 In 1960, the U.S. violent crime rate started rising, and for three decades this was one of the most vexing and talked about problems in America. Anxiety over the possibility of being a victim is becoming an accepted part of everyday life. It's affecting the way people live, particularly in cities and towns that were unaccustomed to this fear before. By the early 1990s, policymakers had mostly lost hope, and then violent crime started falling, and it kept falling. Meanwhile, the number of incarcerated Americans continued to climb. It was the crime decline that made possible a bipartisan movement to reckon with the injustice of over-incarceration and the failure of the war on drugs. But last year, the United States experienced the largest rise in homicides in decades, which could bring the return of tough-on-crime rhetoric and undermine the criminal justice reform movement. Critics say a recently elected group of district attorneys in elite coastal cities who are dismissing routine property crimes and failing to jail potentially dangerous individuals are exacerbating the problem. This backlash underscores why it's so important to distinguish between worthwhile criminal justice reform and simply failing to enforce the rule of law. Join us in rejecting the notion that to be free, we must cage others. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is among this new crop of progressive prosecutors. He was raised by two famous left-wing radicals of the 1960s, Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers, and his biological parents were imprisoned on felony murder charges when he was a baby, stemming from their involvement with the weather underground. It didn't make sense that the state was willing to destroy my family because of something my parents did, and they did it. They're not innocent, and this is not about them being wrongly convicted. This is about what do we do with people who actually commit crimes. Since Boudin took office, in January 2020, burglary, arson, and murder have all spiked in San Francisco, though rape and assault rates have fallen. And most of his term has taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when life in the Bay Area has been far from normal. There is now a petition to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Boudin is facing possible recall for failing to prosecute and jail a man accused of several burglaries who then drunkenly ran over and killed two women, and a man twice accused of domestic abuse who then murdered an infant. Victims want answers, and we get the same lip service. What is your response to them? I will continue to personally do whatever it takes to provide justice and safety to the people of San Francisco. But can other progressive DAs strike a better balance as they reform the system? I think that the big lie was basically that we have convinced our community for years that over incarceration and more police presence and more prosecutions actually was leading to greater safety when in fact it has probably led to greater insecurity. George Gascon took office this year as Los Angeles' new district attorney. He's a former LAPD officer and once held the same job as Boudin in San Francisco. Gascon defeated the more conservative incumbent Jackie Lacey with his radical reform agenda, pledging to release up to 20,000 low-risk offenders. He immediately ended cash bail for misdemeanors and what he calls low-level non-serious crimes. We saw people that were being held in pre-trial incarceration for weeks and months on end just simply because they couldn't afford a very low dollar amount to bail and they were not necessarily dangerous. So the reality is that there is no connection between how much money you have in your bank account and whether you're dangerous or not. Since taking office, Gascon has made good on his promise not to prosecute victimless crimes like low-level drug possession and sex work, but he's also declining to prosecute actual property crimes like trespassing. Libertarians would tend to say you know drugs should not be criminalized at all but the government's primary role is to protect life and property. So I mean is there a case that we should be even more radical in decriminalizing drugs while at the same time treating property crimes more seriously? Data has continued to flow and more so recently that shows that de-emphasizing the criminal process when it comes to low-level non-violent offenses actually increases safety in general not just for those types of crimes but even for more serious crimes. The property crime rate jumped nearly 40 percent during Gascon's almost nine-year tenure as San Francisco's DA. People will draw that connection and say well look how much property crime spiked under Gascon and San Francisco that's what's going to happen here in Los Angeles. What's your reply to that? The spike in property crime San Francisco was purely driven by car breakings. Gascon says local police retaliated against him for co-authoring California's Prop 47 which reclassified many felonies as misdemeanors. After Prop 47 a lot of cops say we're not going to enforce any of the stuff anymore they were against it they wanted to basically teach me a lesson. I finally started a task force with the California Highway Patrol and in several federal agencies we actually went after car breakings at a time for the San Francisco police department decided not to and within about a year or so we started decreasing. If you agree that there should be some sort of consequence for even low-level offenses that reduce the quality of life for people living in big cities what should the consequences actually be? Well I hate to even almost use the term consequence because when people are saying the attempt because they don't have money to get housing criminalizing that behavior I think it's not only immoral I believe that it doesn't fix the problem right so I would say that rather than consequence I like to use a term you know the right intervention what are the right interventions for that population? Quality of life crimes are not something that you want to prosecute on every instance but you also don't want to have a blanket policy that prohibits you from ever prosecuting them as well. Eric Siddall is the vice president of the LA Association of Deputy District Attorneys the prosecutor's union which sued Gascón for directing the DA's office not to pursue extra harsh sentences for repeat felons or in crimes involving gang members. A judge recently ruled partially in their favor. Siddall says the LA DA's office has been making positive reforms for years and that Gascón is disregarding public safety. There has to be a middle ground and I think that's what our office was trying to do prior to Mr. Gascón but when you have a blanket policy that completely ignores quality of life crimes then expect the quality of life to decrease in those neighborhoods. Seven municipalities including the Beverly Hills, Whittier and Pico Rivera city councils have issued votes of no confidence against Gascón. The LA sheriff has publicly supported a recall. Siddall worries that stripping prosecutors of the ability to pursue harsher sentences against gang members will set back the decades-long effort to stem gang violence in the city once plagued by it. He basically destroyed most components of our office and our ability to effectively prosecute cases. The gang division has been around since 1978 and was one of the models for the rest of the country and how to deal with violent street gangs and one of the first things he did was he pretty much dismantled that unit and redirected resources to other projects that he has. It's very clear from his policies his words and his deeds that he is not terribly interested in dealing with violent criminals here in Los Angeles. But in recent years problems with LA's gang database have emerged after LAPD officers were charged with fabricating gang affiliations of individuals they pulled over forcing prosecutors to review hundreds of possibly tainted cases. Gascón has also opposed long prison sentences even for the perpetrators of violent crimes. Data indicates that people we get older there's a less likely that we're going to re-offend. While it's true that people are less likely to commit crimes as they grow older the data on the effectiveness of long sentences on deterring and preventing violent crime is mixed. With one study of three strikes finding that the policy significantly reduces felony arrest rates. Another study from the Public Policy Institute of California that looked specifically at resentencing reforms that saw the early release of many prisoners found little evidence of a relationship between more severe sanctions and better recidivism partially bolstering Gascón's argument. The researchers unsurprisingly discovered a significant drop in drug re-offenders as the state deprioritized drug offenses but a slight rise in repeat offenders in more serious categories like crimes against persons. His data and science argument that he uses is baloney. You're not going to have less crime by letting violent criminals out of prison. You're not going to have less crime by not punishing people appropriately. You're not going to have less crime by not penalizing someone from using a gun. You're not going to have less crime by basically saying we're going to give a pass to the gangs. That's just not going to work. Despite his stated commitment to following the data, Gascón isn't immune to political pressure. He repealed his own order not to seek long sentences for criminals who victimize children or the elderly or commit hate crimes. Claiming that because Trump had so poisoned the country with hate he had no choice. Larger periods of incarceration do not work even for hate crimes. However, I understood. I had a lot of people that came to me and said, you know, hate crimes are on the increase and we are wary that given the posture of the national administration at the time, we were licensing so much hate and racism. The message of lowering the consequences at this point may be a message that says that the hate crimes are okay. But that does sound more like a political reasoning rather than based on data. No, I mean, I made it very clear that the reasoning for doing this is really was, you know, it was one of messaging at the moment. You know, arguably you can say it was a political thing, but you know, as an elected official, you know, I am working with the communities that I represent. It's good to have reform. It's good to kind of deal with these issues. But if you go too far and you alienate the public with these reforms, there is going to be a backlash and that backlash is never good. While Chesa Boudin's time in San Francisco may test the limits of criminal justice reform, it's Gascon's tenure in one of the world's largest cities that could test the very conceit of the progressive prosecutor. That social services can fix most or all urban dysfunction and that withholding police and prosecutorial resources can force the adoption of those alternatives. While he faces resistance from law enforcement, city governments, his own team of prosecutors and the legal system itself, Gascon remains committed to the idea that broad systemic change is needed for safety and justice. We are a country that has increasingly become a country of half and have nots. And you know, you can travel around the world. Those societies where you have those extreme differences, they usually end up in revolutions or dictatorships. A democratic system is not equipped to cope with that. The successful democracies in the world are the ones where you shrink the difference between those that have incredible wealth and those that do not, and that creates some level of safety in public health. And in those societies you see not only greater levels of security and public safety, but you see a greater level of satisfaction across the board, both for those that are affluence and those that are not.