It's the Brian Laird Show on WNBC. Good morning, everyone. Manhattan, DA, Alvin Bragg is my first guest today.

We'll talk about crime trends in the city in most major categories substantially down this year so far.

But public perception is not keeping up. The shell game that policy plays with unhoused, mentally ill or drug addicted New Yorkers and some money from white collar crime that Bragg is sinking into addressing it.

The difficult decisions that DA sometimes have to make over prosecuting people who might be in the act of defending themselves or at least think they are.

People like Subway Choker, Daniel Penny and also others, more recently in the news.

There's the Manhattan Trump indictment for the alleged stormy Daniel's hush money cover up falsifying business records. Remember that?

What happens to that trial date with the classified documents and now possibly January 6th and big lie indictments coming to?

And I'll ask the DA for comments on the Manhattan aspects of the Gilgo Beach serial killer investigation and maybe even more than that. There's so much we could talk about.

We'll see what time allows. DA Bragg always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks so much. Great to be on. Hope you're having a great summer.

And same to you, can I start with Gilgo Beach, the alleged killer Rex Hoyerman lives on Long Island, obviously, but worked in Manhattan and the investigation included things like DNA taken from near his office and documenting cell phone pings from around there too on the disposable phones he allegedly used.

Are the Manhattan parts of the investigation things your office would have been aware of or participated in?

So first, I want to applaud. I mean, I think that you hit upon sort of the key investigatory steps. So I want to applaud my counterpart and Suffolk and and really the law enforcement work and you just hit upon it.

It's just to do the human piece first is so disturbing to think of someone in our midst, you know, coming to Manhattan to work, you know, every day.

Those dimensions you think you talk about things are where we are looking at, you know, we've got a cold case unit that has closed the matters in recent years and is certainly going to be looking at sort of the kind of fact pattern there and collaborating with with our counterparts in Suffolk.

In Suffolk, but just as I talked to particularly hard neighbors and experienced myself, it's just sort of bone chilling to have someone who, who obviously will I'll say allegedly because it's an ongoing matter, but, you know, in our midst with those kind of allegations for years.

Really, it's so creepy. And then you're involved. Creepy is a better word. Creepy is a better word than bone chilling. Yes, creepy.

And your involvement or your office's involvement, if any?

So, you know, it's a Suffolk matter. They've been they've been doing it. We're certainly here and available to support, as you know, the conduct took place in their jurisdiction. And we have that affair about where a crime or a leds crime takes place in one jurisdiction, but the investigation leads you throughout the metro area.

So, you know, we will always support and help and assist. We're asked, but the conduct of police in their jurisdiction, you know, that what they've charged. And so it's their matter.

There's a procedural question around some of that evidence collection that I wonder if you could, as a general matter, give our listeners some insight into Long Island police reportedly thought they knew the killer's identity for a while, but didn't arrest them right away.

So, they could collect some of this Manhattan evidence like the DNA from a pizza box. How do prosecutors and police make that judgment for when to wait to build a stronger case and when to make the arrest because the suspect might be an ongoing threat?

...