KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The 2022 Referendum on Crime: District-attorney primaries show that voters are fed up with left-wing prosecutors.
Jose Alba made national news when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg outrageously slapped murder charges on the 61-year-old bodega worker who stabbed a career criminal in an act of self-defense. Progressive prosecutors everywhere should be worried.
While most of the press focuses on the midterm referendum on Joe Biden, across the country this election season is also shaping up as a check on the “reform” prosecutors responsible for surging crime. Voters will take part in more than 2,000 elections for prosecutor and sheriff, and the campaigns are proving unusually hot.
They also look to be a bust for a progressive prosecutorial movement that hoped to use this year to entrench itself in jurisdictions across the country. “Decarceration” candidates have flooded primaries, many backed by far-left groups calling for an end to prosecutions. They aren’t finding much success, as Democratic and Republican voters alike grow sick of rising crime. San Francisco’s ouster last month of District Attorney Chesa Boudin may prove the norm rather than the exception. . . .
The riots and protests of 2020 elevated the “defund the police” movement, even as the ensuing public disorder alarmed voters. Those voters rendered judgment in last year’s elections, rejecting the anti-police left. Progressive candidates for mayor lost in cities from Seattle to New York, while Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot initiative to abolish the police department.
But the public was slower to understand the role left-wing prosecutors play in the breakdown of public order. Last year’s horrific Waukesha, Wis., Christmas parade attack—perpetrated by a repeat offender out on bail—was a wake-up call. So have been the more recent travails of New York Mayor Eric Adams, whose attempts to get on top of city crime are being thwarted by prosecutors like Mr. Bragg. What good is a proactive police force if prosecutors simply wave criminals back onto the street—or slap charges against law-abiding citizens who defend themselves? Voters are trying to remove some of the worst offenders from office, whether it be last month’s recall of Mr. Boudin, or the effort to get rid of Los Angeles’s George Gascón.
They are also on guard against electing more of the same, as primaries are showing.
Well, good.