For many of us who didn’t wake up to the criminal justice system on November 9, 2016, the elevation of former Southern District of New York United States Attorney Preet Bharara to progressive hero was like a bad joke. Preet? Seriously? As far as the newly-woke progressive left was concerned, his refusal to resign when Trump told him to made him an icon.

Did they have any idea how many kittens he kicked before? Did they even care? There are a lot of those beloved vulnerable and marginalized people of color who will spend the rest of their lives in prison because of Preet. And he’s your progressive hero?

Josie Duffy Rice calls out the “myth of the progressive prosecutor,” starting with Cy Vance.

Mr. Vance is considered one of America’s most progressive prosecutors and has the accolades to prove it. In 2015, he helped create the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Two years earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder gave him an award for having developed a partnership between local youths and law enforcement aimed at reducing violence.

Certainly Eric Holder was a progressive hero, given all he did to eliminate junk science from the courtroom, reduce wrongful convictions and not execute innocent people, with his trusty sidekick, Sally Yates, at his side.

However, like many prosecutors across the country who get credit for changing the game while continuing draconian practices, Mr. Vance simply isn’t the reformer he paints himself as.

Say nice words. Do pretty much the same as always. The words make tears of joy flow. The practices make tears flow too, but the other kind.

Look at the data. Manhattan holds less than 20 percent of the city’s population, but on an average day, almost 40 percent of Rikers Island inmates are from the borough. This disparity has been attributed in part to his office’s zealous prosecution of misdemeanors. As of 2015, Mr. Vance was more likely to prosecute a misdemeanor charge than any other district attorney in New York City.

So Cy turns out to be an ungood ally? This is where Josie goes to town, where the difference between the n00bs who are so certain of their wokeness and people whose heads haven’t been conveniently placed in a bodily orifice for the past decade is made clear.

Nor is Mr. Vance the only faux reformer.

The New Orleans district attorney, Leon Cannizzaro,claims that his office “has worked aggressively to reform New Orleans’s criminal justice system.” But his actions indicate that he values convictions over his community. He haslocked up rape victims who refused to testify against their assailants and has served fake subpoenas to pressure witnesses to talk. Mr. Cannizzaro defended a sentence in which a 17-year-old was sent to prison for 99 years for an armed car robbery, even though no one was injured during the crime. His office tried to sentence a man to 20 years in prison for stealing $31 worth of candy.

Anyone else?

The Los Angeles district attorney, Jackie Lacey, is a Democrat who has benefited from the public’s perception that she is a reformer. This is something she has fed herself, bragging to a Los Angeles Sentinel reporter that she has read “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander and has seen Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13,” about the connection between slavery and mass incarceration. But Ms. Lacey’s values have consistently lagged behind those of her constituency.

In ballot initiatives, Los Angeles County residents supported shorter sentences for low-level and nonviolent property and drug crimes and wanted to legalize recreational marijuana use for adults. Ms. Lacey opposed both. And although the county voted in favor of abolishing the death penalty, she continues to support it. Last year there were just 31 death sentences nationwide. Ms. Lacey’s office secured four of them.

Ouch. Is a death penalty less brutal when obtained by a reforming prosecutor?

Philadelphia’s former district attorney R. Seth Williams was once identified as a rising political star. But it turns out he wasn’t much of a leader at all. By the end of his tenure, which was cut short after he pleaded guilty to bribery and resigned, Philadelphia had locked up more of its residents per capita than any other major city. One in four defendants was being held in jail simply because of an inability to pay bail.

It’s not that progressive prosecutors can’t be dirty, like anyone else, but even the ones who aren’t taking bribes, who can quote Maya Angelou from memory, are still prosecutors. To some extent, the conflict is inherent in the job; prosecutors prosecute based on law. They are not the avenging angels of social justice, but just avenging angels.

The irony of calling for more criminalization in one place (say, revenge porn) while bemoaning criminalization in others (say, marijuana) eludes many. But over-criminalization only seems to register in progressive minds based on fashion trends, forgetting that the crimes they hate today were once just as fashionable as the crimes they love today.

And this is where they fail to grasp how their cries for “justice” make little sense, since “justice” is mostly a matter of whose sad story prevails, the accused’s or the victim’s, at any given moment. Ask any victim about “justice” and there is a good chance their foremost concern won’t be educational opportunities in poor urban schools.

But what Duffy makes clear is that there are real ways in which prosecutors can exercise their authority, their discretion, to bring reform to their jobs, by eliminating false confessions, suggestive identifications, Brady violations, junk science, needless bail, abuse of power, covering for killer cops and the big one, not going for death.

And yet, the suddenly woke former Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris, who talks the talk now that she has presidential aspirations, has been politically reborn.

This is the same Kamala Harris whose feelings didn’t prevent her from opposing police body cams, giving a pass to killer cops, protecting lying prosecutors, as well as dirty district attorneys offices.

Then, there’s Preet. But he opposed Trump, and you hate Trump, so the enemy of your enemy has to be fabulous. Some hero you got there.