Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said he grew up in Harlem, faced near-death encounters with knives to the neck and guns to the head, and witnessed murder firsthand.
However, a new report reveals that he attended Trinity School, an exclusive Ivy League preparatory school in New York City’s Upper West Side.
Bragg won election as New York County district attorney last November, and since election he has perpetuated the Big Apple’s no-enforcement crime policies, the Post Millennial reported.
Upon taking office, Bragg released a memo that ordered the jurisdiction to continue its soft-on-crime policies—including reduced pre-trial incarceration, shortened prison sentences and increased “alternatives to incarceration.”
In this memo, Bragg portrayed his early life as something far different than the record shows.
“Growing up in Harlem in the 1980s, I saw every side of the criminal justice system from a young age,” Bragg wrote. “Before I was 21 years old, I had a gun pointed at me six times: three by police officers and three by people who were not police officers. I had a knife to my neck, a semi-automatic gun to my head, and a homicide victim on my doorstep.”
In a 1995 profile of Bragg for his college newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, he described his high school classmates as “overwhelmingly white.”
The highly selective private school, which today charges more than $57,000 per year, belongs to two elite groups: the New York Interschool and the Ivy Preparatory School League.
“Bragg says he enjoyed Trinity, despite occasionally feeling like teachers asked him to be the ‘flag-bearer’ for his race in a discussion,” the profile stated.
His parents also belonged to some of the nation’s elite institutions: His mother was dean of academic affairs at Manhattan Community College and his father worked with the New York Urban League.
One anonymous NYPD detective reportedly said that Bragg is “trying to score cool points in the hood, but he’s not Tupac Shakur. More like Baby Face.”
Last weekend, at Bragg’s direction, prosecutors waived a felony charge against a career criminal who robbed a drug store at knife point for more than $2,000 in merchandise, the New York Post reported.
The prosecutors reduced the sentence of 43-year-old William Rolon, whom police described as a “felony assault recidivist, robbery recidivist, and transit offender,” from felony robbery to petit larceny, the Post reported.
