Photo Caption: Christian Schwier/Fotolia While the election is still more than a year away, talk has already begun as to who may run for Queens district attorney, a title that Richard Brown has held since 1991, making him New York City's longest-serving DA. Brown, 86 and a Democrat, ran unopposed in 2015 for his seventh term in office. He has been open with his struggles with Parkinson's disease but has said that he intends to finish up his term. In an interview with columnist Len Levitt for amNew York, Brown, a former judge, said that no one is pressuring him to retire at this point, and that a decision to retire would be his own. “Nobody's pressing me,” Brown said in the interview. “I love this job.” New York City Councilman Rory Lancman, a Democrat who represents Fresh Meadows, Jamaica and other sections of eastern Queens, said he is looking at a run for the seat. Lancman chairs the council's Justice System committee—formerly known as the Courts and Legal Services Committee, for which Lancman also served as the chair—which has jurisdiction over the city's five DA's offices, the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor and the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice. Lancman has also been out front on advancing criminal justice reform in the city: he supports closing the massive jail complex on Rikers Island, reforming cash bail and decriminalizing low-level offenses like turnstile jumping and smoking marijuana in public. “Our city needs very substantial criminal justice reform and I wouldn't exclude Queens from that judgment,” Lancman said. DAs are in a powerful position to push criminal justice reform policies, Lancman said. And if you want to hold him up next to Larry Krasner, the recently elected reformist DA for Philadelphia, Lancman said he would “welcome the comparison.” Lancman says he has has more than $793,000 on hand combined from three separate campaign finance funds. Queens Borough president Melinda Katz has also been rumored to be mulling over a run for the seat, multiple sources told the Queens Chronicle. but a spokesperson for her campaign office declined to comment. In most years since 1994, Katz has been in elected office, but took a hiatus from politics in 2009 to work at Greenberg Traurig before returning in 2013 for a victorious run for borough president. She will be termed out in 2021. In recent years, some of Brown's fellow district attorneys in the city have tacked left in their policies and enforcement priorities: in contrast to the vast majority of DAs races, the candidates in the 2017 race for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office sparred over who would be a better reformer, rather than comparing tough-on-crime bonafides. Brown's office has spoken out against closing Rikers, continues to prosecute turnstile jumpers and is now the only DA's office in the city without a conviction review unit (Staten Island just received funding to start its own unit in the current fiscal year, which began this month). Next to Staten Island, which regularly elects Republicans to Congress, the state legislature and City Council, Queens is the most conservative borough in the city. Twenty-two percent of Queens voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, compared to an average of 12.6 percent combined for the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan. But, as evidenced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's primary victory in June over Queens Democratic Party boss and longtime U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley, who represents northern Queens and the southeast portions of the Bronx, progressive-leaning voters are fired up. A representative of the New Queens Democrats, a progressive-leaning group, said in an email that it has been meeting with and vetting potential candidates for the seat. In that kind of climate, said Doug Muzzio, a professor at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, “machine” Democrats like Crowley and Brown “are likely to be targets.” But he noted that a DA needs to be electable borough-wide, thus they'll have to win over more conservative voters in places like Maspeth and Howard Beach. “I think that traditional notions of 'viability' have changed particularly among Democratic voters but don't see a 'democratic socialist' winning the DA race,” Muzzio said. “But times are strange.”