By Dan Murphy
Something is happening with Saritha Komatireddy that does not usually happen to Republican candidates running statewide in New York. People are listening to her. We have watched this campaign since the summer, watched the debate two weeks ago, and reached a conclusion in a race we frankly thought would be a sleeper at the start of the year.
We emphatically endorse Saritha Komatireddy for Attorney General.
Start with fraud
Readers of this paper know where we stand on fraud. We have written about it for years, and we will keep writing about it, because it is the quiet crime that costs every family in Yonkers money whether they ever notice or not.
New York’s Medicaid program is the largest in the country, and billions of dollars a year leak out of it through phony billing, phantom home-care aides, pill mills and nonprofit operators who treat public money as their own. The Attorney General runs the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. It is one of the most powerful fraud-fighting tools any state official in America has. Under Letitia James, New York went from #1 to #51 (the rankings include Wash., DC).
Add the EBT skimming epidemic that has drained food money from poor families across Westchester and the Bronx, the opioid settlement dollars that have gone places they were never meant to go, like government-funded injection sites, and the shelter contractors who collect hundreds of millions while people freeze outside their doors. Because the shelters are too dangerous. In each case, the Attorney General had authority to act. In each case, we have found little evidence that she did.
Komatireddy spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn. She built the cybercrime practice in that office and teaches the subject at Columbia Law School. She put cartel bosses and ISIS and al Qaeda terrorists in prison and convicted the most senior Mexican law enforcement official ever prosecuted for working with drug traffickers. She knows fraud is theft, theft is a crime, and crimes are supposed to be prosecuted. That is her whole pitch on the subject, and it is enough.
Crime and the streets
Ms. James likes to say the Attorney General has no real role in street crime. That is only partly true. The office has an Organized Crime Task Force that can step in when local prosecutors will not. It has special jurisdiction in hate crimes. It can and should investigate the nonprofits and contractors who run the homeless shelter system, which has been broken for as long as anyone in Yonkers can remember.
Komatireddy has proposed an Office of Civil Commitment inside the AG’s office, staffed with doctors and law enforcement professionals, to get severely mentally ill people off the sidewalks and subway platforms and into treatment before someone else dies. She’d pay for it with Medicaid dollars recovered. Last winter people froze to death on New York City streets. Commuters have been pushed, slashed, and set on fire. The current approach helps nobody, least of all the sick. Her plan is specific, lawful, and the first serious proposal on the subject we have heard from a candidate for this office.
On antisemitism, she has pointed out that the Attorney General has used state civil rights law to protect access to other buildings but never a synagogue and has brought discrimination cases for students of many backgrounds but not Jewish ones. She says she would do both. We see no reason to doubt her.
Why now
Ms. Komatireddy is 42, a mother of four, the Brooklyn-born daughter of Indian immigrants, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She was headed for medical school when the September 11 attacks turned her toward law enforcement. She served under Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump, and ran the Drug Enforcement Administration staff. She has never run for anything before.
That is part of why she is catching on. She does not talk like a politician. She talks like an apolitical prosecutor explaining a case, and voters who are tired of being lectured find it a relief. The polls have tightened since Labor Day, and the tightening has come from people who are not natural Republican voters, including families in immigrant neighborhoods who have had enough.
The other part is Ms. James herself. Whatever one thinks of her fights with Washington, they have consumed the office. The state’s chief law enforcement officer has spent seven years looking south toward the White House while the problems in front of her went unattended.
Their debate has changed many New Yorkers’ views and given the NYAG’s race some attention amid the everyday chaos that seems to occupy our politics today. It has also inspired many to move forward and support Saritha. She is a reasonable choice.
We are not asking readers to make a radical decision. We are asking them to hire a prosecutor to run a prosecutor’s office. Saritha Komatireddy has earned the chance, and we urge Yonkers voters to give it to her on November 3.
We urge readers to vote. Early voting starts on October 24.