City Room is reporting that Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau will not seek re-election this year. Morgenthau, who will turn 90 this summer, has held the post since 1975.

His departure marks a changing of the guard and opens one of
Manhattan’s plum elected posts for the first time in decades — a major
draw in a year when the overturning of term limits has left many of the
city’s ambitious younger politicians pondering their future.

This changing of the guard could also be a tremendous opportunity to make traffic justice an issue in the election of the next DA. Morgenthau’s successor will replace the man whose office recently doled out a 16-day jail term to a speeding drunk driver who killed a woman and left the scene — just one example of the cheapening of human life that livable streets advocates have, sadly, come to expect from the borough’s top enforcer.

Even before today’s news, Leslie Crocker Snyder had again thrown her hat in the ring. Here’s hoping she and her opponents will give public safety on New York City streets the attention it sorely needs.