When the plan, “Justice 2020,” came out, it was “a non-story, because he had already sold it and begun to implement it,” said Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who served as general counsel under Mr. Gonzalez, and ran unsuccessfully against Mr. Bragg last year. She and several other former colleagues said the quiet, incremental rollout was typical of his style. “Not because you’re trying to hide the ball, but because that’s sometimes the best way for public safety,” she said.
In his first full term, Mr. Gonzalez continued the work he began as acting district attorney: He dismissed tens of thousands of summonses for low-level offenses, and virtually stopped prosecuting marijuana possession. He expanded a mentorship program that allowed some young men arrested with a gun for the first time to avoid prison, and he reached plea deals with immigrant defendants that allowed them to avoid deportation.
Yung-Mi Lee, the legal director of the criminal defense practice at Brooklyn Defender Services, said an important difference between Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Bragg was that Mr. Gonzalez did not come out of the gates with a sweeping set of changes.
Instead, Ms. Lee said, he had been “quietly implementing his policies, in terms of what kinds of cases should be prosecuted, which kinds of cases he has been declining to prosecute” — with some getting “a very hard-line approach.”
“It’s all about prosecutorial discretion,” she said.
When residents of Bay Ridge were upset about a group of men who often lingered on a corner near a school, drinking and urinating, Mr. Gonzalez said, his office intervened. Instead of seeking charges, the office contacted a charity service, and got a couple of the men into shelters.
“Eric Gonzalez, rhetorically, is very progressive,” said Carl Hamad-Lipscombe, the executive director of the Envision Freedom Fund, a Brooklyn nonprofit and bail fund that pushes for alternatives to pretrial detention.
“What plays out in court is often very different,” Mr. Hamad-Lipscombe said, with prosecutors from Mr. Gonzalez’s office seeking bail in cases that might not call for it.

Source: New York Times

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