How A New Wave Of Woke District Attorneys Are Allowing Criminals To Flourish

After two years of record-setting murder rates in America’s cities, The Daily Wire looks into who is enabling this unchecked rise in violent crime and who should be held accountable.

After at least 16 American cities broke homicide records in 2021, now, as we enter the traditionally violent summer months, many of them are on track to surge past last year’s bloody numbers. Cities across the nation are experiencing a two-to-five year upward trend of increasing violent crime – with little to no solutions offered by law enforcement, prosecutors, or state or locally elected leaders. This includes cities where unchecked violent crime was thought to have been “fixed” in the bygone era of the 1980s and 1990s.

Instead, leaders are dodging their responsibility for this rise in violence. From the COVID-19 pandemic (yes, still) to the economy to a consistent demand for gun control (even in places who have been found to rarely enforce existing firearm laws) authorities are avoiding accountability.

In generations past, these types of chilling statistics would have been met with an immediate change in local law enforcement policies and criminal justice leadership. But now, however, in the post-Trump era of political polarization, mayors and their police executives, district attorneys, and the media establishment seem more concerned with controlling a narrative than making communities safer. 

But the fact is, the last two years were the deadliest in the histories of a myriad of cities throughout the United States. While homicides are becoming a daily staple of local news, what is notably absent from the coverage is any sense of accountability by the political leaders charged with keeping us safe.

“Violent crime is rising because we forgot the lessons we learned in the 1990s about controlling violent crime,” says Manhattan Institute Adjunct Fellow Thomas Hogan, who served as a county and federal prosecutor. “For instance, research shows that 5% of offenders are responsible for over 50% of violent crime in any given city. We need to concentrate police and prosecutors on incapacitating this group with strong investigations and lengthy prison sentences. Low-level offenders can still be placed under supervision or diverted, but crime can’t be ignored.”  

It is vital that we understand how the criminal justice system works, as most people’s view of “law enforcement” begins with the uniformed police officer or deputy sheriff they see every day and ends with the federal agents they likely only see portrayed in television and movies. In reality, public safety is an ecosystem where law enforcement officers make arrests which are prosecuted by mainly elected district attorneys, who try most cases in state courts before largely elected judges. Like a chain, if a link is weak or missing, the system will simply not work.

Historically, mayors and local legislators hired career law enforcement leaders to run police agencies, and political parties picked experienced prosecutors and former policing executives to run for elected prosecutor and sheriff’s offices. If a notable failure in leadership, mismanagement, and/or corruption were to surface within those agencies, these politicians would then fire the appointed official or weigh in with their bully pulpit to apply pressure on the elected prosecutors, judges, or sheriffs responsible. But this is no longer the case. 

Over the last 10 years, a political sea change on the Left brought about an ingenious plan to inject money into high-profile, low cost local law enforcement elections. While this was sold to the public as a “reshaping of a racist criminal justice system,” it was actually a long-term political strategy that is now coming to fruition.

In 2010, the Supreme Court held in the Citizens United decision that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. After Citizens United, many of the nation’s political kingmakers injected millions into national presidential and congressional elections. In a counter to the conservative investments by the Koch brothers, Steve Wynn, Shelden Edelstein and others, Democratic mega-donors George and Alexander Soros directed their wealth into the establishment of a nationwide political action committee (PAC) network that became operational in a myriad of state and local attorney general, prosecutor, and judicial races in 2016.

This proved to be a successful strategy, as crime is widely covered by the media, state and local prosecutors receive media exposure that far out values the costs of their elections. Thus, Soros-funded PACs initially channeled more than $3 million into seven local district attorney campaigns in six states, mainly for candidates who had never before served as prosecutors, for a total sum that exceeded the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors on the right.

After a sweeping success in 2016, the strategy was expanded nationwide, seeding the next generation of candidates for higher offices. It is estimated that a