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Matt Katz: Hi. I'm Matt Katz, in for Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway.

Since the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer, there's been a movement to elect progressive prosecutors in cities around the country. These reform-minded prosecutors committed to reducing mass incarceration and improving equity in the criminal justice system. They worked to exonerate those who are unfairly tried and convicted in the past, and they avoided the use of bail to keep poor people in jail.

Recently there's been a major pushback against these prosecutors and their reforms, not just from city officials and voters, but also from Republican candidates who are running for election in the midterms and blame a rise in some crime levels in some places on progressive reforms.

Lara Bazelon: In Philadelphia, for example, the district attorney is a man named Larry Krasner. He won in 2017, and then he was reelected four years later by an overwhelming majority.

Matt Katz: Lara Bazelon is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco.

Lara Bazelon: However, Pennsylvania is a purple state. Republicans really don't like Larry Krasner, and because they can't get rid of him through the democratic process, what they're trying to do instead is impeach him in the State House of Representatives and try him in the Senate and toss him out of office that way. That's one example. Another example is that there was a recall in San Francisco, where I live, that was successful, where there was a push and it was funded by people with millions and billions of dollars to eject Chesa Boudin from office. That was successful. A similar effort and narrowly failed in Los Angeles against another progressive prosecutor named George Gascón.

Matt Katz: Lara, where these attacks against progressive prosecutors are coming from?

Lara Bazelon: As the midterms are approaching and as the stakes become higher and higher, and a lot of these Senate races in particular are quite close, Republican candidates are using crime as a hammer to basically say to people, "Crime is ticking up. We know you're feeling unsafe, and the people to blame here are these wild-eyed radical prosecutors who Democrats have elected and put in place." It's definitely happening on that level, but it's also happening on a more local level where there's been some really strong pushback, either to try to recall prosecutors or impeach prosecutors or otherwise limit the power that prosecutors have.

Matt Katz: Can you give some examples of that pushback? Where is it playing out?

Lara Bazelon: In Philadelphia, for example, the district attorney is a man named Larry Krasner. He won in 2017, and then he was reelected four years later by an overwhelming majority. However, Pennsylvania is a purple state. Republicans really don't like Larry Krasner, and because they can't get rid of him through the democratic process, what they're trying to do instead is impeach him in the State House of Representatives and try him in the Senate and toss him out of office that way. That's one example.

Another example is that there was a recall in San Francisco, where I live, that was successful, where there was a push and it was funded by people with millions and billions of dollars to eject Chesa Boudin from office. That was successful. A similar effort and narrowly failed in Los Angeles against another progressive prosecutor named George Gascón.

Matt Katz: The argument here is that the prosecutors are somehow responsible for a rising crime. What kind of effect can prosecutors have on reducing crime? Or in their policies, can they have an effect in raising crime?

Lara Bazelon: The truth is that there is no direct correlation between rising or falling crime rates, and who the elected DA is in a local jurisdiction but that's not the perception. The perception is that there is this direct link, and so the people who want to push more reform-minded prosecutors out really press that button and play on voter fears, but whether crime is going up or down, it's a very, very complex equation. Part of it involves the police, for example.

In San Francisco, we have a clearance rate of about 8% or 9%, meaning that 92% of the time when you commit a crime, you're going to get away with it. All the voters were quite angry with our now-recalled DA. The truth of the matter is, he could only prosecute the people who were arrested. It's like law and order. The police investigate crime, and the district attorney prosecutes the offenders. Well, if the police are not investigating or arresting, there's no one to prosecute.

Matt Katz: Right, but the argument is that people are committing crimes because they think that progressive prosecutors are just going to let them out. They're not going to force them to go to prison or jail. That's the argument that they're making, that there's an idea in the cities that they can commit crimes because there's no consequences because of progressive prosecutors, right?

Lara Bazelon: Yes, that is certainly the argument, and it's very complicated because again, referring to California, we have a legislature that's passed a number of reform laws, including reducing many felonies to misdemeanors, which means basically reduced or no jail time for a number of quality of life and other low-level offenses. It actually doesn't matter who the district attorney is. They can't charge these crimes as felonies even if they wanted to. Again, that's a more complicated story to tell, and usually, the politician with the simplest story is the politician who wins, and the campaign slogan these wild-eyed radicals are making you unsafe has proved to be quite compelling.

Matt Katz: In your experience, do defendants charged with crimes, are they even aware of these nuances in criminal justice policy or is that something that they consider when they decide whether to commit a violent act or deal drugs or whatever the case may be?

Lara Bazelon: Absolutely not. Before I became a law professor, I was a public defender. I represented hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. I've never had a single one of them say, "I thought that I could get away with this crime because X was the DEA or X was the US Attorney." People commit crimes for any number of reasons, including poverty, homelessness, criminogenic effects of the environments in which they were raised, impulsivity. Many, many crimes were committed by people who are young, including between 18 and 25, and we know that the human brain just isn't fully developed at that point, not because they think, "Oh, this particular person got elected and so, therefore, I'm going to get away scot-free."

Matt Katz: When these arguments come from Republicans, they're also coming from centrist Democrats, too. When they're making arguments against progressive prosecutors, they're also bringing up specific policies like bail reform. Is that the main one that has been tied to progressive prosecutors and criticizes this having something to do with the rising crime?

Lara Bazelon: Yes, and that's particularly true in New York where, for example, the race for governor has narrowed dramatically and the incumbent Kathy Hochul is now neck and neck with the Republican challenger Lee Zeldin. His position is that she is weak on crime, that the rise in crime in New York is attributable not just to her but also, yes, to these bail policies. What state legislatures did in New York was enact bail reform. Really, the purpose of bail reform was to stop criminalizing poverty because the system in New York and elsewhere tags the crime to a certain amount of money.

Basically, say you commit a robbery, if you can afford a $30,000 bail, you can get out, and if you can't, you stay in, but of course, that doesn't really correlate to dangerousness, it just correlates to how much money you have in your bank account. The legislation was designed to undo that. The argument now is, well, if New Yorkers are experiencing a rise in crime or feeling unsafe, it's because of these bail laws, and they're letting too many people out.

Never mind that the law is too new to have any kind of empirical data to make that a correlation but again, it's a very simple, clear argument to make, even if there's nothing solid behind it. Bail reform absolutely has become a wedge issue and really a cudgel that Republican candidates are using to beat over the head of their democratic opponents.

Matt Katz: Is the rising crime a real thing or is that something that people are really scared of, or is the media and these dishonest political ads trumping it up?

Lara Bazelon: There's no question that certain crimes have gone up post-pandemic. Some other ones have fallen. It also varies between different jurisdictions across the country, and what's also really important to point out is that crime rises in red states and blue states. It rises whether there's a reform-minded DA or a more centricity. For example, here in California, we've had spikes in violent crime in Sacramento where we've had a very centrist/right-leaning DA for some time.

Getting to your second part of the question, there's what I call the Willie Horton effect and some of your listeners may remember that in the campaign for president in 1988, George W. Bush really seeking to combat the perception that he was a wimp, but also to get an advantage over his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, ran a series of ads about a man named Willie Horton who had been let out of prison through a furlough program that Massachusetts has had for some time. He had, in fact, committed a number of horrific violent crimes.

Now, the truth of the matter is that 99% of the people who went through that furlough program completed it successfully, but the only person we remember is Willie Horton. That playbook has been used over and over and over again, and it's those stories that stick in people's minds and grow and metastasize to the point where people think that there is this Willie Horton type of person lurking just around the corner when statistically speaking that is not true.

Matt Katz: In terms of the effect on progressive prosecutors, is this criticism, these political attacks, is it having an effect on the way they operate their district attorney's offices? Are they asking for higher bail than maybe they would have in the past? Are they feeling this kind of pressure and responding to it?

Lara Bazelon: It has had a huge effect. We had our own version of Willie Horton here in San Francisco a couple of years ago, about a year into Chesa Boudin's term. He was the reform-minded prosecutor. He had been elected in 2019. A man named Troy McAlister, who had gotten a plea bargain plowed through an intersection and mowed down two innocent women, and that was really the beginning of the end for the DA Boudin regime because it was blamed on his policies.

The story just continued in the news cycle for weeks, and then it led to more and more scrutiny of every single case that was going through that office. In answer to your question, I think that that's the kind of lesson that's been seared into the minds of other reform-minded prosecutors. It's alarming. I think that a single case can be weaponized in that way and really used to mobilize voters to turn out, and if your state allows it, to recall you.

I think, for example, the interim district attorney who we have now, who was appointed by the mayor, and is up for her own election in about a week or so, has made a point of coming out very strongly against detaining people who are accused of violent crimes, seeking longer sentences, and that sort of thing. It's hard not to think that it isn't a direct reaction to the past couple of years at least here. I think you could see that playing itself out in other jurisdictions as well.

Matt Katz: Yes. In Manhattan, the new district attorney who had run on a progressive prosecutor model, he ended up having to backtrack on some of his initial policies that he had announced early in his term because of such criticism.

Lara Bazelon: Exactly. That would be Alvin Bragg. He came in with this reform agenda, and immediately, there was a media firestorm. Immediately, you had people not just on the right, but really in the center, Democrats pointing at him and saying this is way too radical. Then you saw him walk back certain policies. We've seen the exact same thing in Los Angeles where as you and I were talking about earlier, George Gascón was in a fight for his life because he was inches away from getting recalled, and he, too, has modified or walked back some of his progressive policies.

Matt Katz: What happens after the midterms? Does the tough-on-crime, anti-progressive prosecutor messaging died down? Or is it such a potent selling point for the Republicans and people on the right that it keeps going?

Lara Bazelon: My bet is that it does die down, and I'll tell you why. I think there's a real difference between the national media narrative and what these more national candidates are saying and doing, and what's happening at the local level, at least in cities with significant minority populations. I say that because when you look at, for example, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, or Cook County DA Kim Fox, who is in Chicago, or State's Attorney Kim Gardner, who is in the St. Louis area, these are people who ran on a progressive platform but were also reelected on a progressive platform despite overwhelming efforts to eject them, demonize them, and blame them for rising crime rates. Why is that?

Criminologist John Pfaff at Fordham has looked through this data, and what he has been able to demonstrate is that it's the communities that are most impacted by crime, who most want progressive prosecutors. That is because they understand and have been really the victims of the '80s, '90s, and '00s, tough-on-crime policies. What they know is that the members of their community who commit crimes get sent upstate to these filthy, criminogenic prison conditions, and then they're released and they come back. Oftentimes, not only are they recidivating, but they're worse off than they were before.

Those communities who are directly impacted, they've been to the movie and they know how it ends, and they're asking for something different, and they're going back and turning out in these reelection efforts and saying, ''Yes, we want to keep this more reform-minded person.'' I think we're going to continue to have a splinter narrative where Democrats on a national level are going to run away from reform, but on a local level, at least in cities with significant minority populations, you are going to continue to see reform-minded prosecutors get elected.

Matt Katz: That's interesting. I was curious, before I let you go, what the alternative that critics of progressive prosecutors are offering, are they suggesting a better way of doing things, or is it just a criticism of the current policies? Are they asking for a return to an emphasis on incarceration? What are you hearing?

Lara Bazelon: They are asking for a return to the policies that we had starting in the 1950s and continuing really through until about 10 years ago in most places. That is longer sentences, more prisons, more laws named after victims, essentially bringing down the hammer as hard as possible on every single person with the idea that if you incapacitate for long periods of time, nearly everybody who commits a violent crime, you will keep your community safe.

The data really don't show that. They show sharply diminishing returns from this mass incarceration. Of course, the United States is the mass incarcerator in chief. We're only 5% of the world's population, but we lock up a quarter of the world's humans. As we've seen, it hasn't made us any more safe. Yet it's these same arguments that are being recycled and brought back up.

Matt Katz: Lara Bazelon is a professor of law at the University of San Francisco's School of Law. Lara, thank you so much for joining us on The Takeaway. That was really interesting discussion.

Lara Bazelon: Thank you so much for having me.

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