(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Progressive Backlash in California Fuels Democratic Debate Over Crime [1]
['Shane Goldmacher']
Date: 2022-06-08
“What’s clear is that Californians want the streets to look differently than they look today,” said Anne Irwin, founder and director of Smart Justice California, a criminal justice advocacy group. But she disputed the notion that the results were a rebuke for progressive policies. “We will lose battles here and there. That doesn’t mean we’re losing the war.”
For Democrats, the issue of crime and disorder exposes the party’s racial and ideological divisions, threatening to drive a wedge between some of the party’s core constituencies: Some voters are foremost demanding action on systemic disparities while others are focused on their own sense of safety in their homes and neighborhoods.
“People walking the streets, in many cases, feel themselves in danger, and that’s got to be dealt with,” said Willie Brown, a Democrat who is the former mayor of San Francisco.
But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats did not want to talk about “what cops do” for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending “A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is,” he said dismissively of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the influential progressive.
In 2019, Mr. Boudin’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for the progressive prosecutor movement. A former public defender who had switched sides of the courtroom, he became a symbol of success as he vowed to shrink racial disparities, curb mass incarceration and more aggressively hold police accountable. He promised then that “the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of the 1990s and early 2000s are on their way out.” Instead, he is.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/us/politics/california-voters-democrats-crime.html
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