The Progressive Prosecutor Project

Andrew McCarthy has this article in Commentary with the above title.

May I introduce to you, then, a new and uniquely destructive actor on the 21st-century scene: the progressive prosecutor.

For such law “enforcers,” the obstruction of immigration-law enforcement barely scratches the surface. The agenda here is to obstruct prosecution itself.

McCarthy notes the revolution in policing through the “broken windows” theory of Wilson and Kelling and the Compstat system in New York. This is certainly part of the dramatic reduction in crime from the early 90s onward, but McCarthy’s piece could be read to imply it was the only reason. It was not. Tough sentencing mattered also, as did less tangible factors. Even so, his next point is quite correct.

Nevertheless, success can be its own undoing. The crime waves that washed over America from the tumultuous 1960s into the 1990s are not in the conscious memory of young Americans. New Yorkers graduating from college today were toddlers when Rudy Giuliani was mayor. Americans of a certain age, especially those of us who spent much of our professional lives fighting crime, remember the Bad Old Days and scoff at the conceit that they could not come back—and do so far more quickly than it took to suppress this manifestation of evil, an enduring human condition. Yet, as [Steven] Malanga [of the Manhattan Institute] adroitly observes, the revival of urban neighborhoods has lured the well-to-do to cities. Among those relocating are college graduates attracted by the prospect of tech-sector careers. Those products of American higher education have “the progressive beliefs typical of their demographic.”

Those beliefs prompt people to vote for politicians and policies that will slowly but steadily undermine the great crime-fighting success of the recent past. On the front line of this effort is the election of “progressive prosecutors,” and McCarthy relates the criminogenic policies of several of the most prominent examples. He then concludes:

It has become a commonplace for clueless pols to wax delirious over criminal-justice reform—craving any glimmer of bipartisan light in our deeply divided politics. We’d do well to resist the kumbaya moment. Crime was suppressed, to the nation’s great benefit, by clear thinking about the willfulness of offenders, and the realization that compassion is owed, first and foremost, to the aggrieved. The reformers prominently include progressive prosecutors and their patrons, who would have us unlearn those hard lessons. They are making real strides toward the dystopia we thought we’d left behind.