The recall of Frisco district attorney Chesa Boudin has given rise to two opposing lessons. The first is that criminal law reform is dead, blamed as the cause of increasing crime and a growing public sense that society has become unsafe. The second is that the problem is messaging, as tough-on-crime advocates are proving successful in lying to the public to foster fears and a backlash against progressive prosecutors.
The reality is that neither of these is either accurate or useful in explaining complex problems. Crime is trending up again, after a lengthy unexplained drop from the really bad old day of the 1990s. It’s nowhere near what it was back then, but it’s also not remaining at its low levels or still falling. People not only know this from the media reports,, but from their own observations and life. Denying it is not merely bizarre, but foolishly ineffective.
Reciting crime stats comparing today with 30 years ago wins no one’s heart or mind, but it’s all progressive reform activists have to try to salvage their progressive prosecutors, so that’s what they do. And they’re not wrong, per se, but they’re not right either. Much as academics and partisans take credit and level blame for crime going up and down, it’s never really understood and a consequences of a multitude of factors, most which have nothing to do with the usual excuses. Blaming progressive prosecutors is silly, just as lauding their plans to “fix” the system by choosing not to do their job when they don’t feel like it.
But as argued, Boudin wasn’t recalled because of what he did as much as what he represented, a failed social approach.
But there are also signs that the Boudin recall hinged on factors particular to the city of San Francisco and may not represent a larger national backlash to the movement.
In other elections, reform prosecutors prevailed, suggesting that while there might be a growing concern about crime, it does not necessarily mean that people are blaming reforms for it or that they are done with reforms and ready to go back to prison nation, locking away as many people as possible for as long as possible.
The push for reform was once touted as bipartisan, common-sense medicine for a country that leads the world in incarceration. But it has been reframed by opponents, including law enforcement groups, as the province of the far left.
To be fair, the far left has seized ownership and control of reforms, rejecting bipartisanship in formulating sound and sustainable change in favor of simplistic dogmatic change. Defund police, anyone? Abolish prisons, maybe? Reformers rejected nuanced changes that would produce significant improvements without undermining the functioning of the system, as too incremental and hard to explain to their tribe’s useful idiots. The choice didn’t have to be between imposing bail on everyone or no one, but imposing only when necessary. But that would take a scalpel, and the reformers only had a bludgeon.
“No, California didn’t just send a message on crime — only voter apathy,” read the headline of an editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle, citing low turnout.
That people didn’t come out to vote for Boudin wasn’t apathy. Like voting against Chesa, it was a choice. If they were apathetic, it was because they were not moved to vote because of the failed mess San Francisco was becoming. They may not have blamed Boudin, but they weren’t going to fight for their city to get increasingly worse either.
One commentator, in a Chronicle opinion essay, warned of the emergence of what he called the “‘I’m a progressive, but …’ demographic” of affluent white people whose commitment to social justice and ending mass incarceration has limits and whose frustrations are real, even if the recall campaign was fueled by misinformation. “Boudin supporters can’t afford to dismiss the movement against meaningful reform as a purely astroturfed coalition,” he wrote.
For years, I’ve sought to make the point that reform without consensus won’t happen. As much as the majority of a country supports eradicating the burden of unlawful discrimination, that does not mean they are prepared to shift the burden onto themselves and create a brave new world where the majority exists to serve the minority. If it works for everyone, and everyone can live with it, then it can survive. If it fails the majority, then it has no chance of survival.
For years, I’ve sought to make the point that reform has to do more than merely change things, but change them for the better. Improving the legal system isn’t just about sloganeering, but dealing with the complexities of a system that will never be perfect because people aren’t perfect. We’ve learned from the Drug Wars that merely ratcheting up sentences doesn’t eliminate crime, even though people were certain that’s how it would work. We have yet to learn that eliminating sentences isn’t the answer either, as some people do bad things to other people, and the people to whom they do it deserve some consideration as well as the people doing the dirty.
Janos Marton, the national director of Dream Corps JUSTICE, an advocacy group, and a candidate in last year’s race for Manhattan district attorney, said he was not impressed with arguments that played down the significance of Mr. Boudin’s loss in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. “This is a huge deal,” he said. “This is very disappointing. This is a big setback.”
The recall may not have been a death knell for the movement, he said, but it exposed “longstanding weaknesses,” particularly a failure to recognize that liberal gains in the criminal justice arena are fragile and must be defended even after they are won.
The lesson on the left is that they need to double down, dig the hole deeper, fight, fight, fight.
“We’re not learning the lessons of past defeats,” Mr. Marton said, adding, “The very aggressive messaging that’s hostile to criminal justice reform is not going to let up, so we need to be honest about whether our countermessaging as a movement is successful.”
Progressive activists see their problem as movement countermessaging, not that people still support reforms, but just not their reforms. The people in San Francisco sent a message that they don’t want to live in the social cesspool that progressive policies have created. It’s unclear whether the interest in reform will survive, but if so, it will have to be far smarter, focused and more sustainable than the childish crap progressives spew on twitter.
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