Cash Bail Threatens Democrats’ 2022 Chances

 

As Democrats work to leave their controversial “defund the police” movement in the past, their party’s embrace of more complicated, but still decisively liberal, criminal justice reforms could leave candidates nationwide vulnerable in November.

Democratic lawmakers have spent years promoting and implementing the elimination of cash bail, sentencing reductions, juvenile prosecution reform, and other changes that critics blame for the increase in violence experienced by most major cities.

Hoping to confront what polls suggest is a growing concern among voters about the country’s rise in crime, many Democrats have spent months insisting that they don’t collectively support the politically destructive push to take money away from police budgets.

President Joe Biden touched off an effort in June of last year to distance his party from “defund the police” supporters with a high-profile speech that explicitly rejected the idea of cutting law enforcement funding, and his top aides amplified the message as they sought to portray the administration as sufficiently concerned about crime.

But the constellation of other criminal justice reforms that Democrats have championed, and the ensuing crime spike in the places where those policies have been implemented, could continue to saddle the Democratic Party with a liability just as damaging as the one imposed by “defund the police.”

“I think the point is that some issues generally favor one party and some favor the other, and crime is an issue that’s always going to favor Republicans. The Democrats have made it much, much worse by a whole series of policies, and they won’t be able to escape the problem,” Charles Lipson, political science professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Examiner.

“The problem that Democrats face is a problem that Republicans have also faced; the problem is, how do you appeal to both the activists in your party and the general electorate?” Lipson added. “And that’s gotten harder, and it’s gotten harder both because the activists are much more active, and that includes the donor base, and because there’s greater transparency than there used to be.”

Lipson noted candidates can no longer attempt to evade scrutiny for things they say to primary audiences once they advance to the general election because social media has ensured that every utterance during each stage of the campaign is available to opponents and voters.

Left-leaning voters have demonstrated an appetite for change on the criminal justice positions their candidates have long espoused.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s victory last year in a crowded primary field offered a glimpse into the potency of anti-crime positions among even Democratic voters.

Adams has followed through with his campaign promise to pursue tough-on-crime policies during his first two months in office, targeting bail reform passed at the state level in 2019.

New York lawmakers ended cash bail for a broad range of nonviolent and misdemeanor offenses and set limits on how high judges could set bail for defendants who can’t afford to pay. Voters have soured significantly on the reforms since their passage, however; a Siena College poll released this week showed 65% of New York voters want to see the law changed.

Adams traveled to Albany last week to push state lawmakers to tighten bail laws, despite some Democrats’ objections to the idea of watering down reforms championed by the activist Left.

Democratic state lawmakers have so far resisted the effort by Adams to overhaul the law, underscoring the challenge facing Democrats caught between the vocal liberal faction of their party and growing discontent among the political middle that they’ll need to retain to avoid a debacle in November.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin implemented bail reform shortly after taking office in 2020, eliminating pretrial detention for most nonviolent crimes.

In 2019, San Francisco saw 41 murders, 4,964 burglaries, and 4,448 car thefts, according to the city’s police department.

In 2020, the first year that Boudin’s liberal criminal justice reforms took effect, San Francisco experienced 48 murders, 7,574 burglaries — a more than 50% increase — and 6,084 car thefts.

By 2021, the city saw 56 murders, 7,289 burglaries, and 6,058 car thefts.

Boudin’s permissive bail policies and efforts to keep more criminals out of jail have inspired an aggressive recall campaign against him, with its organizers attributing their motivation to the “embarrassingly high” level of crime that has mushroomed on his watch.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner also ended the cash bail system in his city upon taking office in 2017, and like most other major U.S. cities, his experienced a dramatic increase in violence over the past several years.

Last year, Philadelphia police recorded more than twice the number of murders compared to the city’s average annual homicide rate during the four years before Krasner took office, according to Philadelphia Police Department data.

Krasner’s liberal reforms went beyond pretrial detention and included office policies of not prosecuting prostitution and marijuana-related offenses, pursuing shorter probation and parole periods, and seeking shorter prison sentences for convicted offenders.

His role as a leader in the left-wing criminal justice movement could offer Pennsylvania Republicans the opportunity to draw a strong contrast in a state that Biden carried in 2020.

For example, Republican state Sen. Jake Corman, who is running for governor this year, called for Krasner’s impeachment earlier this month as he sought to capitalize on voter fears about public safety.

Lipson said many voters are likely to draw parallels between Democratic criminal justice policies and immigration policies on the southern border, given that both sets of policies deal with enforcement of the law.

“I would say that the Democrats’ biggest problem is that I think people also connect the open southern border with soft on crime,” Lipson said. “They just see a whole unwillingness to enforce laws as being a part of the progressive Democratic movement, and they also see the fact that there are all these prominent progressive district attorneys … who are not willing to prosecute whole classes of crimes.”

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