NY Times Endorses Kenneth Thompson For Brooklyn DA

NY - After refraining from backing anyone in the Democratic primary, The New York Times is endorsing Kenneth Thompson in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s race, just weeks after sitting DA Charles Hynes announced that he was getting back into the race on the Republican party line.

In issuing its endorsement, THE NEW YORK TIMES calls Thompson “smart,” and says his record “has shown a passion for combating crime and injustice.”

“He pledges to bring in experienced advisers to review office operations,” says The Times. “He says he will strengthen prosecution of gun crimes, weed out abusive stop-and-frisk arrests, see to the completion an inquiry into a discredited detective’s old cases, and build on Mr. Hynes’s programs for offenders and victims. We recommend Mr. Thompson, trusting he will follow through on that sound agenda.”

But editors are also quickly to point out that Thompson is “not an ideal successor.”

“He lacks significant managerial experience, and we were not reassured by his publicity-oriented approach to representing Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel housekeeper who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn,” cautions The Times.

On Hynes, editors openly credit him for a number of successes over the course of his 24-year run, but say that his negatives now outweigh his positives.

“Mr. Hynes has had an important role in developing drug treatment programs and other cost-effective alternatives to incarceration as well as programs to help domestic violence victims and former inmates re-entering society,” states The Times. “But these parts of his record are overshadowed by charges of political favoritism in his handling of child sex-abuse allegations in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, his loyalty to tarnished deputies and reports that his office relied on discredited witnessess to wrongly convict defendants in a string of cases.