Inside Manhattan DA Bragg's effort to prosecute police accused of abusing power

Prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office's Police Accountability Unit have been filling their dockets with NYPD officers they say have abused their positions while on duty.

In recent weeks, they charged an officer accused of threatening a fellow NYPD employee with a gun in police headquarters, an officer accused of having sex with a woman he arrested and two other officers accused of covering up a drunk driving arrest.

Prosecuting police officers who break the law while on duty was a campaign promise for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and one he says he’s already fulfilling.

He said he views the work as a critical tool his office has to strengthen trust between the criminal justice system and New Yorkers who may be skeptical of speaking to law enforcement. He said that prosecuting officers shows witnesses, jurors, victims and others that his office is actively working to hold the system accountable.

The unit has brought charges in those cases against officers at a higher rate than their counterparts in other boroughs. In 2025, the unit secured convictions of four officers and one civilian in four cases, according to Manhattan DA spokesperson Doug Cohen. Since the start of this year, the unit has brought charges against five officers and secured one conviction, he added. The remaining cases brought this year have yet to be resolved.

The Brooklyn DA has a similar law enforcement accountability unit, and it prosecuted one case in 2025, a spokesperson said. The Staten Island DA’s office does not have a similar unit and handles police-involved matters on a case-by-case basis, a spokesperson said.

The focus on prosecuting officers for on-duty abuses has drawn harsh criticism from the city’s largest and most outspoken police union, which has accused Bragg of overreach that threatens public safety in the city.

“Police officers on the street know that DA Alvin Bragg is working against us, not with us. There is a clear pattern of Bragg’s office indicting police officers for simply doing their jobs, while at the same time downplaying serious crimes, including assaults on police officers,” Patrick Hendry, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, told Gothamist in a statement.

“His goal is simply to bolster his anti-police credentials by destroying cops’ careers and reputations. Manhattanites should demand that Bragg stop putting politics before public safety,” he added.

But Bragg is happy to defend the unit's work, which is siloed from the rest of the office and answers directly to him.

Supporters of the unit argue that it also signals to officers that there is a risk of prosecution if they abuse their position.

“ I guarantee you every time a cop gets prosecuted by the Manhattan DA's office, cops everywhere in the department know about it,” said Chris Dunn, an attorney who previously served as the legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Bragg recently spoke to Gothamist about the unit.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Gothamist: What was your vision of the Police Accountability Unit?

Alvin Bragg: In large part, we want to hold people accountable who have the public trust, whether that's a politician who was elected, whether it's a public servant who may not be in the public eye, whether that's a police officer, whether that's a prosecutor.

We need to have oversight and be held accountable. So that's sort of the first starting point.

It's important in and of itself to hold people accountable, and it's also important to our other public safety work that people have trust that we are going to hold the system accountable.

And how does that go hand in hand? How is it important for your other public safety work?

If the public does not trust us, we can't make cases. So victims coming forward, witnesses coming forward.

You know, I grew up in and live in the part of the borough [Harlem] that historically has had the most significant public safety challenges, and also has historically had the most challenges with people trusting the office and coming forward.

So the conversations I have with the public often are sort of hand in hand: Well, yes, we want public safety. Everyone does. I don't know of a single community that does not want that. But they also want to know that if someone who's been entrusted with public power violates that trust that they'll be held accountable too.

I've had people come up to me and say, you know, "I don't trust government, I haven't trusted prosecutors, but I saw you took that action. I'm far more likely to engage with your office in the future."

That trust is our currency, right?

How does the unit typically find cases to pursue?

So it could be a traditional whistleblower. It could be something that comes up in an investigation, a case from an [assistant district attorney], an internal referral.

It could be the NYPD Internal Affairs Bureau. So any one of a number of paths, which is why outreach is so important to let people know that the work is being done. We want to cast a wide net so that we get the incoming, and then, of course, we want to rigorously assess it.

How do you measure success, and how do you find juries receptive to cases?

As with our other work, you go into court and grand jury and get an indictment and then ultimately prevail at trial is an important part of the puzzle.

I think in all of our work, we don't want to be ends-oriented, right? There are cases that we present to juries or judges and they have a different take on the facts, and that's our system. We work in the system. We accept that.

But certainly, having accountability in the form of conviction … That is important too to get accountability, but obviously equally important is the process through which we achieve it.

I think in all that we do, we hope to get deterrence, both specific and general deterrence. In terms of specific deterrence, oftentimes part of the relief is that someone's no longer an officer, so then they can no longer abuse that trust.

In terms of general deterrence, I think officers know that this work exists. We're not the only ones who are doing it. And so I think there's an awareness that these cases are being brought.

And I also want officers to have trust in the office, much like everyone else. Every allegation is not a case, right? And that we're independently and rigorously assessing every violation, you know, is not a criminal case.

We assess these issues across the board. We may get a case in our white collar unit that is a really good civil litigation and should be handled there, but does not warrant criminal sanctions.

Have you gotten pushback from unions or anybody else about prosecuting police officers?

This is New York City. There's always going to be a variety of opinions. And I'd say what's important for me is we like to engage with stakeholders and have an ongoing dialogue, not on any specific case, but macro issues.

And so, we have had dialogue with unions who may have a different view as to where this should rank in the priority. In terms of the police department, [NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau] is a key partner. And this [NYPD] commissioner, I think rightly so, we hear people talking about integrity and she's prioritized that.

So in terms of the department, they're a partner in this work.

Did you work well with the NYPD under the Adams administration, or did you run into any issues there? The department also has historically had issues with police abuses. Do you think the volume of these incidents has dropped?

We generally work well through [NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau] as our sort of primary contact. Regardless, there were a few different commissioners during the last administration, but the primary contact for this was IAB and you get the information we need to get to go forward with our cases.

I don't have a historical comparator. But what I can say, I can go back to sort of the process, is that when we are investigating these we get the information we need, we get the partnership we need from internal affairs.

It certainly has been our experience over the last four years that they are often are our investigative partner. We do have our own investigators here staffed on this, but IAB is a significant Investigative partner in this work.