A rational candidate for Manhattan District Attorney.

0:00 Speaker 1 Well, a lot of people say we need law and order in New York City, we need the quality of life can become better or go back to normal in New York City. Well with us today is Maud Maren and she plans to run for District Attorney in Manhattan or in New York City. And Maud Maren, good morning

0:23 on a Sunday morning. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

0:28 Speaker 2 Absolutely, I am a New York City mom. I have four children, and I have worked as a criminal defense attorney for several decades in this city before I turn my attention to doing some work trying to improve our schools, our public school systems, and getting involved in politics. I was a lifelong Democrat. We have a lot of Democrats

0:52 here in Manhattan, but the last few years we saw the many Democrats in that city sort of lose touch with common sense. And you know, I think it’s Ronald Reagan. He said I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. And that’s certainly true of me. And now I want to take my criminal litigator knowledge and

1:10 help bring back and restore some common sense to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

1:16 Speaker 1 Now, did you work for a prosecutor before I did, you worked with mister Mogenthal any of the other prosecutors.

1:23 Speaker 2 I worked in the criminal courthouse when Morganshal was the district attorney. I worked for Legal Aid Society.

1:31 Speaker 1 I was a.

1:31 Speaker 2 Criminal defense attorney both in Manhattan and in the Bronx. And I also worked as a director of training for Legal Aid Society, training new lawyers how to be litigators.

1:43 Speaker 1 Understood. And where you live in Manhattan, I guess because you live in the Upper west Side, up or East Side, or I live downtown.

1:53 Speaker 2 I lived fairly close to the criminal courthouse, so I would have an easy commute to work.

2:00 Speaker 1 Understood, And you believe in law and order, and you want to make sure that you know what I’ll tell you. The statistics in case you don’t know, is all the police commissioners have given me the same number, and this number includes all five boroughs. There are thirty three hundred repeat criminals in New York City. That means ten arrests,

2:27 twenty arrests, thirty arres, forty arres. And if they’ve told me that, if you take the thirty three hundred off the streets in New York and you put them in either you know, they need attention for their drugs or they need the prison, then the city will have ninety four percent less crime. How do you like those numbers?

2:58 Speaker 2 Yeah, I’ll tell you what’s are we frustrating about the crime surge in New York right now is because it is actually a solvable problem. And the reason the NYPD officials who are talking about those numbers are citing it is because we really have a pass forward to be able to actually prosecute our way back to a safer city.

3:24 We know, and the police officers in the city know who are the people that are committing the most crime. You can’t You’re not going to get it down to zero. No city is going to have zero criminal offenses. You know, in the course of a year, there’s always going to be some serious crime. But we have the absolute possibility.

3:42 We have the tools available to reduce the serious crimes, to reduce the major felonies. And it starts with prosecuting repeat offenders. As you’re mentioning, we know when it starts with reversing. Alvin Brad’s day one memo, what prosecutor comes into office and says on day one, let me tell you which crimes I’m not going to prosecute. And that’s

4:03 what his Day one memo was. It was a blueprint to increase crime in the city. And that’s exactly what happened.

4:10 Speaker 1 And let me tell you something. The people in Manhattan and New York City are miserable. And it’s crazy with jo England. And we used to be able to walk around New York City and go out till midnight, go to drug stores, go to supermarkets, to go to restaurants, and you can’t do that anymore.

4:33 Speaker 2 Well, I think what you have is a city that has just it’s the social fabric is fraying. And you see that in people. You have junkies on the street who are shooting up, you see people who are defecating on the street. You see horrible things that you do not want to see when you’re walking down the street

4:50 with your child, and you can actually feel deep compassion for a human being who’s at such a low point in their life and also want to be able to walk down the street and go out to dinner without being these horrible things. There’s a couple of different things that the prosecutors can do. One is to really use

5:08 the tools available in the criminal justice system to get people like Jordan Neely, the man who was killed in the subway when Daniel Penny had to restrain him to prevent him from hurting the innocent passengers on that subway car.

5:26 That man died on a subway car. But he really should have been in jail getting the help that what is actually available to people who have such severe mental illness and drug addictions. He was arrested many, many times, sometimes for violent felony assaults, and he was always let out by Alvin Bragg’s prosecutors, when in fact, had they

5:45 incarcerated him, had they used the criminal justice tools available to him, he might have been able to get some help. It’s very, very hard to help the long term mentally ill and drug addicted, but the criminal justice system does provide avenues to do that. And I have gotten clients of mind help using the criminal justice system. And have

6:07 we do that, not only does that individual stand a chance or an opportunity of getting help, but then the people on the subway don’t have a violent, ant lell drug addicted man coming onto the subway and threatening them.

6:19 Speaker 1 Understood anything else you want to tell the listeners On Sunday.

6:23 Speaker 2 Morning, I would love for people who are interested to go to maudmaron dot com. They can sign up to get email updates from us and get more information about the campaign. We are going to have an official launch of this campaign in early January, and we invite everybody to come check out all the information we’re going to

6:41 have there.

6:41 Speaker 1 And that’s what m a U D maarn m a r o n dot.

6:46 Speaker 2 Com dot you got it.

6:48 Speaker 1 Thank you so much, and we’ll catch up again with you real soon.

6:52 Speaker 2 Thank you very much.