Deja Vu All Over Again

A March 4 article by By Paul Demko, Jeremy White and Jason Befferman published in POLITICO reports that liberal Democrat politicians in some of the nation’s most progressive cities are abandoning the soft-on-crime policies that they vigorously supported a few years ago. Back in 2020, as the George Floyd riots were tearing up these same cities, politicians running New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco were insisting that sentences for so-called “low level” drug and theft related crimes be reduced, that cash bail be eliminated and that criminals, including violent gang members, be released early to rehabilitation programs. The motivator for these policies was the systemic racism narrative promoted by progressive academics, non-profits like Black Lives Matter, race-baiting politicians and the national media. While this narrative had been pushed since the 1990s, it got major traction after Floyd’s death as deep blue cities reflexively cut police budgets, elected pro-defendant prosecutors and swept away consequences for crime. Then something happened.

Crime rates skyrocketed. Murder, assault, commercial burglary, vehicle theft, carjacking, drug trafficking, and overdose deaths all went up.  Way up. City streets became unsafe, even during the day. Looting of stores has become so common that many closed to cut losses, and protect employees and customers. After a couple of years of making excuses for the increased crime some politicians found themselves out of a job.  Democrat New York Mayor Eric Adams was elected on the promise to crack down on crime. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was voted out of office because he wouldn’t.

Washington, DC’s progressive city council, which tried to pass a soft-on-crime measure last year, has just passed a tough-on-crime package that will hold suspects in jail until they are tried. San Francisco voters just passed a law requiring drug screening for welfare recipients. The city’s mayor and the mayor of San Jose, both progressive democrats, have endorsed a statewide ballot measure that will sharply increase penalties for theft and drug dealing. The governor of New York, Democrat Kathy Hochul, has just dispatched national guard troops to protect the New York City subways.

It should surprise no one that politicians would so radially change their positions to save their jobs. But even after voting for DC’s crime package, two liberal members of the city council are facing recalls.

The Soros-funded District Attorneys across the country are also under fire for their refusal to hold criminals accountable.  Baltimore’s progressive state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby was voted out in 2022. St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner resigned last June as the Attorney General was preparing to remove her from office. Last November, Loudoun County, VA commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj was voted out of office. Soft-on-crime Chicago state’s attorney Kim Fox has announced that she will not seek re-election this year, as has Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm. Upstate New York DA David Clegg has also declined to run again. The March primary has pitted beleaguered Los Angeles district attorney George Gascon against former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman in a November runoff.  Recent polling found that 52% of LA residents want Gascon replaced. Oakland District Attorney Pamela Price, who often refuses to charge black offenders, is also facing a recall. It is being led by the Oakland NAACP and a prominent black bishop. 

Die hard progressives (read socialists) are not happy watching democrats abandon them. Addressing the turnaround by San Francisco mayor London Breed, progressive former San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar said, “You’ve got a mayor that’s in big trouble, likely not going to be mayor again, so she’s throwing some hail marys out there.”  The head of the New York chapter of the ACLU was more pointed, “These heavy-handed approaches will, like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers, ripping a page straight out of the Giuliani playbook.”

While the movement to restore law and order is real, the policies undermining it began to be put in place twenty years ago. The road to truly making the nation’s cities and towns safe again will be long.

When we at CJLF started speaking out against progressive criminal justice reforms many years ago, the politicians supporting those reforms called us “fearmongers,”  somehow forgetting that America suffered a similar crime wave due to similar soft-on-crime policies fourty years ago.  Now they fear losing their jobs.

“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know,” President Harry Truman.