Tuesday’s California results are likely to send a harsh message to Democrats who control Congress and the White House. The result will once again underscore the danger that a ruling party may face when voters feel that the certainty of their lives has been removed, a dynamic that extends beyond crime and homelessness to inflation, l ‘rising gas prices and the continuing disruption of the Covid pandemic.
“From a broader perspective, voters and residents feel that the government regime, the Liberal Democrat regime that has dominated LA for the past 30 years, and California and San Francisco, is not meeting the moment,” says Fernando Guerra, a politician. scientist who runs the Los Angeles Center for the Study at Loyola Marymount University.
Zev Yaroslavsky, who served on LA City Council and then on the LA County Board of Supervisors for nearly 40 years beginning in 1975, says the only time he can remember Los Angeles voters is as unhappy as they are. today was the late seventies, an era. of high inflation and rising property tax bills that produced California’s Proposition 13 and the fiscal revolt that helped elect President Ronald Reagan in 1980.
“What people used to take for granted can no longer be taken for granted: your ability to pay rent, your ability to walk the streets safely, your ability not to be approached by a homeless person.” says Yaroslavsky, now. director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a lack of confidence in the government’s responsiveness.”
Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, who took office in 2013, also hears these outbursts. “I’ve never seen a more angry electorate than this particular election,” he told me. “I think all this is boiling.”
An inverted agenda
The dominant role of crime and homelessness in the Los Angeles and San Francisco elections represents a reversal of the political agenda since the summer of 2020. Like dozens of other cities, both places were seen as protesters for police reform. they filled the streets after the assassination of George Floyd. In Los Angeles, this energy helped propel Gascon to a limited victory over the District Attorney-backed Jackie Lacey law enforcement in November 2020 and also drove voter approval of an election initiative to combat racial inequalities by shifting county funds to social services and alternatives to imprisonment. .
San Francisco District Attorney Boudin, who was elected by restraint in 2019, and Gascon have pursued largely parallel agendas focused on reducing incarceration through measures such as the virtual ban on judging minors as adults. rejection of “improvements” (due to factors such as gang involvement or use of a gun) that extend the length of sentences and a policy of not prosecuting minor “quality of life” crimes associated with homelessness, such as public admission and urination.
This agenda was quickly met with strong resistance from other elements of the criminal justice system committed to traditional approaches, including unions representing police in both cities. Law enforcement interests are supporting the withdrawals against Gascon and Boudin, and in LA the police union is spending heavily on Bass, a leader in the House of Representatives approval last year. federal police reform legislation. Withdrawal efforts against Boudin and Gascon, as well as Caruso’s candidacy for mayor of Los Angeles, have also garnered the support of major Republican donors, who are a clear minority in both cities.
The role of both law enforcement members and conservative donors and activists has frustrated advocates of police reform, who see the reaction on these many fronts as an attempt to restore hard-line approaches before new alternatives. have a chance to prove if they can succeed.
“I think that, to a large extent, the most conservative forces have been very, very adept at framing the problems of the homeless and crime, so the discussion on … how to respond to these two problems is very, very narrow, “he says. Mike Bonin, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, an open Liberal who is not seeking re-election this year after narrowly avoiding a revocation campaign focused on his resistance to tougher measures against homelessness endemic to his Westside district .
However, the evidence is overwhelming that the unrest that dominates Tuesday’s election extends far beyond conservative circles. Yaroslavsky notes that in the annual UCLA Luskin School survey in Los Angeles County, concern about crime has risen substantially not only among whites but also among Hispanics, blacks, and Asian Americans.
Ben LaBolt, a San Francisco-based Democrat strategist and former Barack Obama campaign spokesman, also notes that prominent local Democrats have played a prominent role in the effort to remember Boudin. “The idea is that [recall] It’s dangerous for Democrats to say or think of any right-wing disinformation campaign, because it’s definitely not, ”he says.
In both cities, public safety anxiety is rising faster than the actual trends in reported crime. The San Francisco Police Department’s online bulletin board shows that until May 29 (the last week for which figures are available) thefts and thefts or thefts of motor vehicles are clearly higher than the comparable period. of 2019, before Boudin took office. But assaults and homicides have hardly changed during this period, and robberies have dropped, as has the total number of serious crimes. In Los Angeles, the trends are more complicated: the Los Angeles Police Department’s tracking system shows that by the end of May, both property crimes and violent crime had increased substantially over the comparable period of 2020 (before the Gascon elections). But even in LA, both violent and property crime remain a small fraction of their high levels in the 1990s and well below their rates for most of the first decade of this century.
“We’re not seeing numbers that look like some of the worst times people’ve ever been through,” said Michelle Parris, director of the California program at the Vera Institute of Justice, speaking on behalf of Vera Action, an advocacy group. criminal justice. In addition, he notes, California communities with harsh crime policies such as Sacramento and rural Kern County are experiencing increases in crime that in some cases outweigh the increases in Los Angeles and San Francisco. “We’ve seen that even the toughest prosecutors with crime in California have not offered security,” he says. “They are subject to the exact same trends that we are seeing across the country.”
A high visibility issue
Like many other observers in both cities, Parris points to a different cause of crime per se as the main driver of rising public safety anxiety. “Homelessness and untreated mental illness … affect people’s perception of security,” he says. “And so I think that’s part of why in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco in particular, where [that] It’s quite visible, it has a big impact on what people are talking about. “
In both cities, widespread homelessness has rekindled concern about losing control of the city’s streets that inspired proponents of the “broken windows” theory to defend 40 years ago for greater enforcement of “disorder” crimes such as vagrancy, manipulation, and public intoxication. In San Francisco, the focus has been on the Tenderloin neighborhood, which has been overwhelmed by open drug use among the homeless. In Los Angeles, races for mayor and City Council have been dominated by concerns about the spread of large homeless camps around the city. These camps have proliferated despite the approval of two election initiatives in Los Angeles in 2016 that authorized substantial spending on building homes and providing services for the homeless, and the City Council’s approval of an ordinance last fall. which authorized the removal of encampments around sensitive areas such as. schools, libraries and nurseries.
“Take a look at our streets: no matter where you live now, you can walk down the street, you can look out the front window, and you’ll see … that what the city and county have been doing is just not working.” , says Martinez, president of LA City Council.
Yaroslavsky, a former city and county official, says the persistence of homeless camps has become a viscerally visible symbol of fundamental government failure. “I think homelessness is both a real problem, but it’s also a metaphor for everything that has gone wrong in society and the government’s ability to address something that is so visible and so ubiquitous in the county,” he says. “So it’s like a billboard that says failure.”
The hustle and bustle of the neighborhood for a large camp around the public library in the traditionally liberal community of Venice facing the Los Angeles Ocean encapsulates the discontent that has turned politics in both cities. After the city of Los Angeles finally cleared a mass camp of homeless people along Venice’s waterfront promenade that drew national attention, a new one was developed last fall around the community’s public library. . It has now engulfed the library on all sides, angering and frightening nearby residents, who have posted viral videos of drug use and rampant violence in the area. Longtime library customers have publicly lamented that they no longer feel safe using the facilities, which were also threatened by a recent fire that started in the camp.
“There are cuts. There are shootings,” said Elizabeth Clay, a local activist and land use planner who has been involved in community protests against the camp. “My last email to the mayor was that, among other things, we had just had a massacre in Texas, an unstable man who was ignored, but it’s not like people didn’t know he was unstable. We have a park mentally unstable people currently cutting and …