Saturday afternoon, a Duane Reade security guard was severely stabbed and a shopper threatened by a knife-wielding thief at one of the chain’s midtown Manhattan stores.

Roughly 12 hours later, a straphanger was shot in the hand as his train pulled into the 86th street and Lexington Avenue platform.

That’s life at Manhattan, where transit crime, assault, and shoplifting are raging.

“The city has changed so much,” Ermal Gura, 35, of Staten Island, who barely escaped the knife-wielding thief, warned. “We have to watch our backs in the stores and on the subway.”

That’s because District Attorney Alvin Bragg of Manhattan doesn’t have New Yorkers’ backs.

Thursday, minutes after securing a guilty verdict against President Trump on 34 felony counts, Mr. Bragg boasted, “I did my job.”

Mr. Bragg’s not doing his job. The mainstream press are gushing with adulation. Yet New Yorkers living in constant fear should find Mr. Bragg’s stardom nauseating.

He’s being hailed as a hero, but he’s a menace.

Mr. Bragg should prioritize jailing violent criminals and repeat offenders, including the shoplifting gangs that are forcing stores to close.

Since the year before he took office, grand larceny crimes — theft of property worth more than $1,000 — are up 33 percent.

Here’s the zinger: Despite spending years and millions of dollars pursuing Trump, Mr. Bragg claims he lacks the resources to bring thieves to trial.

In December 2022, with the DA’s investigation of Trump in full swing, cops arrested Charles Lindsay, 22, and charged him with four heists in one week at high-end Madison Avenue boutiques, where he was alleged to have stolen nearly $25,000 in goods, including luxury handbags.

Four grand larceny charges. Mr. Lindsay was known to belong to a gang targeting the area and had a long rap sheet.

Yet the DA’s office let Mr. Lindsay off, dropping the charges if he consented to five counseling sessions. He didn’t even have to pay the stores for the goods.

Mr. Bragg’s office said prosecutors had too much on their plates to try the case.

A criminal lawyer and former Bronx Assistant District Attorney, Michael Discioarro, said Mr. Bragg has 300 prosecutors. “What exactly is he working on?” Mr. Discioarro said in a February 2023 interview. Definitely not getting criminals off the streets.

Two months after Mr. Lindsay got his sweetheart deal, he was nailed for packing a pistol and mugging a 14-year-old on a Brooklyn playground. The Brooklyn DA’s office had the good sense to ask for $100,000 bail.

Mr. Bragg sides with the criminals. That includes fare-beaters. People who beat the fare often have rap sheets and open warrants for more serious crimes. Criminals don’t conscientiously pay the fare, then they rob and assault other riders. Enforcing the fare would keep crime down.

New York state’s bizarre criminal justice “reforms” are partly to blame for the crime surge, but Mr. Bragg refuses to recommend bail or incarceration even when the law permits it.

Public anger against Mr. Bragg soared when he released four migrant teens charged with beating up two cops at Times Square in February. No bail required. At that point, 20 Republican state senators sent a letter to Governor Hochul urging her to remove Mr. Bragg as DA, explaining that “his incredibly poor judgment is matched only by his unwillingness to take criminals off the street.”

On April 16, in the midst of his own trial, Trump visited the scene of one of Mr. Bragg’s biggest mistakes in judgment — the Sanaa Convenient Store at Harlem. Showing total disdain for the right to self-defense, Mr. Bragg had charged a clerk at the bodega,  Jose Alba, with second-degree murder after he stabbed a career criminal who had attacked him over a bag of chips. When the public grew outraged, the charges were dropped.

The bodega’s co-owner told Trump he’s still grappling with rampant crime. Trump pledged to straighten New York out, adding, “Alvin Bragg does nothing.”

Nothing to keep New Yorkers safe.

“Bragg watched his place in the history books take shape,” the Washington Post wrote after Mr. Bragg won a conviction against Trump. That’s the problem. New Yorkers need a DA who watches out for them, not for himself.

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