Verdict on Reform Prosecutors More Mixed Than Headlines Suggest

I consider myself middle of the road on police and criminal justice reform issues. As I said in the new episode of the podcast just out this afternoon, high crime rates will snuff out criminal justice reform as surely as night follows day. I'd reiterate a point I've made at other points over the years: no one has a greater interest in low crime rates than liberals and progressives because high crime rates spawn conservative politics. They don't just turn the tide against more humane criminal justice policies. They shift the whole political universe in a more authoritarian, conservative direction. Again, just an observable fact.

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But with all this said, the narrative emerging out of yesterday's primaries that voters sent a big rebuke to Democrats over law and order politics or that it was a rejection of criminal justice reformers is at best incomplete.

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This editorial from The Los Angeles Times gives a good review of the races across the state. It's really more of a mixed bag. Yes, Chesa Boudin went down to a resounding recall defeat. But there were a number of other races where reformist prosecutors did fine. The reformist state attorney general, Rob Bonta, managed to get more than 50% of the vote in a crowded field.

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One interesting case is that of L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva. He was first elected as reform-minded Democrat (not reform in reform DA sense) in 2018 but has shifted hard to the right and now frequently appears as a guest on Tucker Carlson as a law and order foe of the "woke left." In his primary he got just under 35% of the vote and will now face a run-off with the number two vote-getter. As the Times points out that's the worst result for incumbent LA County Sheriff in the last century.

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The whole picture is more of a mixed bag than the Boudin headlines would suggest.

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I would stress again: I would expect reformers to be doing worse. That is because while crime rates are still far below the highs of the early '90s, they are up. What's more, while I think the spike in crime is mostly driven by dislocations caused by the pandemic critics can point to at least a broad chronology in which the rise of criminal justice reform was followed by rising crime rates. What's more, many of the policies reformers espouse are ones I'm at best ambivalent about. So this really isn't me trying to put the best face on something. The actual results both in California and the rest of the country are just much more equivocal than the overnight reports suggest. If anything they show the resilience of reform politics in a tough electoral environment.

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