Saritha Komitareddy: New Yorkers deserve an AG who fights criminals instead of playing politics

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.

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