California voters rolled back a number of criminal justice reforms this month. Los Angeles County ousted District Attorney George Gascón, who had been elected on pledges to end cash bail and prioritize violent crime. San Francisco reelected District Attorney Brooke Jenkins despite a spike in crime in her first year after replacing Chesa Boudin after his 2022 recall. “Public safety” had won the day. Crime was up, and reforms were out. Initial takeaways from the results concluded that voters were getting serious on crime and proclaimed that the reform push was dead. In Alameda County, District Attorney Pamela Price, who had pledged to end cash bail and let low-level offenses go uncharged, was ousted, but not because of a huge spike in crime. Oakland, the county's most populous city, saw a 33 percent drop in homicides this year.
Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the fate of criminal justice reforms throughout the state is more complicated than it seems, reports The Intercept.
California is experiencing historically low levels of crime statewide. Apart from the homicide spike that affected cities and rural areas during the pandemic, crime in California has been relatively steady since the late 1990s. California had been a bastion of reform. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the closure of death row at San Quentin State Prison. Legislators passed the Racial Justice Act in 2020, making it easier to challenge criminal convictions based on evidence of racial bias. And, that same year, Los Angeles voters approved a ballot measure to transform the jail system and allocate funding to alternatives to incarceration. What changed? Voters were primed with sensational coverage of shoplifting sprees and horror stories blaming reform-minded DAs for letting offenders off the hook. Outsized spending from corporations, real estate interests, and tech investors helped opponents of reform get their message out. Money, though, wasn’t the only factor in ousting Price and Gascón or leading voters to oppose abolishing slave labor in prisons, said Anne Irwin of the criminal justice policy advocacy group Smart Justice California She says, "What’s really happening here is the housing crisis and the prevalence of unhoused people on the streets up and down California is creating for people a psychological sense of disorder, which will absolutely, inevitably make them feel unsafe. And unless and until we begin to really meaningfully solve our housing crisis and our homelessness crisis, it will be very hard to make Californians feel safe.”