To the editor:

I am writing to express my support for Mimi Rocah for Westchester County district attorney. A seasoned federal prosecutor with 16 years of experience as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, she is an experienced professional who has worked on sophisticated trials involving organized crime, human trafficking, public corruption and child predators. We need our top prosecutor not only to be more adept at trying these sorts of cases, but also more committed to doing so.

What’s more, we are living in an era when anticorruption and transparency need to be the guiding ethos of the district attorney in order to provide the leadership needed to combat the criminal threats of our time. We can’t fight corruption when the DA promotes bad cops, or takes campaign contributions that could compromise the integrity of the office. That might be the way things used to be done, but it can’t be that way any longer.

It’s time for protocols over cronyism. Most importantly, the public has a right to know the data on things like where seized assets go, and Mimi Rocah has pledged to report this information annually. If we are to pave the way forward past disparities in criminal justice, we need a DA who is cognizant of injustice and who operates under the guiding principle that the office works for the people of this county—who have a right to transparency in how the office operates in order to trust in its use of the tremendous power it wields.

We have a choice to make in the Democratic primary this month between the incumbent DA, who has never tried a case, and Ms. Rocah, a federal prosecutor from the most respected office in the nation whom we would be lucky to have working for us here in Westchester. Democrats, I urge you to request your absentee ballot at www.elections.ny.gov/votingabsentee.html and cast a vote for Mimi Rocah before the June 23 primary.

Deborah Lowery Knapp

59 Corlies Ave.