Thanks to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, New York is a city turned upside down.
Get caught with an illegal gun, get released without bail. Shove an elderly person to the ground, attack someone because they are Asian, a slap on the wrist. Shoplift again . . . and again . . . and again . . . nothing.
But defend yourself and your place of business from a man who attacks you, and Bragg sends you to Rikers.
Jose Alba, 51, was working at a bodega on Broadway near West 139th Street late last Friday night. A woman came in wanting chips and couldn’t pay; Alba wouldn’t give them to her for free.
Furious, the woman’s boyfriend, Austin Simon, 35, went behind the counter and confronted Alba. Video of the incident clearly shows Simon is the aggressor. He yells at Alba, gets in his personal space, then shoves him into the wall.
While Simon continues to rant, Alba gets up and tries to leave. Simon grabs him by the back of the neck.
It’s at this point that Alba takes a knife off a nearby shelf and stabs Simon. The two continue to fight, falling off camera, until Alba comes back into frame — his arm wounded, bleeding, perhaps because he was stabbed by Simon’s girlfriend. A bloody knife in his hands.
“He was cornered in,” Alba’s daughter, Yulissa, tells The Post. “As you can see in the video, he was cornered in, and when he saw himself getting taken outside, he thought his life was being threatened and he defended himself.”
And not just threatened. Simon assaulted him.
But in Bragg’s world, Alba is being way overcharged with murder in the second degree, and locked up on $250,000 bail.
What Alvin Bragg is practicing isn’t justice. It’s madness. Police are villains, criminals are heroes and victims are told to accept their fate.
Jose Alba needs to be free. Alvin Bragg needs to be out of office.