“Reform prosecutors” are starting to flounder in California, exposing just how unpopular criminal justice reform is in reality once it moves past the half-baked platitudes of the campaign cycle.
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price will soon be facing a recall election, with the Alameda Registrar of Voters confirming that recall supporters secured enough signatures. Crime has gone up in Oakland, the biggest city in Alameda County, every year since 2020, and Price oversaw a 26% increase in crime last year.
Price’s cavalier attitude toward crime has made the problem worse, highlighted by her opposing jail time for gang members who shot and killed a toddler and by Price ludicrously saying that locking up violent repeat criminals doesn’t actually affect crime. Her ideology matches that of former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled in 2022 by more than 35,000 votes than he was elected with in 2019.
Los Angeles voters did not succeed in getting their recall effort on the ballot (potentially due to some chicanery in the signature verification process), but they will get a chance to recall the county’s district attorney, George Gascon, later this year. Gascon has built his reputation on going soft on sex criminals, gang members, and violent criminals. In last month’s primary, Gascon pulled just 25.2% of the vote. With most of the candidates in the 12-man field being anti-Gascon, the chances are that both he and Price could be out of office by this time next year.
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Boudin, Gascon, and Price all proved that criminal justice reform wasn’t about helping out poor, beleaguered souls who got minor drug possession charges or were caught up in bad circumstances. That is how it is sold in campaigns, but when they talk about fighting “mass incarceration,” they mean that emptying jails is the priority above all else. That means keeping all criminals out of jail, regardless of how violent or dangerous they are or how long their rap sheet is.
As it turns out, that isn’t popular even among the large chunk of Democratic voters that make up California’s Democratic cities. If voters in Oakland and Los Angeles join their colleagues in San Francisco in casting out these “reform prosecutors,” they should remember the snake oil they were sold the first time around.