Several local election outcomes make 2024 the “anti-crime election” that many Americans have longed for, contends Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute.
In California, Proposition 36 which looked to counter a 2014 initiative, Prop. 47, that had raised the threshold for felony theft to $950 and converted many felony drug offenses to misdemeanors.
Prop 36, which passed by a large margin, allows prosecutors to bring felony theft charges when the perpetrator is a repeat offender, increases sentences for mass thefts, and requires that certain sentences be served in state prisons rather than in county jails.
Vox.com offers a similar take, saying that if even California’s liberal voters supported the measure, wouldn’t other states may want something similar, if not even tougher.? “It will absolutely put wind in the sails of opponents of [criminal justice] reform,” said Insha Rahman of Vera Action, predicting that prison and jail populations in California will rise..
In Los Angeles County, “progressive” prosecutor George Gascón, who succeeded Kamala Harris as San Francisco district attorney before becoming the lead prosecutor in L.A., lost his reelection bid to Nathan Hochman, who ran on a law-and-order platform.
Anti-crime voter sentiment also made its way north to the Bay Area, where voters had already recalled former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022. Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, seems poised to win election to a full term. In Alameda County (home to Oakland), District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao appear likely to lose their respective recall elections.
Price and Thao positioned themselves as criminal-justice reformers, keen to shrink the footprint of the justice system.
In Tampa, Fla., Democrat Andrew Warren, suspended by Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 for his non-prosecution policies, lost his reelection bid against Republican State’s Attorney Susan Lopez. In Athens, Georgia—where the murder of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant stoked outrage—Kalki Yalamanchili won a landslide victory over incumbent District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, who was elected on a reform platform.
In Phoenix, Tamika Wooten, who ran on pushing alternatives to incarceration and restorative justice, lost her bid to oust incumbent Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, a Republican. Law-and-order prosecutors also won in Macomb County, Mich. and Kenosha County, Wis.
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Progressive prosecutors did win important races—particularly in Texas, where voters in Austin, El Paso, and Houston handed victories to candidates who positioned themselves as reformers. They also prevailed in Albany, N.Y., Orlando, Fla., and in both Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Mass outrage over various policing incidents that went viral on social media seemed to override whatever reservations Americans had about the hundreds of legislative and administrative criminal-justice reform initiatives of the 2010s and early 2020s. It's now clear, Mangual argues that many voters have reached their limits with respect to how much crime and disorder they were prepared to tolerate.
He contends that tje vast majority of prisoners in the U.S. are violent, chronic offenders who have squandered more than one “second chance.” Police are imperfect and sometimes abuse their authority, but the sorts of fatal encounters that drove public outrage are statistically rare.
It remains to be seen how much (if at all) this election cycle will affect the left’s approach, Mangual concludes.
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