{"id":355037,"date":"2026-09-23T21:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T21:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/355037\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T21:55:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T21:55:00","slug":"first-latino-brooklyn-da-eric-gonzalez-delivers-emotional-remarks-at-bar-association-hispanic-heritage-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/355037\/","title":{"rendered":"First Latino Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez delivers emotional remarks at bar association Hispanic Heritage event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez teared up Tuesday while accepting an award from the Brooklyn Bar Association in recognition of his trailblazing work as Brooklyn\u2019s \u2013 and the state\u2019s \u2013 first Latino top prosecutor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOur real responsibility is to make sure that we\u2019re not the last to hold these positions,\u201d Gonzalez<\/a> said. \u201cMy only request is that all of you use your collective voices to continue the fight to provide more opportunities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gonzalez\u2019s remarks came at the legal organization\u2019s annual Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, an event he noted was meaningful to him because of how many people in the room were also the first from their community to hold their positions \u2013 referencing judges on different benches across the city and attorneys in certain leadership roles \u2013 and how many of those people had a continued commitment to reaching a hand back to helping the next person through the door.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re all people who have broken barriers in your career in this room, and to be honored and to be considered to be worthy of being a keynote speaker in this matter means a lot to me because of you,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cThese rooms did not always look like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Brooklyn attorneys and judges, including Hon. Joanne Quinones, Hon. Dagmar Plaza-Gonzalez and Hon. Abayomi Ajaiyeoba stand together at the Brooklyn Bar Association\u2019s event.Photo by Isabella Gallo<\/p>\n

Gonzalez knows firsthand that those doors to lofty legal positions aren\u2019t easy to open. A Latino boy from Brooklyn \u2013 first Williamsburg, then East New York \u2013 whose parents held jobs in what he described as Lower East Side sweatshops, going to college, let alone law school, weren\u2019t things he saw as remote possibilities. Until, that is, he was approached by a graduate student in her 20s while skipping out of school as a high-school sophomore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShe said, \u2018Why aren\u2019t you in school?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Because I\u2019m playing handball,\u2019\u201d Gonzalez said, laughing. \u201cShe said, \u2018Listen, you should be in school.\u2019 Then she pulled me aside and said, \u2018What do you want to do with your life?\u2019 I told her, \u2018I don\u2019t know.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The woman told him she was starting a chapter of the club ASPIRA, which supports Latino youth, at his high school, and that she\u2019d pay him and other students to come study and prepare for college at her office on Downtown Brooklyn\u2019s Jay Street.<\/p>\n

So, though he was skeptical, Gonzalez said he trekked from East New York to Downtown Brooklyn \u2013 two of the city\u2019s roughest neighborhoods when he was growing up in the 1980s \u2013 to receive $20 after studying from SAT prep books with a few other Latino kids from his school for four hours every Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Brooklyn Bar Association\u2019s Dan Antonelli and Ang\u00e9licque Moreno stand on either side of Hon. Connie Mallafre and attorney Karlyne Fequiere.<\/p>\n

Gonzalez said he credits that experience with the rest of his life: He earned a high enough score to be admitted to Cornell, then earned admission to the University of Michigan\u2019s Law School, then set his sights on becoming a prosecutor. He won election to head his borough\u2019s district attorney\u2019s office in 2017 and has led it ever since.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShe changed my life,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cHaving that history coming from East New York, I just wanted to serve. I believed in paying it forward, and so that\u2019s what I tried to do \u2026 I had a vision of what a fair criminal justice system could look like, and what I\u2019ve tried to do with my time that I\u2019ve been the shepherd of that office is to do two things: make our community safer, and try to create fundamental fairness in how we do the work here.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Growing up in East New York drove his desire to lead a career in law enforcement, he said. One of the city\u2019s deadliest neighborhoods in the city\u2019s deadliest borough when he lived in it \u2013 one year, 128 people were killed in just his precinct and roughly 900 people were killed in Brooklyn \u2013 he wanted to both improve public safety and ensure people on both sides of the courtroom \u2013 the crime victim and the accused \u2013 got a fair shake.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEast New York was called the murder capital of this state in this city. It was a tough time, and I saw a lot of bad things,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cI knew that those who were killed were hardworking families who lived there and wanted nothing more than safety and fairness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut growing up in that precinct, I also saw that there was distrust of law enforcement,\u201d he continued. \u201cIt\u2019s tough to explain because everyone wants to be safe, but if people don\u2019t feel they\u2019re treated with respect and dignity, they don\u2019t have faith in the system, and they feel less safe. That was why I wanted to be a prosecutor in Brooklyn \u2026 I always cared about having a sense of public safety and believed that people could not live their lives if they didn\u2019t feel safe in their community.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Gonzalez speaks at the Brooklyn Bar Association\u2019s event.<\/p>\n

Gun violence in Brooklyn has decreased under Gonzalez \u2013 It hit its lowest point ever last year<\/a>. That\u2019s a mission that\u2019s deeply personal to him \u2013 his younger brother was shot and killed in the Bronx \u2013 and ongoing \u2013 his voice tightened while noting that a man had been shot in Downtown Brooklyn a few streets over just earlier that afternoon.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t feel like the work is complete. I don\u2019t feel like I deserve to get all the recognition, because there\u2019s still much more work for us to do,\u201d the district attorney said. \u201cI made a commitment to the people of Brooklyn that I would drive down gun violence. I\u2019m proud that Brooklyn is safer than ever before. But, there was a shooting up the block earlier today and a young man, 24 years old, lost his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mission is never really done, which is why I say I don\u2019t like getting recognition because I have much more to do, but I am proud that many people feel represented because I exist in this space,\u201d he continued, tearing up.<\/p>\n

\"\"Brooklyn judges and attorneys stand together, including Brooklyn Supreme Civil Administrative Judge Genine Edwards, Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Joanne Quinones and Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Dagmar Plaza-Gonzalez.<\/p>\n

Under Gonzalez, the Brooklyn District Attorney\u2019s Office has pushed forward programs to overturn wrongful convictions. He\u2019s been involved in 42 such cases, something he sees as important in ensuring people trust law enforcement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we started this work in the Brooklyn DA\u2019s office, people thought it would undermine the confidence in the DA\u2019s work,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cMy experiences taught me just the opposite-that when you come forward with the humility to acknowledge when things haven\u2019t gone right, and you make the effort to correct those miscarriages of justice, and you explain why it\u2019s happened and you train on it, the opposite impact occurs: People have confidence that the office will be seeking to do the right thing moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s also helped diversify the office during his tenure, something he said is critical, both to wedging the door to the legal world open further and to the office\u2019s proper function.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Connie Mallafre, Brooklyn Women\u2019s Bar Association President Elect Ruth Chung, Columbian Lawyers Association President Grace Borrino and Appellate Division, Second Department Justice Lillian Wan stand at the Brooklyn Bar Association\u2019s event.<\/p>\n

\u201cI entered a district attorney\u2019s office that was very large \u2013 the largest district attorney\u2019s office in the state, but was not as diverse as it is today,\u201d Gonzalez said. \u201cPeople who looked like a lot of the people in this room weren\u2019t really seen in leadership roles in a lot of the institutions and our courthouses.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not representation for the sake of representation,\u201d the district attorney continued. \u201cIt\u2019s representation because when we represent, we\u2019re better. And when people are coming behind you, our young students and young people see you in these rooms and in your positions, they know that they can get there too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Members of the Abrams and Fensterman firm, which hosted the Brooklyn Bar Association\u2019s event, stand with Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. (From right to left: Octavia Brown-Lyde, Peter McNally, Eric Gonzalez, Frances Ciorciari, Brendan Romano and Efrain Lipshutz.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez teared up Tuesday while accepting an award from the Brooklyn Bar Association in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,56045,5533,10072,2710,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-355037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-brooklyn-bar-association","tag-eric-gonzalez","tag-hispanic-heritage-month","tag-law","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}