It’s been coming for a while. It’s why “Karen” happened, the white woman acting upon her fear, when that fear happens to involve a black person. Maybe the woman is wrong to be afraid, but maybe she’s not. After all, the narrative says that she is allowed to be afraid, for good reason or whatever reason, since women are historically oppressed, except when she’s afraid of someone whose identity trumps hers. It’s all so confusing, which explains why feminist scholar Susan Estrich gets it all so very, very wrong.
Having been run out of San Francisco, as liberal a place as you will find in America, George Gascon relocated to Los Angeles. Having failed to free everyone from prison in San Francisco, he is now trying to do even worse in Southern California.
Was George Gascón run out of Frisco? Beats me, as I’m not sufficiently attuned to the California prosecutorial woke world. But if so, then it’s pretty astonishing that the DA run out of San Francisco ended up winning as DA of Los Angeles, not quite so woke in practice, and ousted a black female democrat incumbent district attorney. Yet that’s what happened. How it plays out has yet to be seen.
In November, voters in Los Angeles overwhelmingly rejected a proposition that would have eliminated cash bail. The margin was almost twice the margin newly elected Los Angeles District Attorney Gascon won by against a Black woman who had been targeted by the Black Lives Matter movement for two years. The first thing he did after he was elected, before meeting with anyone else in the community, was meet with the leaders of Black Lives Matter. The first thing he did when he was sworn in was lift his middle finger to voters by swearing to eliminate cash bail. And sentencing enhancements for crimes? Gone. Resisting arrest will no longer be punished. Nor will it matter anymore if the guy who mugged you happens to be a drug dealer and gang member.
Whoa. That was pretty much a full-throated attack on black guys. You know, those drug dealers and gang members with whom he met because he ran as an extremely progressive prosecutor, got elected as an extremely progressive prosecutor and plans to be exactly what he said he would.
Gascon apparently trusts criminals more than he does police. It’s true that there are police officers who use these enhancements to make sure that gang members who commit violent crimes don’t end up in the revolving door. It is also true, however, that such “nonviolent” offenders are the ones most likely to pull a gun on a police officer, to terrorize honest citizens and to turn neighborhoods into battlegrounds. But under Gascon, there will be no more prosecution for “nonviolent crimes” like mugging and petty theft and shooting up on the corner after a score. Don’t even bother calling the police if your home has been broken into by a man threatening to kill you.
Sure, voters in California rejected the elimination of the Equal Protection Clause in their state Constitution so that racial preferences could be freely given, but that doesn’t mean they’re back to the presumption that all black people are criminals. Estrich knows that Gascón was elected to be the progressive guy in the well, so what’s her problem?
It makes me furious, not because my own neighborhood is teeming with crime (it isn’t) but because, having been raped in my building parking lot when I was 19, I’m sensitive to those sorts of things. My vote is not with the criminals or the prosecutors but with the victims. I’ve been called a racist more than once for standing for victims whose honesty is not in doubt, regardless of the race of the bad guy who was responsible.
The crack in the identity narrative is about to explode, and as much as the coalition of identitarians held together when they had a common enemy, the reality is swiftly hitting home that it’s an untenable narrative. The problem isn’t that progressive feminists don’t care about black and brown people. They do. Just not at the expense of their own victimhood. They want a progressive prosecutor, but he should be their progressive prosecutor.
What about women? What about their fears and concerns? What happens when they’re the victims? And just in case you don’t feel the pain, Estrich offers an example.
So, Mr. Gascon, when a gang member demands that a 14-year-old girl give him sex in exchange for safe passage to school, what would you call that? Consent? A nonviolent crime?
Because that is what the children going to the worst high school in Los Angeles went through, until the teachers voted to give up their tenure to make it a charter school so that we, the charter school group whose board I sat on, took over. That first year, security expenses skyrocketed as we created a visible presence in the school neighborhood. Which, of course, made it safer for everybody — something Gascon has shown absolutely no interest in to date.
Does that happen? Is that a good example or just one invented to create fear and loathing of thugs? Estrich says it does, and who can question her lived experience? Then again, she utters the same language and fears that has long informed cops to presume young black guys are likely criminals. And if so, is she demanding that they be treated like the muggers, burglers, drug dealers and gangbangers she says?
Tell Gascon to dig deep into the literature about the sort of “incivilities,” like being mugged at the corner, that can turn a neighborhood into a killing field and make honest citizens afraid to go out and talk to the police, not because, as Gascon might tell you, the police overreacted but because they fear the gangs hold sway on the street.
Nobody wants to be raped or mugged. Nobody wants to be beaten or shot by cops because they assume you’re more violent based on your skin color. The hard part is figuring out how to distinguish between the criminal and the victim, the innocent and the guilty, and still respect the constitutional rights and bodily integrity of everyone.
Now that the progressive prosecutors are having their moment, will they be willing and able to make these hard and very real distinctions, or will they see their duty in black and white, and the identities that don’t make the racial cut are on their own? It was obvious that this would eventually happen, as the clash of identity interests was clear. Not every identity can prevail over every other identity. So who will be the loser? Things are not looking good for Karen.
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What a cluster. The core belief of progressivism is the denial of reality and your next to last paragraph is the reality that needs to be faced. It is not easy.
You can vote with your feet in this country and I hope the residents of LA do so.
They elected Gascon, and now they should live with him. It’s likely that some of the things he’s going to do will either work out or at least not prove sufficiently bad as to cause flight. But other things could well do to LA what happened to Frisco, and I don’t know that LA residents are prepared to live in a city where the sidewalks are covered with needles and feces, which they’ll have to step over to get into the Gucci boutique.
You ask: “Now that the progressive prosecutors are having their moment, will they be willing and able to make these hard and very real distinctions, or will they see their duty in black and white, and the identities that don’t make the racial cut are on their own? “ I’m willing to let progressive prosecutors try to rebalance the scales of justice, especially since decades of “tough on crime” prosecutors have brought us disproportionate imprisonment and punishment (see, e.g., the death penalty) for poor people of color, while Anglos got less punishment and the wealthy got wrist slaps.
The “tough on crime” crowd brought this response on themselves and refused to adjust their methods, even though the innocence movement demonstrated how absolutely wrong their methods were and even though insiders like you offered nuanced criticism. We need a rational approach to criminal justice. If progressives can achieve that, good on them.
There are a lot of people who agree with you: they were bad and wrong so we get our turn to be bad and wrong.
But where did the “tough on crime” crowd come from? It was a reaction to the fact that a large portion of the public viewed Warren Court policies/legal rulings as far too lenient, particularly in the face of rising murder rates and other crime rates in the cities; the rhetoric about “cleaning up the streets” reflected that. People wanted RoboCop, Judge Dredd, Death Wish, on-sight executions of drug dealers and sex criminals. For the tough on crime crowd, the problem was that they didn’t go anywhere near far enough as was necessary to clean up the “mistakes” of the 60s and 70s. A lot of those people are still alive, haven’t gone away, and haven’t changed their opinions.
Now, taking that same stance as a “progressive prosecutor”, “they got their turn and I hated every minute of it, now it’s my turn so I am going to to be as excessive as possible and completely ignore the concerns of others”, is a surefire way to end up with an actual fascist who dispenses with trials and legal protections by the early 2030s.
As a wise man once said, the alternative to bad is not necessarily good. Sometimes it’s just a different bad and sometimes it’s worse.
But an election was held and (inconsistent) choices were made. Will we learn from the experience (no matter what the experience may be as it’s plays out)?
Sadly, one of the reasons we don’t learn much is that things get presented as all good or all bad based primarily on tribal loyalties left and right. But it seems like we could at least try harder to be a rational thinking society instead of the dominant tribe.
The cycle of failure could theoretically be broken by some hard, serious effort to find a sustainable solution for everyone. But that would require thinking and doesn’t play well to the unduly passionate tribe of either color.
This woke posturing is the flip side of the war on crime posturing. For both It’s about who pays the costs of crime. Get a felony conviction and the perp goes to state prison to which local taxpayers make a relatively small contribution. There is still some local tax money left to fix the potholes and dispense to whoever has their hand out. Get a misdemeanor conviction and the perp goes to the city or county jail where the financial hit on local taxes is huge and there is a lot less moola to spread around. The war on crime folks wanted to turn everything into a felony and the woke want to do away with locally expensive “petty” offenses. Either way the same people at the bottom of the pile pay the price in the end.