By Andrew McCarthy
Sunday, February 16, 2020
A newly minted district attorney for a major American
city vows to establish an immigration unit. At first blush, that would seem
entirely normal for a prosecutor’s office. Immigration laws require
enforcement, and prosecutors are in the law-enforcement business.
But no—the new San Francisco DA actually has in mind an
immigration defense unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to
protect undocumented aliens—those who are either illegal and thus deportable to
begin with, or for whom a criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful
status and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement target would be
not the law violators but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who
enforce federal laws, along with any local police and corrections officials who
have the temerity to assist ICE in that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in
the words of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on immigration”—the
president having made signature issues of border security and the stepped-up
deportation of aliens who flout the laws.
That kind of immigration unit is not something
you’d expect to find in a district attorney’s office. But of course, neither
would you expect, upon this new DA’s election, a victory party marked by
ear-splitting chants of “F*ck POA!” The POA is the Police Officers Association.
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. It is, to quote Chesa Boudin, the newly
elected progressive prosecutor described above, “a movement…rejecting the
notion that, to be free, we must cage others.”
The movement he mentions is self-consciously racialist.
It is not merely heedless of, but fiercely hostile to acknowledgement of, one
signally inconvenient fact: The disproportionate incarceration rate for African
Americans in comparison to their proportion of the overall population (like the
closely related higher rate of crime victimization suffered by African-American
communities) is due to striking differences in behavior. For all the chatter
about “reform,” what the left calls “mass incarceration” is not principally a
criminal-justice issue. It is the glaring symptom of a cultural issue,
inextricably intertwined with what progressive governance has done to erode
bonds of family, faith, and intermediate institutions that not so long ago had
pride of place over the individual’s ties to (and dependence on) the state.
But you are not to see it that way. For progressive
prosecutors, it is not that young black males commit strikingly more crimes
than other demographics; it is that the system is endemically racist, both
willfully and unconsciously. And pay no mind to the record-high minority
recruitment in police departments and prosecutors’ offices, many of which are
now led by black and other minority officials. Far from serving as the solution
to systematic racism, they simply serve as cover when they join these indelibly
bigoted institutions. The mass-incarceration “crisis,” we are to believe, stems
from the bigoted targeting of “oppressed” populations for investigation.
We are told we inhabit not a constitutional republic but
a “carceral state” when 2.2 million people, out of a population of 330 million,
are in custody after being proved guilty of felonies beyond a reasonable doubt,
followed by multiple rounds of appeal in a justice system run predominantly by
political progressives—a “carceral state” that is the envy of the world (or
haven’t you noticed that our immigration enforcement “crisis” involves millions
seeking to enter and stay in the United States).
By the movement’s lights, the very act of policing, of
enforcing the laws enacted by the people’s representatives, is an exercise in
race-based persecution. Indeed, in its most triumphalist iteration—and it is
really feeling its oats these days—the movement would eliminate police
departments. Not tame them. Not scale them back. Eliminate them.
Criminal-justice “reform” is all the rage these days. Not
just on the political left but across the bipartisan Beltway, with more
momentum under President Donald Trump than it has ever enjoyed. (His Super Bowl
commercial touted his work in this area.) This periodically astonishes those of
us still mindful of our good fortune to live in an era of historically low
crime, wrought by the intelligence-driven revolution in policing begun in the
early 1990s.
The Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga crunches the
numbers that a generation of domestic tranquility has bleached from memory and
reports: “The nation’s violent-crime rate blasted from 161 crimes per 100,000
people in 1960 to 364 a decade later, reaching a terrifying summit of 758 in
1991.” In the early 1990s, however, law-enforcement principles guided by
information technology and gimlet-eyed social science were pioneered by New
York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with his police commissioner, Bill
Bratton. They included such innovations as “Compstat,” a system that enabled
precinct commanders to allocate police assets based on timely crime statistics,
and the “broken windows” theory posited in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George
Kelling, which championed the cultural and intelligence-gathering benefits of
taking action against petty crime.
The results were transformative, and they spread across
the country. Law and order were restored as the norm of the streets,
gentrifying neighborhoods that had been riven by decades of gang violence and
law-breaking. In the past 30 years, violent crime in New York City has
plummeted an astonishing 70 percent. In 1990, there were 2,245 people murdered
in New York City; in 2018, the number was 289, a decline of 80 percent, even
though the city’s population had increased by more than a million (to about 8.5
million) in that span. (Murders ticked up to 318 in 2019, but that’s still just
a fraction of 1980s carnage and compares favorably to the worrisome but still
historically low 335 murders recorded in 2016.) New York is a trailblazer but
not an outlier: Violent crime has been cut in half nationwide since 1990, and
property crimes reduced slightly more than that.
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 Malanga 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.”
To say this demographic is spearheading a resurgence of
progressive urban governance understates the matter. It is one thing to be soft
on crime. Today, the hard-left shock troops who are ascendant in Democratic
Party politics are fighting The War on Cops, to adopt the fitting title
of Heather Mac Donald’s deeply researched book.
And ingeniously front and center in the waging of this
war is the Progressive Prosecutor Project.
***
Progressives grasp, in a way their political adversaries
mostly do not, that executive power is the change agent in modern society. The
Framers had in mind a vision of limited government in which power was divided
and distributed among components that would be motivated to check one
another—separate state and federal sovereigns, and within each, discrete
executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It is a cliché to speak of the
latter as “co-equal” branches of government. The founding conception was that
legislative power—close to the people, endowed with the authority to enact law,
create courts and agencies, make rules for them, and control their
budgets—would be primus inter pares.
A century-plus of progressive governance has dramatically
overhauled this construct. The executive is now the principal locus of power.
The complexity of modern society, the theory runs, requires ever greater
interventions by bureaucracies to which legislatures delegate their regulatory
authority. Most of this administrative state ultimately answers to the chief
executive, who is empowered to make key appointments and impose policy
direction. Legislative authority is marginalized. The executive both manages
the bureaucracy and, more significantly, exercises discretion regarding which
laws get enforced.
In the arena of criminal justice, this implicates the
venerable doctrine of “prosecutorial discretion.” Properly applied,
prosecutorial discretion is nothing more than common-sense resource-allocation
guidance. Law-enforcement assets (police, prosecutors, administrative support,
and, ultimately, courts and prisons) are finite. It would not be possible to
prosecute every crime, no matter how trivial. Nor would such overbearing
enforcement comport with a free society. Therefore, prosecutors are given broad
discretion to prioritize the enforcement of some laws at the expense of others
(say, to focus more on gang violence and drug trafficking than
financial-institution fraud if that’s what local conditions call for).
Government attorneys also get to determine which offenders merit prosecution as
opposed to some form of diversion (e.g., unconditional non-prosecution
for a given offense, adjournment of an arrest case in contemplation of
dismissal without formal charges after a period of good behavior, counseling or
community service in lieu of indictment, and so on).
Prosecutorial discretion, picking and choosing which
cases to pursue, should be and has historically been unremarkable. But like any
discretionary authority, it can be abused. If the weighing of the merits of
prosecution based on the facts of individual cases morphs into a programmatic
decision not to prosecute various categories of crime, it becomes an
executive veto of the community’s right to define and punish penal offenses
through its legislative representatives.
This flouts the foundational executive duty to execute
the laws faithfully. Similarly, if what is rationalized as “prosecutorial
discretion” devolves into charging decisions that are based on class distinctions,
particularly race, as opposed to a color-blind assessment of the criminal
histories of suspects in individual cases, this eviscerates the bedrock
principle of equal protection. It undermines the rule of law itself.
And here we see how muscular, how potentially
transformational, is the power of the prosecutor.
If a state or local legislature dared to enact a law that
made such distinctions as race, ethnicity, or sex dispositive of, or even
relevant to, the decision to prosecute, such a law would promptly be
invalidated on constitutional grounds. It would either be thrown out by the
courts or repealed due to public outcry. Similarly, a judicial ruling that
endorsed such invidious discrimination would quickly be reversed by appellate
courts or legislative action.
District attorneys, by contrast, can achieve the same
noxiously discriminatory result without any fuss—through the pretextual
exercise of prosecutorial discretion. At first, it would be done subtly,
ostensibly on a case-by-case basis, as if the merits of each suspect, rather
than class distinctions, were driving the result. But as the public grew
gradually inured to the notion that such distinctions were a legitimate factor
in prosecutorial determinations, our assumptions would change, and so would the
facts on the ground.
Eventually, we would come to the stage the left believes
we have now reached: A critical mass of people in urban centers have bought
into narratives about the racialist bias of law enforcement, so much so that
progressives are comfortable brandishing them in campaigns for public office. These
narratives are no longer up for debate in a growing number of cities where
progressives dominate the political system, the media, and, increasingly,
top-tier positions at law-enforcement agencies.
The key to understanding the Machiavellian brilliance of
the Progressive Prosecutor Project is this: As a matter of constitutional law,
no legislature or court has the power to order a prosecutor to charge any crime
against any person. In our system, prosecution is exclusively an executive
call. Practically speaking, short of voting a rogue district attorney out of
office, there is no remedy for abusive discretionary omissions—decisions
not to prosecute. To be sure, if a prosecutor performs some affirmative illegal
act while enforcing the law, there are legal remedies available—motions to
suppress evidence, lawsuits against government, potentially even prosecution.
But omissions are a different story. It is nigh impossible to force
prosecutors to take enforcement action. Thus, a willful district attorney has enormous
power to install non-prosecution as the default policy.
Realizing this, the left’s social-justice warriors have
grasped that the control of prosecutorial power may be the most effective route
to rapid societal transformation. It is transformation driven not by law,
logic, or a half-century’s empirical data on offense behavior and policing
methods, but by cultural Marxist narratives: the criminal-justice system and
its law-enforcement agencies as a superstructure reifying America’s pervasive
racism, xenophobia, and forcible oppression of The Other.
Equally important, prosecutorial power is attainable
at the ballot box. For the most part, district attorneys, who oversee state
prosecution at the municipal level throughout the United States, are elected
officials. (By contrast, United States attorneys, who oversee federal
prosecutions, are Senate-confirmed appointees of the president.) But the vast
majority of DA elections have not traditionally been high-profile, high-dollar
affairs, in the way contests for governor and mayor tend to be. This, despite
the fact that top prosecutors wield enormous power, setting the priorities and
parameters of police enforcement action, which determine whether order or chaos
reigns supreme on the streets.
DA candidates tend to be politically active lawyers who
have gained prosecutorial experience as young attorneys before moving on to
respected law firms. They are slated by their party to run for the chief
prosecutor position. Often, these races are not competitive. In de facto
one-party governance (Democratic), which controls most urban centers, the DA
candidate runs virtually unopposed, the real contest limited to any intraparty
vying for the nomination.
Consequently, DA positions have been ripe for the taking.
Over the last few years, a network of progressive activists backed by big money
has seized the day.
Most notable is George Soros, the 89-year-old billionaire
investor and currency trader, whose Open Society Foundations lavishly fund
leftist causes and politicians. As noted by the left-leaning scholar Rachel
Elise Barkow (in her provocative bestseller, Prisoners of Politics: Breaking
the Cycle of Mass Incarceration), DA campaigns are traditionally modest
affairs, with budgets that seldom exceed five-figure fundraising. This creates
an opportunity, and the Soros network has pounced, overwhelming the field by
pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of favored candidates.
The Open Society Foundations network is joined in its
effort by other progressive actors—Democratic trial lawyers, the Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), the Civic Participation Action Fund, such
political action committees as Color of Change and Real Justice, and Black
Lives Matter. Together they have backed and supported the electoral efforts of
progressive prosecutors in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Orlando, St. Louis,
Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, New Mexico, and elsewhere.
Barkow intuits that the lesson is that overtly
progressive agendas can win if they have sufficient financial support to get
their message out. I’m more inclined to believe that, at least for now, in
cities living off the low-crime legacy of the intelligent policing revolution,
hard-left community organizers resonate with heavily Democratic constituencies
because they now outspend, as well as outwork, left-leaning moderates.
The progressive prosecutor is perhaps best instantiated
by the aforementioned San Francisco DA. He is 39-year-old Chesa Boudin, the
honoree at that raucous anti-cop victory celebration and pioneer of the
anti-enforcement approach to enforcement. If the name has the faint ring of the
dim and distant past, there is a good reason. Yale- and Oxford-educated Boudin
is the son of Weather Underground terrorists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.
Alas, his parents were not around for his formative years. Still an infant on
October 20, 1981, Chesa was left with a sitter as they went off with their
Black Liberation Army confederates to execute the infamous Brinks armored-car
robbery in Nanuet, New York—a blow against the indelible racism of AmeriKKKa,
in which the plotters murdered a private security guard and two police
officers, including Waverly Brown, a U.S. Air Force combat veteran who had
become Nyack’s first African-American police officer.
Airbrushed into an “author and activist,” Gilbert is
still serving his murder sentence. Released after decades in custody, Kathy
Boudin is now—you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn—the co-founder and
co-director of Columbia University’s Center for Justice. There, she studies the
effects of (what else?) mass incarceration while agitating for criminal-justice
reform.
Chesa was raised in Chicago by their Weatherman comrades
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, two other terrorists who escaped prosecution
due to the excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO scandal (“Guilty as sin, free as a
bird,” as Ayers himself put it). They, too, have been reinvented as
distinguished academics. Dohrn, co-author of the terrorists’ “Declaration of a
State of War” against the United States, recently retired from her perch as a
clinical law professor at Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center.
Ayers retired as a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of
Illinois. In 1997, he penned A Kind and Just Parent, a scathing
indictment of the American justice system, which he analogized to South Africa
under apartheid. Barack Obama, then a young Chicago pol and acquaintance of
Ayers and Dohrn, raved that the book was a “searing and timely account.”
As he recounts in his memoir Gringo: A Coming of Age
in Latin America, Chesa Boudin cut his political teeth as a translator and
think-tank researcher for Hugo Chavez’s regime. In this, he was tracing the
footsteps of Ayers, a frequent visitor to Venezuela and devotee of the
Bolivarian revolution’s education “reforms”—and how well that is all working
out! Boudin eventually joined the San Francisco public defender’s office but
did not try cases and had no prosecutorial experience when he ran for DA.
In that progressive paradise, though, he is radical
royalty, his candidacy lauded by Senator Bernie Sanders, Communist icon Angela
Davis, Islamist apologist Linda Sarsour, and Shaun King, the civil-rights
activist and Black Lives Matter promoter. His fundraising blew away the field,
led by Soros ally Chloe Cockburn (program manager for criminal-justice reform
at the Open Philanthropy Project, a left-wing mega-donor, after a stint as
counsel to the ACLU’s “campaign to end mass incarceration”). Also included
among Boudin supporters were such Soros-backed ventures as the Tides Foundation
and the Brennan Center for Justice.
No one will ever describe the new DA as abashed. He vows
to dial back what he frames as undue police focus on people of color, the
implication being that it is police animus against people of color—not the fact
that communities of color are inordinately victimized by crime—that generates
arrests, prosecutions, and imprisonment. Boudin would halt prosecution of minor
“quality of life” offenses—essentially rejecting the “broken windows” approach.
His campaign promises included ending both the cash bail
system and enhanced sanctions against gang members. Repealing cash bail is a
hard-left hobby horse, a storyline that accused felons languish in prison for
nonviolent crimes because they are minorities of minimal means, while the
well-to-do are sprung. In reality, bail is presumptively granted to all
arrestees (they are presumed innocent until proven guilty), but it is denied in
cases that present some combination of a serious offense, an accused with an
extensive criminal history, and strong indications that the accused is apt to
abscond. It is fair enough to argue that the rich should not escape pretrial
detention in cases that call for it; but it is preposterous to contend that, to
achieve equal justice, we should just indiscriminately release everyone,
heedless of the risks of danger to the community, intimidation of witnesses,
and flight.
In the eyes of the left, anti-gang measures such as
intelligence databases, enterprise prosecutions, and sentencing enhancements
are seen as pretexts for surveillance and harassment of poor
communities—vehicles by which the dominant white class keeps people of color
checked and “caged.” In point of fact, gang-related crime results in higher
punishments because (a) it is inherently violent (even the ostensibly
nonviolent offenses are abetted by the well-earned reputation for brutality),
(b) it accounts for an inordinate amount of total crime, and (c) the heinous
effects of gang crime are disproportionately inflicted on poor communities. In
New York City, for example, City Journal’s Robert A. Mangual notes that
gangs are responsible for between 30 and 40 percent of homicides and nearly
half of total shootings. Fully 20 percent of shootings in the city occur in
public housing projects, though only 5 percent of the population inhabits them.
That is precisely because they are hotbeds of gang activity and rivalry.
Besides thwarting immigration enforcement, Boudin plans
to prioritize investigations into excessive-force claims against police. For
felons, by contrast, he would establish a unit specializing in the
reexamination of prior convictions for legal flaws—i.e., diverting resources
from protecting the public against ongoing crime to the mitigation of convicts’
criminal histories.
Overarchingly, Boudin rejects the premise that
prosecution and imprisonment are the proper way for, you know, prosecutors
to address crime. Alternative techniques, such as “restorative justice,” would
be implemented. This is the newfangled theory that crime is not a matter of
willful predator and innocent victim. Rather, crime is a societal phenomenon in
which there is no individual agency or culpability, just a congeries of players
(the person directly wronged, the accused defendant, the families of each, the
investigators and administrators), all victimized, all assuming the roles
imposed by a “broken system.” Instead of prosecution, instead of all that
handwringing over who mugged whom, shouldn’t we all just talk it out?
Boudin is the paragon of the Progressive Prosecutor
Project’s aspirations. But the project has been underway for a number of years,
providing good examples of progressive prosecutors in action. In 2017,
Philadelphia elected Larry Krasner. Named for brotherly love, the city is
better known today for its cauldrons of crime. Krasner, as progressive pols
like to say, has a plan for that. Because high levels of arrest, prosecution,
and mass incarceration are caused by the justice system, this dolorous
situation can be reversed only if we stop prosecuting so many people, stop
seeking bail for arrestees, water down the charges against people who are
prosecuted, and then accelerate the release of people already in custody.
Krasner has thus homed in on a favorite piñata of the
Progressive Prosecutor Project: mandatory-minimum sentencing provisions. These
statutes instruct judges, upon a defendant’s conviction for certain serious
felonies, to imprison that defendant to some minimally required period of time
(say, five years for rape; or 10 years on a second violent felony conviction).
Probation and similar slaps on the wrist are not options.
The left howls that this divests judges of the discretion
to administer individual justice with empathy and compassion, the hallmark of
judging. In fact, mandatory minimums are enacted by the people’s
representatives because they reflect the community’s judgment that serious
crimes warrant prison time. The purpose of punishment is not merely to address
the accused’s need for rehabilitation but the public’s need for retribution,
incapacitation of (typically) habitual offenders, and deterrence. Judges are
legal elites who hail from the same self-proclaimed progressive academic
institutions as the new breed of prosecutors. Many of them buy the narrative
and prioritize the interests (and the perceived victimhood) of the accused over
those of the community. Without mandatory minimums, they would not incarcerate
sociopaths whom it is imperative to sideline.
Now, there is a worthy argument that some mandatory
minimums are too draconian. Again, though, these provisions are statutory, so
they can be (and in some cases have been) tapered back. Plus, if real injustice
is done in individual cases, the governor’s pardon power (or the president’s at
the federal level) can alleviate it by reducing sentences. But if our choice is
between unaccountable judges or elected representatives answerable to the
people most affected by crime, most of the public would favor putting in the
legislature’s hands decisions about what prison terms are minimally necessary
for serious crimes.
Knowing that, the progressive prosecutor usurps the
decision for himself. Krasner’s office defeats these minimum-sentencing
statutes by not invoking them, even if the criminal conduct at issue fits the
statute prescribed by the legislature. Rather, it engages in fictional
“fact-pleading”—pretending, at the charging or pleading stage, that the offense
did not occur, or reimagining it into vanilla crime. In so doing, Krasner’s
people erase indicia of violence, firearms, drug-weight, and other factors that
trigger statutory minimums. In one case that left many Philadelphians
speechless, a defendant shot and nearly killed a store owner during a brutal
hold-up, and thus potentially faced decades in the slammer on attempted murder,
aggravated assault, and robbery charges. Krasner struck a plea deal that will
allow the felon to serve as little as three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment.
Alas, this is what Philadelphians voted for when they elected their new DA.
The same was true when Chicagoans, the residents of the
nation’s murder capital, elected Kim Foxx the DA of Cook County in 2016. She is
yet another Soros progressive prosecutor, who campaigned on the standard “disparate
impact” delusion: The justice system must be structurally bigoted because
minority defendants are prosecuted at numbers that vastly overrepresent their
proportion of the population. But it was the Jussie Smollett debacle in 2019
that thrust Foxx into the national spotlight. An openly gay African-American
actor who was starring in a cable-television drama, Empire, Smollett
claimed to have been subjected to a vicious attack by Trump supporters shouting
racist and homophobic slurs. The incident spurred a major police investigation,
with dozens of personnel working long hours to interview witnesses, pursue
suspects, and conduct forensic analysis. The effort yielded powerful evidence
that the actor himself had staged the “assault.”
When Smollett was finally arrested for filing a
fraudulent police report, Foxx was contacted by a friend, Tina Tchen, who
vouched for the Smollett family and admonished that there were “concerns” about
how the police conducted the investigation. (Tchen just happens to have been
chief of staff to former First Lady Michelle Obama.) Foxx intervened,
contacting a Smollett family member and trying to pressure Chicago police to
let the FBI take over the case. In the resulting uproar, she intimated that she
had recused herself but did not do so formally. After Smollett was indicted on
16 counts, Foxx’s top aides abruptly dismissed the case for a song: a few hours
of community service and the forfeiture of $10,000 in bail, while the court
sealed the case file from prying public eyes.
Foxx insists this was not sweetheart treatment but the
level of punishment commensurate with a nonviolent crime committed by a first
offender. Having been extraordinarily taxed by the demands of the
investigation, the police remain livid and the FBI is said to be exploring
potential federal charges (a tough case for the feds to make when it is state
law enforcement that has been obstructed). Foxx’s kid gloves, meanwhile, extend
liberally to violent criminals, too. As she hews to the progressive prosecutor
template of minimizing prosecutions and sentences, police increasingly find
that suspects arrested for serious felonies are preying on the streets despite
lengthy rap sheets. Crime is beginning rise again, and, naturally, the spike is
mainly detectable in the poorest neighborhoods.
***
Prepare to spot a trend. With its foundation built on
scandalous fictions, the Progressive Prosecutor Project cannot help but imperil
the public and squander the urban flourishing achieved by the historic
reduction of crime. This becomes clearer each day. The racial scapegoating of
cash bail, for example, has been taken to parodic heights in New York, which
has dispensed with bail entirely for broad categories of crime regarded as
“nonviolent.” Gotham, the original laboratory for intelligent policing, is becoming
the Progressive Prosecutor Project writ large. The results would be comical if
not so dangerous.
In the first weeks of the new law, a bank robber named
Gerod Woodberry was released multiple times during a string of six attempted
heists—sometimes detained just long enough to have lunch between robberies and
marvel that he was not kept in custody. The rationale? Woodberry’s modus
operandi is to hand tellers a threatening note rather than confront them at
gunpoint. Hence, he is deemed a “nonviolent bank robber.” (Federal authorities,
who are not subject to state anti-bail provisions, finally stopped the madness,
charging and detaining Woodberry pending trial, under U.S. law.) Meantime, a
raging anti-Semite named Tiffany Harris physically assaulted three women while
screaming “F-U Jews” at a Hanukkah observance in Crown Heights. She was
released—not violent enough, you see—only to sucker punch another young woman
the following day in Prospect Heights.
Of course, bail is only an issue because we have police
making arrests. In Seattle, progressives are thus working on a “reform” that
would simply abolish the police department. Documentary filmmaker
Christopher Ruso recounts in the City Journal that Sean Scott, who came
within a hair of winning election to the municipal legislature, campaigned on a
platform of defunding the “police state” that “steer[s] many black and brown
bodies back into, in essence, a form of slavery.” One of Scott’s allies in
“build[ing] towards a world where nobody is criminalized for being poor” is
Kristen Harris-Talley, who briefly sat as an appointed city councilwoman. She
traces the origin of policing to slavery: “How do you reform an institution
that from its inception was made to control, maim, and kill people?”
Now, Americans are not going to abolish the police any
time soon. And there are glimmers of hope that the Soros funding network has
become sufficiently notorious that it will no longer sneak up on unsuspecting
cities and towns. In the last cycle, its DA candidates were defeated in
California and upstate New York, with voters more antagonized than enticed by
the anti-enforcement agenda and the incursion of out-of-state progressive
ideologues and funding streams, seeking upheaval, not sensible reform.
Then again, Chesa Boudin’s candidacy, and the agenda he
champions without apology, would have been inconceivable a decade ago, even in
San Francisco. Now, he is the elected DA, an undeniably charismatic leader of a
movement that, however patently destructive upon close scrutiny, has real
traction in our cities. 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.
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