Democrats champion 'equity' but shrug as radical criminal justice reforms hit minorities the hardest

Editor's note: This op-ed is adapted from an article that first appeared in City Journal.

The 2022 midterm election cycle was the first real test of the police and criminal-justice "reform" movements’ political viability amid resurgent violent crime. Republicans took up the cause of those who were worried about public safety and open to a tougher approach to crime, while Democrats defended the recent leftward lurch on the criminal-justice policy front. The Democrats’ defensive strategy involved downplaying (if not outright denying) recent crime increases or dismissing any suggestion that such upticks in crime were related to reform efforts.

Democrats held off what many predicted would be a "red wave" election, but the GOP enjoyed a massive advantage among the 11 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that crime was the biggest issue. Absent any clear political price imposed on the party, at least judging by the midterm results, there remains in office a critical mass of Democrats unwilling to roll back the most misguided reforms passed to date, or to resist newer efforts to go even further.

In November, for example, the Democratic city council in Washington, D.C., voted to move forward with a plan to rewrite the city’s criminal code—all but doing away with mandatory minimum sentences, extending the right to a jury trial to misdemeanor cases, expanding the rights of convicts to petition judges for sentence reductions, and lowering the maximum penalties for various serious offenses such as burglary, robbery, and carjacking. 

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Absent from the council’s agenda is addressing the city’s struggles with police hiring and rising crime. As of August 2021, the D.C. Metro Police Department had close to 500 fewer officers than the 4,000 positions budgeted. And the city has averaged more than 205 homicides a year since 2020—60 percent higher than its annual average (127.6) between 2010 and 2019.

In Illinois, residents saw part of a controversial law known as the Safe-T Act go into effect on January 1, 2023. A legal challenge has delayed the implementation of its most controversial provisions, which would have eliminated cash bail in Illinois and put new limits on judges’ ability to remand defendants to pretrial detention. But the Safe-T Act’s surviving provisions make it easier to file complaints against police officers by letting them be made anonymously; puts new restrictions on police uses of force; and loosens mandatory minimum sentences. 

Three years ago, New York’s controversial bail reform law took effect. Soon after, the nation’s biggest city saw an approximately 25 percent jump in total and violent felony arrests of pretrial releasees and a sharp rises in homicides and shootings, which rocketed by 47 percent and 97 percent, respectively, in 2020. Both measures increased again in 2021; and so-called Part I crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand larceny auto) spiked 25 percent through early December 2022 over the previous year—though murders were down 12 percent. Despite the city’s deteriorating quality of life, New York lawmakers have resisted calls for change. 

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The criminal-justice reform agenda is still largely driven by advocates far more radical than the average Democrat. Take a recent NBC News article co-penned by former defense-attorney-turned-social-media-personality Scott Hechinger and Dyjuan Tatro, a reform advocate who served prison time for, among other things, shooting two rival gang members. Per Hechinger and Tatro, bail reform in New York has proved a "success," and New York City has "remained secure." Not as secure as it might have been for the hundreds of additional homicide victims the city has seen over the last three years.

Notwithstanding New York’s dramatic leftward shift on criminal justice in recent years, advocates still don’t sound satisfied. In December, the New York City Council considered new legislation that would ban landlords from conducting criminal background checks on prospective tenants. That same month, New York University’s Policing Project relaunched its Reimagining Public Safety initiative, which seeks to shrink the policing footprint in the United States. 

The Left’s defenses of recent reforms, as well as proposals for even greater leniency in the criminal-justice system, have been advanced even as many jurisdictions across the country have faced record (or near-record) levels of violent crime in recent years. More than two dozen cities have broken all-time homicide records since 2020, while others have watched murder numbers climb to levels unseen since the mid-1990s.

Progressives insist that their wins are fragile and will vanish at the first sign of trouble on the crime front, many pointing to last year’s recall of San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin as evidence of their movement’s precarious position. But the successful recall effort in San Francisco now seems more of an outlier. Los Angeles’s radical D.A., George Gascón, survived a similar recall drive, as did California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In 2021, Philadelphia’s progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner, sailed to reelection, as did his Chicago counterpart Kim Foxx. And in November 2022, a number of similarly leftist prosecutors emerged victorious in races across the country.

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The seeming nonchalance and lack of urgency to restore order among so many left-leaning policymakers, advocates, and voters is surprising, given that the burden of the current crime spike has fallen disproportionately on those whom the reformers say they’re fighting for: those living in low-income, minority communities.

A study published in the November 2022 issue of the JAMA Network showed marked disparities in firearm homicides, with Black males victimized at a rate last reached in the mid-1990s—a rate that (at almost 60 per 100,000) is close to ten times higher than that of white males. In New York City, 97 percent of shooting victims were either Black or Hispanic in 2021; yet those minority groups constituted only slightly more than half of the city’s estimated 2021 population. One would think that disparities of this magnitude would concern a party that brands itself a defender of "equity."

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What does this all mean? In the short run, American cities can probably expect a few more years of declining quality of life—particularly in places that can least afford further setbacks. In the early 1990s, when the country seemed to resign itself to rampant crime and disorder as just part of urban life, it took New York City to demonstrate that change was not only necessary, but possible. The city declared—through a fed-up citizenry, a tough-on-crime mayor, and a legendary police commissioner—that it was going to restore order. What followed was a nearly three-decade period of crime declines and urban flourishing.

New York is apparently not yet ready (or willing) to lead the way in this new fight against an old foe. If New York, or New Yorkers, won’t, then someone else must. Who will it be?

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