In 2018, I ran for District Attorney with no political sponsor and no permission from anyone. The people who decide these races – before voters get a say – decided early that I was not qualified for the job and not viable in the field. And they were not shy about saying it. Then Suffolk County voted. What arrived was not a narrow win handed down by an endorsement or the political elite. It was a mandate built at doors and kitchen tables and church basements by people who had been told for far too long that this office was not theirs to shape.
We built an office around that mandate.
We collected data and published it. We wrote our policies down so the public could read them and hold us to them. We brought in researchers who could tell us honestly whether what we were doing worked, including on misdemeanor prosecution, where the evidence showed that charging certain nonviolent cases made future crime more likely rather than less. We created the first Discharge Integrity Team in any prosecutor’s office in the country, with a community member seated on it, so that when police used deadly or excessive force there was a process the public could see. Homicides fell to a twenty-year low.
We also went to court against the federal government. When ICE agents began terrorizing our community during the first Trump administration, I took them to court and sued them with my colleague in Middlesex County. A federal judge ordered the practice stopped. A courthouse only functions if a witness to a shooting, a person seeking a restraining order, or a worker owed their wages can walk through the door without calculating the risk. That was true in 2019. It is more true today.
I left to serve as United States Attorney only after asking for and receiving assurances that this important work would continue. It did not. What voters built in 2018 was undone by appointment, which is the oldest way there is to take something back from people without asking them.
Within days, the research partnerships were severed and the published data stopped. The Discharge Integrity Team was disbanded. Four years later, the office still has no written protocol governing officer-involved shootings. Meetings about homicides in our neighborhoods are held by invitation only. Relationships with the police departments this office depends on have frayed in public.
You can measure the cost. Roughly 1,500 homicides remain unsolved, some dating to 1960, and not one prosecutor is currently assigned specifically to clearing those cases. Each file is a family told to wait and then forgotten. Shootings are up. That is what happens when an office throws away the evidence that was guiding it. If voted back into office, I will bring back the Project for Unsolved Suffolk Homicides and focus on the murdered and missing that have not had answers for years or decades.
When people who live in certain neighborhoods describe what they see out their windows, the answer coming back from the people currently in charge is a statistic, a press release, and a quick change of subject. Their experience is not treated as evidence. It is treated as an inconvenience, something to be managed until they hopefully stop raising it. In my office, data was how we found the truth. It was never how we told a grieving family they were imagining things.
I am running the way I ran the first time. Against the people who settle these things privately, for the people who have to live with what they settle. I ask for your vote and pledge to bring the office back to transparency, community focus and data driving our policies, all while remaining steadfast about public safety.
Rachael Rollins is the former Suffolk County District Attorney and a Candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney.