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Keeping New Yorkers safe isn’t a Republican or Democratic job.
It’s the job.
I did it under three presidents, two Democrats and one Republican. The work never changed. You find out who did the crime. You prove it. You lock them up. Or sue them.
New York needs an attorney general who does that and nothing else.
That is the whole argument for my candidacy.
A knife doesn’t ask who you voted for. The man stabbed to death on the J train this fall didn’t get to explain his politics. Neither did the 83-year-old Air Force veteran pushed onto the tracks this year. Neither does the grandmother in Queens who gets a call that sounds exactly like her grandson and wires away her savings. Crime happens to everyone. Fighting it should belong to everyone, too.
I was a federal prosecutor in New York for more than a decade. Loretta Lynch hired me under President Obama. I kept doing the same job under President Trump. Then a Democrat, Anne Milgram, made me her chief of staff at the 10,000-employee DEA. She didn’t know me. She had no political reason to choose me. She asked her agents which prosecutor they trusted, and they gave her my name.
The cases didn’t have party labels. They read instead like: ISIS; al Qaeda; the Sinaloa drug cartel; and Genaro Garcia Luna, the most senior Mexican law enforcement official ever convicted of working for the cartels to smuggle poisonous drugs into the US. I was a career prosecutor nailing those convictions, not a Republican prosecutor. The agents I worked with knew the difference.
Since February I’ve been to all 62 counties in this state. I ask everyone the same question: What do you think about public safety in New York?
Nobody brings up parties. Nobody brings up the President. Never.
New Yorkers bring up the same two things in Buffalo and Bay Ridge, Syracuse and Staten Island: repeat offenders committing crime, and the mentally ill living on the street. Then they tell me about getting ripped off. Food stamp cards drained by hackers. Contractors who take the deposit and vanish. That’s not a red issue or a blue issue. That’s the grocery money.
The numbers back up what people feel. In 2019, New York had the lowest crime of this century. From 2019 to 2024 under Letitia James, crime rose 26 percent. Felony assaults are up. That means stabbings, slashings, people punched for no reason. Murders and shootings are down, and the police earned every bit of that with targeted enforcement and real consequences. Turns out when you actually lock up the trigger-pullers, people stop pulling triggers.
A few weeks ago a man told me he was shoved to the ground into a pile of mud by someone who called him a “dirty Jew.” That is a felony assault with a hate crime attached. It was charged as a misdemeanor. Then reduced. Then dismissed.
The attacker paid $12. That was the dry-cleaning bill for the victim’s shirt. The attorney general has the power to step in on a hate crime when a local prosecutor won’t. Nobody has used it. I will.
Letitia James said something in our debate that I can’t shake. She said “you don’t have to look at the facts and the law.” I’ve thought about every case I ever tried. The facts and the law were the entire job. They are the only protection a citizen has against a prosecutor with an agenda.
One of her own prosecutors emailed colleagues to say the office was choosing cases on politics instead of evidence. He was fired. His personnel file was leaked. That is what happens when a law office turns into a political office.
The attorney general runs the biggest law firm in New York. About 700 lawyers. Fewer than 100 of them prosecute crime. I’ll put half the office on it. I’ll send prosecutors to any district attorney who asks for help, Democrat or Republican. Most of them are Democrats. I don’t care. I care whether they want to jail the guy arrested nine times this year.
And it’s not just crime.
More than a dozen New Yorkers froze to death on the streets of NYC last winter, and Letitia James calls that progress. I call it immoral. We’re better than that, New York!
Psychosis doesn’t know it’s 10 degrees outside. My Office of Civil Commitment will get dangerously mentally ill individuals off the street and into treatment before they hurt themselves or others. It’s what a caring society does.
New Yorkers don’t have an attorney general right now. We have a political hack who is using our tax dollars to make herself famous. And you know what? We feel it.
If New York isn’t safe, nothing else matters.
Saritha Komatireddy served for more than a decade as a federal terrorism and narcotics prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York and as chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration. She is a candidate for New York attorney general.