Three weeks after the Democratic primary for Queens district attorney, where the leading candidates are separated by 16 votes and election officials are undertaking a painstaking manual recount, the only certain outcome is change.
Led for 28 years by Richard A. Brown until his death in May, the prosecutor’s office had in many respects been frozen in time. But the candidates vying to replace him campaigned on reform, none more so than Tiffany Cabán, the 31-year-old public defender who is as intent on constraining the office’s powers as she is on exercising them.
Neck and neck with Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, Ms. Cabán ran a campaign that attracted the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and seemed to signal that the wave of progressive prosecutors elected to big cities across the country — from Chicago to Dallas to Philadelphia — had arrived in New York.
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