aboushi Law Firm, which she and her siblings founded in 2010. Last January, Aboushi and her partner won a federal discrimination case brought by Black firefighters in New York in 2018<\/a> challenging a departmental policy forcing them to shave their beards or be placed on light duty, arguing that the policy was discriminatory and ignored a skin condition that affects 45 to 85 percent of Black men. Aboushi also represented a woman who won an $85,000 lawsuit in 2018 against the New York Police Department for forcibly removing her hijab after she was taken into custody.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can incarcerate people. But you\u2019re never going to incarcerate your way out of these problems,\u201d Aboushi told The Intercept during a December interview. \u201cYou can\u2019t incarcerate out of poverty, you can\u2019t incarcerate out of substance abuse, you can\u2019t incarcerate out of the gun violence. It\u2019s just not going to happen. Because that\u2019s the state that we are in now. \u2026 We are doing everything the opponents of transformation want us to do. It\u2019s happening right now. And you\u2019re still telling me crime is rising. So let\u2019s step back and talk about the root causes. Let\u2019s step back and prioritize our families, and prioritize the stability and safety of our families, instead of conditioning one constituent\u2019s safety on the incarceration and destabilization of other constituents.\u201d<\/p>\n Aboushi\u2019s campaign has endorsements from Real Justice PAC; Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib; former WFP gubernatorial candidate<\/a> Cynthia Nixon; activist Linda Sarsour; Akeem Browder,\u00a0whose brother Kalief was detained\u00a0for three years on Rikers Island without a trial and eventually killed himself; leaders from seven New York City Housing Authority developments; Incarcerated Nation Network, Inc., a network of formerly incarcerated people working to end mass incarceration; and Coalition for a District Alternative, a progressive group mobilizing residents, activists, and neighborhood groups in the Lower East Side.<\/p>\n The post Working Families Party Weighs In on Crowded Manhattan DA Race<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By endorsing Tahanie Aboushi, WFP sets a precedent for how other local progressive groups may endorse in the race.<\/p>\n The post Working Families Party Weighs In on Crowded Manhattan DA Race<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60326"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60327,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60326\/revisions\/60327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u201cYou can\u2019t incarcerate out of poverty, you can\u2019t incarcerate out of substance abuse, you can\u2019t incarcerate out of the gun violence.\u201d<\/blockquote><\/p>\n