The Democrats' crime conundrum looms as a midterm threat

WASHINGTON — Rattled by the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and the strong showing in the Los Angeles mayoral primary by billionaire Rick Caruso, who ran on a public safety platform, Democrats are searching for a new way to talk about crime ahead of the 2022 congressional midterms, with many convinced that a sound message on criminal justice reform has been poorly delivered but is still more potent than Republicans’ tough-on-crime rhetoric.

“Let’s not muddy the waters here,” Center for American Progress president Patrick Gaspard said on a call with reporters earlier this month. “When it comes to what is happening versus the perception of what is happening based on MAGA fearmongering, it’s clear one party has solutions and the other is only making things worse.”

But not everyone believes that a messaging shift is what ails a party that, since 2020, has embraced criminal justice reform wholesale. The Democratic Party platform on criminal justice makes little mention of public safety but frequently invokes the need to “overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom,” much as Boudin had promised to do in San Francisco.

“The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has failed miserably on this issue — and it’s going to cost them big time,” former Los Angeles and New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told Yahoo News. “They’ve created a mess. The pendulum is swinging back to center."

Hailed upon his election in 2019 as a rising progressive star, Boudin espoused many of the same ideas — ending cash bail, curbing sentencing enhancements and emptying prisons — that national Democrats now support, making it difficult to argue, as some have, that his recall is merely the result of quirky San Francisco politics.

“‘Defund the police’ cost Democrats a dozen seats in 2020 and has left a deeply damaging perception that Democrats in swing districts must battle in the upcoming midterms,” said Jon Cowan, co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way.

He and other moderate Democrats believe that anti-police calls emanating from the social justice protests of 2020 continue to hurt the party, especially as rates of violent crime continue to rise nationwide.

Cowan cites the defeat of a police-defunding measure in Minneapolis and the election of New York Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer with an unapologetic law-and-order platform, as warnings that cannot be ignored.

“To beat Trump and Trumpism, Democrats must campaign and govern from the center, not from the left-wing extremes, and that starts with crime,” Cowan said.

Progressives have tried to counter that perception and minimize the significance of Boudin’s loss, which came after two years of increasing displeasure from San Francisco’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.

“One has to be careful not to read too much into the vote in San Francisco,” says Miriam Krinsky, who heads Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that advocates for progressive prosecution. In a phone conversation with Yahoo News, Krinsky pointed out that progressives won in other parts of the country, including elsewhere in the Bay Area.

In New York, for example, the same voters who selected Adams for City Hall also chose the progressive Alvin Bragg to act as the city’s next district attorney, setting up a potential clash between the mayor and his top prosecutor, who supports many of the same principles as Boudin. Prosecutors Kim Foxx in Chicago and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia — both of whom are as progressive, and polarizing, as Boudin — have survived recent attempts to oust them from office.

“San Francisco is unique. It doesn’t bring the kind of diversity that other urban areas do,” Krinsky argues, pointing to the city’s shrinking African American population and politically influential billionaire class.

Those factors may be unique to the unaffordable tech haven, but other forces have more national relevance. The most pressing for national Democrats may be the increasing clout of Asian American voters, whom demographer Ruy Teixeira worries that the Democrats are about to lose as a reliable constituency because of their messaging on social issues and crime.

Asian Americans are “a constituency that does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and how it must be remade to cleanse it of intrinsic racism and white supremacy, a viewpoint increasingly identified with Democrats,” Teixeira wrote in a Substack newsletter following Boudin’s defeat. “They are far more interested in how they and their families can get ahead in actually-existing American society.”

Asian Americans in San Francisco grew furious after Boudin described the killing of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee as the result of a mere “temper tantrum” on the assailant’s part (Boudin later tried to clarify his comments). Shopkeepers in Chinatown complained that the district attorney’s ambitious goals blinded him to quality-of-life problems like drug use and smash-and-grab crimes, a complaint that was echoed elsewhere in the city.

Boudin did not respond to a Yahoo News request for comment. But in a speech following the recall vote, he told supporters that his defeat amounted to a temporary setback to what he described as a much broader national shift in approaches to criminal justice.

“It was never about specifically which person gets to be in the office of the district attorney,” he said after it became clear that voters were going to expel him from office. “This is a movement, not a moment in history.”

In response to a question from Yahoo News during the Center for American Progress press call, Gaspard suggested that Boudin did a disservice to the very ideas he championed. “There was a lot of defense being played there,” he said. For the kind of muscular, progressive messaging on crime he said Democrats should embrace, Gaspard pointed to Georgia, where Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has been attacking Republican incumbent Brian Kemp for dismantling his GOP predecessor’s reform agenda.

“Under Brian Kemp, Georgia has become more violent than it has been in a decade,” she recently wrote on Twitter, even as she emphasized some of the same progressive plans championed by Boudin and others.

During his presentation, Gaspard presented polling that showed that while likely voters trusted Republicans more on crime, by an 18-point margin, that was wholly due to white voters’ overwhelming distrust of Democratic approaches. “Black voters still overwhelmingly trust Democrats on crime,” the polling concludes. So do Hispanic and Asian American voters, he said, albeit by much more narrow margins than African Americans.

African American voters "have a different view of police than other demographics," says pollster Jermaine House, whose firm HIT Strategies focuses on communities of color. "They want a comprehensive and smart approach to public safety, one that rids their communities of crime and protects them from overpolicing — with meaningful criminal justice reforms," House told Yahoo News in a telephone interview.

In Los Angeles, Caruso had a surprisingly strong showing in the mayoral primary by stressing public safety issues like homelessness. Though he effectively conceded the African American vote to Rep. Karen Bass, a longtime representative of South Los Angeles on the state and national level, Caruso campaigned heavily in Asian and Latino neighborhoods.

“Many of the policies the progressives are proposing are not landing with the rest of the Democratic Party. That is something we, as a party, have to be very cognizant of,” says Caruso adviser Peter Ragone, who cited Asian Americans and Latinos in particular.

Polling conducted by the Caruso campaign found that nearly 6 out of 10 Hispanic and Asian American voters thought Los Angeles was on “the wrong track,” with homelessness emerging as a top problem for both groups.

Caruso campaign memoranda obtained by Yahoo News show antipathy to “defund”-style messaging but also confirm what House and others have found in their own polling — a recognition that aggressive policing alone is no longer a viable choice, especially in a city like Los Angeles, where civil unrest following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 remains a vivid and painful memory.

Bratton was brought in to modernize the Los Angeles Police Department, which for much of the second half of the 20th century functioned more like a military outfit than a civilian police force. He was celebrated there for enforcing public safety without emboldening police officers to resort to the kind of aggressive policing that had marked the 1980s and ’90s. He subsequently returned to New York, where he also oversaw historic drops in crime, though he also became embroiled in the controversial stop-and-frisk policy.

Bratton continues to insist that a professional, accountable police force is the key component of a progressive vision of criminal justice. "I support a lot of their efforts — what their goals are," he says broadly of the Democratic Party. He also praises President Biden, who has called on cities and municipalities to use coronavirus relief funds to hire more police officers.

“They have some messaging that would resonate with the public,” he says. Ultimately, however, the former commissioner thinks that the progressive approach embodied by Boudin is bound to fail because it is not tough enough on perpetrators.

"They're focused on enabling, rather than prevention,” Bratton says of criminal justice reformers. “It's as if the criminal has ceased to exist. They're excusing away all these behaviors."

Bratton’s criticisms remain far outside core Democratic conviction — but perhaps not as far as they were two years ago, when some mainstream liberals called for defunding police departments. Such calls have grown virtually silent since then.

“If you don’t mean defund, don’t say defund,” says Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., a former CIA officer who has emerged as a critic of progressive messaging on crime and other social issues. She has introduced legislation to fund community policing programs, which law enforcement experts say could better prepare officers to handle tense situations.

“It takes funding to vet people, it takes funding to train people,” Spanberger told Yahoo News. Although hiring and training practices vary across the nation’s thousands of police departments, American cops tend to be much less thoroughly trained than their counterparts in countries like Germany.

The legislation has not moved through the House so far. Meanwhile, violent crime continues to surge — and is likely to do so throughout the summer months, if seasonal patterns hold. That could leave Democrats on the defensive come fall, as the congressional midterms near. They will have to navigate the treacherous political divide between a pro-reform base and a nervous public.

For moderates, the path forward could not be more obvious. “The message on crime for Democrats from California is clear,” says Cowan of Third Way. “They must steer away from the policies and rhetoric of the far left.”