Diversity Counts: My Experience as a Black Prosecutor
When I was in law school, I wanted to be a prosecutor. It was my dream. My passion. I’ll never forget my mother feeling confused at my decision. “You want to persecute people?” she pondered. But I viewed it as a tremendous opportunity to do the work I loved, trial work.
When I began at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office in 2000 as an Assistant District Attorney, at least half of my incoming class, of about 75 attorneys, were women. We also had a strong representation of African American, Latinx, Muslim, and Asian attorneys. We truly reflected the communities we served. It was a vibrant, diverse group. I realized that our varied backgrounds would allow us to view our caseloads with a more practical and fair perspective.
With this revelation in mind, I dived into my cases, conducted trials, and began to learn about the communities in Brooklyn. As I progressed, I wanted to use my position, the most powerful in the criminal justice system, to help communities. My goal was to be fair-minded. I wanted to serve my community and engage victims, but I also sought fair dispositions for defendants. I took an interest in how cases involving African American and Latinx men were handled. I was more sensitive to understanding the full picture of their lives. In hindsight, I may have been more open to rehabilitation programs (youth programs, drug treatment, mental health, job training) than my colleagues.
Over time, I started to change my career goals beyond how many bench and jury trials I conducted. My focus shifted to making fair charging, bail, plea, and sentencing decisions. I spent hours understanding the defendants’ prior criminal record and personal background to cultivate the best dispositions. And I spent more time learning about rehabilitation programs that would be appropriate for my cases.
Over twenty years later, I now see more clearly the role of the prosecutor. It should be to maintain safe communities, implement innovative crime prevention strategies, support victims, use incarceration as a last resort, and be in the forefront of the reform movement to end mass incarceration and racial disparities in case outcomes.
But have prosecutor offices progressed enough in the past 20 years? It seems not. In 2017, according to the American Bar Association, 95% of elected district attorneys are white and primarily men. Many of the 2,400 offices still struggle to hire and maintain attorneys of color.
To date, there has been some change with the elections of Rachel Rollins, Kim Fox, Aramis Ayala but in most of the 2,400 state prosecutor offices, there are very few attorneys of color.
To truly keep communities safe and make the transformational reform, we need true diversity. We can do better.
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