Despite facing her first primary challenge in her eight years in office, Tuesday night was “business as usual” for Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark.
Despite progressive challenger Tess Cohen, 35, doing her best to dent the armor of Clark’s record as DA — from her handling of abuses at Rikers to press conferences with wrongfully convicted New Yorkers accusing the incumbent of witness intimidation — Clark cruised to a decisive Democratic primary win by a 73%-27% vote margin, according to unofficial results from the city Board of Elections.
“It was no different from what I was already doing. I just keep my head down and do the work,” Clark told the Bronx Times following her win Tuesday night. “That’s what it was all about … so I didn’t do anything different during this campaign that I haven’t been doing the last eight years.”
It’s the first time in the Bronx district attorney race that two women were in consideration for the nomination of either party. With no Republican challenger waiting in the wings, Clark is all but confirmed for a third term.
The 61-year-old Clark is the first and only Black woman in the state to hold a district attorney post since her election in 2015, although her time in the office dates back to 1986, under the Mario Merola administration.
Not subject to ranked-choice voting and the only boroughwide race on the June 27 Bronx ballot, Clark managed to secure a vote of full confidence from borough voters despite the challenger bringing up less than flattering statistics regarding Clark’s tenure.
The Bronx DA’s office has the worst conviction and dismissal rates in New York City. Internally, the office has been faced with a mass exodus of employees and a 44% spike in crime since 2021 amid an acute backlog in court cases.
Clark’s office has secured guilty verdicts in just 60% of murder arrests by law enforcement — the lowest in the city — compared to 62% in Brooklyn, 66% in both Queens and Staten Island, and 76% in Manhattan, according to data from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services.
Since 2018, Clark’s office has declined to prosecute at least 101 attempted-murder arrests of varying degrees, according to state data, with Cohen, a criminal defense attorney who spent eight years in the Manhattan DA’s office, pointing to the lack of follow through on cases involving sexual assault.
According to state data, the Bronx DA’s office has also declined to prosecute 172 rape and 51 sex-abuse arrests of varying degrees during that time period.
None of this, according to Clark, should take away from the accomplishments of her eight-year stay in office, including doubling the DA’s budget. Clark told the Bronx Times during her Tuesday night watch party at Con Sofrito in Parkchester that she’s confident that those rates will be ameliorated.
“We were doing well before interceding factors like COVID, law changes happened. I’m confident we’re going to turn it around,” she said. “We’ve been here before. We’ve seen worse in the Bronx. … It’s going to get better.”
Clark said some of her third term goals will be continued efforts to prevent gun violence in the borough, citing a “lost generation of kids.”
— Emily Forgash contributed to this report
