If forcing progressive prosecutors to do their jobs was racially hostile, we’d expect objections from the Americans most affected by racism. We don’t.
CNN’s Ronald Brownstein performed a public service this week when he published a column featuring a variety of sources stating outright what critics of the backlash against “progressive prosecutors” have so far only implied: Those who object to the permissive coddling of career criminals and are doing something about it are racist.
“From Florida and Mississippi to Georgia, Texas, and Missouri, an array of red states are taking aggressive new steps to seize authority over local prosecutors, city policing policies, or both,” Brownstein began. The conspicuous omission from this table-setting sentence of verdicts rendered by, for example, voters in places like San Francisco and Chicago or the Democratic president’s rejection of indulgent reforms to Washington D.C.’s criminal code is your first clue that something is off. Nevertheless, Brownstein plowed ahead with a tidy narrative about “red states” stripping “blue cities” of autonomy and invalidating the will of their voters, many of whom are minorities. And we all know what’s really motivating this civic initiative, right?
“There’s a strong hint of discrimination because most of the prosecutors they are coming after are black women, or [other] people of color who don’t line up with a hard-core lock ‘em up philosophy,” Georgia NAACP President Gerald Griggs told Brownstein. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis agreed, citing efforts by Peach State legislators to establish commissions dedicated to the oversight and discipline of lax prosecutors. “I, quite frankly, think the legislation is racist,” she said. “I don’t know what other thing to call it.”
Brownstein cannot refute the charge:
Some of those targeted by these efforts, such as [Philadelphia prosecutor Larry] Krasner and [ousted Hillsborough, Florida, State Attorney Andrew] Warren, are White. But in most cases, these efforts target Black local officials in heavily minority jurisdictions, including the mayors of St. Louis and Jackson; the county attorneys in the counties centered on Atlanta, Orlando, and St. Louis are all Black women.
Brownstein eventually circles back to the cases that complicate his narrative, in which non-Republican voters and politicians took on acquiescent law-enforcement officers. In his telling, those episodes underscore the degree to which Democrats “muddled” their message in support of “reform-oriented” prosecutors and the need to confront “racial inequities in the criminal justice system and more aggressively prosecuting police misconduct.”
This tale presupposes that American minorities are on the same page as the activists who claim to represent their views. When it comes to crime and justice, however, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest minority voters want to see criminals taken off the streets as much as anyone else.
In survey data highlighted by Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg shortly before the 2022 midterms, minority voters were overwhelmingly positive toward messages that express support for “having more police” and “fighting violent crime as a top priority with all the resources at our disposal.” Likewise, black, Hispanic, and Asian voters were more likely than whites to agree with statements that hit Democrats for refusing to “talk about the growing violent crime problem in our community” and expressing the need to “get criminals in jail.” The findings dovetail with an October 2022 Pew Research Center survey that found 81 percent of black Americans and 65 percent of Hispanics saying “violent crime is very important” to their midterm vote.
Greenberg’s research demonstrates that American minorities – black voters, in particular – remain supportive of efforts to reform the conduct of criminal justice and impose stricter oversight on police. But he also found that these traditionally Democratic constituencies depart from the Democratic consensus regarding which party “would do better on crime.”
While Democrats were still competitive in the congressional ballot throughout the fall, they trailed Republicans by 13 points on which party would do better on crime. A quarter of Democrats in October said Republicans would do a better job. That included a quarter of Blacks and a stunning half of Hispanics and Asian Americans.
If the effort to force “progressive prosecutors” to do their jobs or remove them from office was a racially hostile enterprise, we should expect to hear objections from the Americans who are most acutely attended to and affected by racism. So far, the loudest complaints have come primarily from the negligent prosecutors and politicians on the receiving end of the backlash.