Adjunct Professor Kenneth Montgomery provided his thoughts to City & State New York on the resistance that Tiffany Cabán will face within the DA’s office if elected as the next Queens District Attorney.
Several former prosecutors in the Queens and Brooklyn district attorneys’ offices said that Cabán’s transition will include certain turnover within the office. “I’m sure a bunch of people there who have been there their entire careers, who never anticipated or thought about new leadership – particularly leadership like this – they’re going to look to get out,” said Kenneth Montgomery, a former assistant prosecutor in the Kings County district attorney’s office, who now teaches at Fordham Law School and Brooklyn College. Referring to the longtime Queens DA who recently passed away and a more conservative candidate in the recent primary, Montgomery added, “there are loyalists: there are Richard Brown loyalists, there are Greg Lasak loyalists, there are loyalists to the Democratic Party and there are people who are not with a public defender coming in, saying that the things that they were doing may not have been the best way to do things.”
In any DA’s office – though perhaps especially in Queens, which hasn’t seen new leadership in nearly three decades – the prosecutors and other staff may not go along with Cabán’s “decarceral” policies, such as not prosecuting many minor offenses. This may be especially so because Brown was, by New York City Democratic standards, a more punitive, law-and-order focused prosecutor. “You’re talking about a traditionally conservative office, where people, they don’t see don’t see the causal relationship between race and poverty and prosecution,” Montgomery said. “They are going to be resistant to anyone who is coming along and interrupting that (system).”