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Nearly a decade ago, talk of so-called “progressive prosecutors” came onto the legal scene with all the flair and freshness of Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album or tickets to Hamilton.
The label is generally applied to district attorneys — elected officials who lead local prosecutor’s offices — who challenge the traditional “tough-on-crime” approaches of their predecessors and seek to reduce their jurisdiction’s reliance on mass incarceration.
“There seemed to be an unwritten law: Tougher is always better. And then, with remarkable speed, the unwritten law ceased to operate,” Stanford Law Professor David A. Sklansky wrote in 2017 about the shift.
Their rise was quickly met with persistent, aggressive attacks from critics, who’ve decried them as “woke,” anti-police, and a threat to “safe and secure communities.” Some prosecutors also faced resistance from staffers who rebuked their reformist ideals.
After the general election earlier this month, some are wondering whether this marks the end of a movement. “One of the key takeaways of the 2024 election cycle may be that voters have learned a key lesson from recent history. When it came to progressive policies, they went along to get along — until the results hit them, hard and fast,” concludes Rafael A. Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, who urged Democrats to take more moderate positions.
Critics of traditional tough-on-crime district attorneys have argued that the old approach fueled mass incarceration and the racial disparities it creates. Progressive prosecutors offered a different path, one guided by minimizing and correcting past harms.
In 2016, Kim Foxx unseated the longtime tough-on-crime incumbent to take charge of the country’s second-largest local prosecutor’s office, in Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago. Foxx vowed to reduce unnecessary prosecutions for non-violent, low-level offenses like retail theft — which made up one of the largest types of cases her predecessor prosecuted. The following year, Philadelphia residents elected Larry Krasner, a civil rights and defense attorney with a history of suing the city’s police department and city hall. In 2020, George Gascón took over the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, where he swiftly called for ending the death penalty, curtailing the use of cash bail for low-level crimes, and reviewing cases that involved excessive sentences.
But the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in a country where most people feel strongly about crime and, increasingly, say that efforts to curtail it aren’t tough enough. Crime rates spiked briefly around the country during the pandemic, particularly homicides. Corporate retailers harked on about retail theft.
Progressive prosecutors became a popular scapegoat — even as numerous studies concluded that they have little influence on violent crime rates and that the role is inherently reactive.
But efforts to oust them from office breezed along.
In 2022, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren, the lead prosecutor of Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa. DeSantis called the progressive prosecutor movement a “pathogen.” The following year he suspended another prosecutor, Monique Worrell, “for being too soft on crime.”
According to reporting by The Appeal, Warren was among several prosecutors, including San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, whose roles had been threatened by recalls, investigations and attempts to limit their powers. Voters recalled Boudin in 2022. More than a dozen states have introduced bills — some successfully — to curtail top prosecutorial powers.
In Nueces County, Texas, which includes Corpus Christi, longtime progressive District Attorney Mark Gonzalez faced a trial for “gross carelessness” and “gross ignorance” of his job duties — a push backed by local conservatives. Gonzalez resigned in 2023, shortly before the trial began.
The general election earlier this month dealt some more blows to the progressive prosecutor movement, although voter support on criminal justice varied wildly by jurisdiction.
Gascón was ousted in Los Angeles after he had weathered two previous recall attempts. In Alameda County, which includes Oakland, voters recalled Pamela Price, who had only been in office for two years. Price was the first Black woman to hold the office in the county’s nearly 200-year history.
“Both officials were flawed, and both recall efforts were funded by a group of wealthy hedge fund managers, tech elites, and real estate investors who claimed to be concerned about crime,” writes commentator and reporter Radley Balko.
Balko says the voters’ political affiliations likely played a big role in these races, and notes that progressive prosecutors won in places where they weren’t targeted by “wealthy right-wing donors.” (Lake County, Illinois, and Albany County, New York, for example.)
Rachel Marshall, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College, writes that questioning whether the recent election marks the end of progressive prosecutors “fundamentally misreads what is happening” around the country.
Marshall points to the reelection of José Garza in Texas’ Travis County, which includes Austin, Karen McDonald in Oakland County, Michigan, near Detroit, and Monique Worrell in Florida — who won again despite DeSantis’ interference. Larry Krasner remains in office in Philadelphia and is serving his second term. He reportedly plans to run for a third.
In Chicago, Foxx did not seek reelection and will end her second term next month. Her tenure was defined, in part, by her office’s effort to overturn wrongful convictions by corrupt police officers and pushing to end cash bail.
In an interview with WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station earlier this week, Foxx reflected on being the first Black woman to lead the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and how her identity played into the criticisms she received.
“The policies were different than anything we had done before. And I think any time you’re trying to do a new innovation, there will be pushback,” she told WBEZ. “Some of it was related to my race and my gender. I know that because I read the hate mail. I saw the Proud Boys march on my office with the [Fraternal Order of Police].”
She will be succeeded by Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke, a former judge and prosecutor who ran on a tough-on-crime platform.
“We don’t have to choose between safety or justice. We can have both with the right leadership,” Burke said during her victory speech.
Burke’s plans include undoing the very first policy decision Foxx made when she was elected to office nearly a decade ago, by lowering the threshold for prosecuting people accused of low-level retail theft with felonies.
