Criminal-Justice Reform Takes Time. California Might Be Out of Patience.

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% :In each city, the opposition from law enforcement -- along with support from right-leaning donors -- provided the initial spark for the recall efforts.
51% : Alex Bastian, a special adviser to Gascón, says the bail policy applied to those gun-possession cases is shaped by a California State Supreme Court decision discouraging reliance on cash bail, and by rules the state and county court systems instituted to reduce incarceration during COVID-19 outbreaks; Gascón, Bastian adds, is working with law enforcement to explore whether there should be more exceptions to the rule for repeat offenders or others who pose a special risk.
50% : Conversely, he notes that although diversion programs or investment in social services might look like leniency today, those policies can foster safety over time by shrinking the pool of potential future offenders.
49% :San Francisco's Chesa Boudin and L.A.'s George Gascón each ran for office on confronting structural racial inequities, reducing incarceration, and toughening accountability for law enforcement.
46% : In L.A., Eric Siddall, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys' vice president and a 15-year veteran of the office who now prosecutes crimes against law enforcement, says that when Gascón barred prosecutors from seeking sentencing enhancements, including three-strikes counts, he put the office's line attorneys "in an ethical dilemma" of following "his orders or ... the law."
43% : "He did the things he said he would do," says Jonathan Simon, a professor of criminal-justice law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
43% : Magnus Lofstrom, the policy director for criminal justice and a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, says the rise in homicides and aggravated assaults across California is genuine cause for concern.
42% : Each pledged not to seek the death penalty and to reassess the death sentences their offices already had imposed.
42% : "The effect that any policies that a D.A. adopts has on crime will take some time to manifest itself," says David Alan Sklansky, a Stanford University law professor who studies criminal justice.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.