Bragg Removes Manhattan Prosecution Data Dashboard as Conviction Rates Dip Before Election Season

The quiet removal of public prosecution data under Manhattan’s district attorney raises pressing questions about transparency, accountability and the future of justice in New York City.

On a website once hailed as a model for open government, a message now greets curious New Yorkers: “Under construction.” The Manhattan District Attorney’s data dashboard—once a trove of updated figures on convictions, charges, and prosecutorial choices—vanished in October, leaving residents and policymakers in the dark. The disappearance has coincided, not coincidentally, with an electoral season and a slide in conviction rates that may portend deeper currents in the city’s approach to crime and punishment.

The numbers behind the vanishing act are as plain as they are stark. Since Alvin Bragg assumed office as Manhattan’s district attorney in 2022, the conviction rate for felony cases has descended from 42% (in the final year under his predecessor) to 35% in the latest data, sparking concern across New York’s legal and political establishment. Misdemeanor conviction rates, too, have fallen in lockstep, now sitting at a paltry 17%, down from 24% only two years ago. Accompanying this has been a sharp rise in outright refusals to prosecute: 12% of felonies and 31% of misdemeanors are now declined before ever reaching a judge, nearly doubling or more from prior years.

Such figures might be expected to provoke robust debate—or at the very least, explanation. Instead, the public dashboard heralded as “groundbreaking” was quietly shelved. Critics, like Scott Evans of the West Village, have accused the DA’s office of obscuring vital information from voters ahead of this year’s election. When pressed, Bragg’s representatives offered vague assurances about coordination with other boroughs to “present the data,” but specifics remain elusive.

For the nearly 1.7 million residents of Manhattan—the city’s beating economic heart—these statistical shifts translate into real-world anxieties. By declining to prosecute a growing share of both serious and low-level offences, Bragg’s office is recoding the contract between citizen and state: what conduct, exactly, is the city willing to punish, and with what ferocity? The effects ripple outward from repeat offenders to business owners and families living on the city’s margins. If criminal justice relies for its legitimacy on both deterrence and public trust, then the quiet curtain drawn over the numbers is cause for concern.

The DA’s allies insist these outcomes are intentional, not accidental. Bragg’s day-one memo directed prosecutors to avoid prison sentences for a host of non-violent, and some violent, crimes. The guiding philosophy—echoing criminal-justice reformers nationwide—insists that incarceration is, at best, an expensive and often counterproductive last resort. Bragg’s office often downgrades convicted felonies to misdemeanors or even non-criminal violations; of felony cases resulting in conviction, two-thirds are reduced in this fashion. His critics, including commentators at the Manhattan Institute, argue this approach neglects the preventive function of prison, which—however imperfect—removes active offenders from city streets.

These questions are hardly unique to Manhattan. New York’s decline in conviction rates appears entangled with the 2020 “discovery reform’’ laws designed to amend what many saw as opaque, unfair procedures for evidence sharing—laws which prosecutors now say have made winning convictions costlier and more complex. Across the United States, urban prosecutors in cities from Chicago to San Francisco have faced parallel criticism: struggling conviction rates, a swell in declined prosecutions, and pushback regarding both transparency and public safety.

Such cross-city comparisons reveal sharply divergent answers to America’s chronic public safety and mass incarceration dilemmas. While Bragg, like his counterparts in progressive jurisdictions, pursues decarceration and alternatives to prosecution, others maintain tough-on-crime orthodoxies, even as national crime data offers little consensus: overall violent crime has ebbed from pandemic highs nationally, but gun violence and retail theft remain stubborn in enclaves such as Manhattan’s commercial corridors.

With less light, more shadows: the consequences of diminished transparency

Yet what sets Manhattan apart is the withdrawal of information itself. The promise of “data-driven” governance is not just a technocratic slogan—it underpins the case for experimentation in criminal justice. When public dashboards were launched in 2022, officials crowed they would reaffirm trust, arming the press, scholars, and voters alike with hard facts rather than anecdotes or ideological claims. Removing access to this data, especially in an election year, can only fuel speculation—whether of bad faith, institutional inefficiency, or open disdain for public scrutiny.

If justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done, the present shadows bode ill. For the city’s business leaders eyeing return-to-office mandates, for neighbourhood groups freshly awake to petty crime, and for civil-society advocates anxious to ensure reforms do not become decay, credibility rests on open access to the impact of policy experiments. Hiding the scoreboard mid-game rarely wins public trust in sport or politics.

To be sure, transparency is no panacea; numbers, like laws, require context and interpretation. Prosecutorial discretion inevitably involves more than statistical yield: justice denied is not solely a matter of percentages. Still, informed debate about trade-offs—public safety, rehabilitation, cost, and equity—depends on sunlight, not euphemism. If Manhattan’s experiment in cautious prosecution succeeds, let it succeed in full view; if it fails, honesty will speed its correction.

A healthy civic culture prizes facts over feelings and debate over dogma, especially when the stakes are as tangible as freedom and security. By pulling down the blinds, the DA’s office has made consensus harder to achieve and suspicion easier to stoke. New Yorkers have weathered far greater storms than disappearing dashboards, but even here, trust must be earned anew, one line of data at a time. ■