The 2020 Black Lives Matter riots and the subsequent defund the police movement inspired by them emboldened criminals to act without impunity and left many communities without the resources to contain rising crime. The 2024 elections provided a snapback to normalcy as most people across the country have decided locking up unrepentant career criminals was actually the sensible policy all along.
Aside from the country’s rightward shift in the 2024 presidential race, tough-on-crime victories and “criminal justice reform” losses were the biggest stories of the election cycle. California’s Proposition 36 was the most well-known ballot proposition in the country, promising to turn back the 2014 ballot proposition that softened criminal penalties for thefts and shoplifting. Prop 36 makes serial shoplifting or carjacking a felony, increases felony sentences for thefts, allows people with multiple drug offenses to be charged with “treatment-mandated felonies,” and allows murder charges for fentanyl dealers.
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These once commonsense ideas were cast aside in California over the last decade because state Democrats were focused on emptying out prisons regardless of the crimes prisoners committed or how much of a danger they posed to the public. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) opposed Prop 36 but couldn’t muster any enthusiasm to campaign against it. Vice President Kamala Harris, who playacted as a centrist former prosecutor while trying to become president, never revealed how she voted on the measure (which implies she voted against it, as it was wildly popular in polls).
Despite California’s notoriously slow ballot counting, Prop 36 was confirmed to have passed on election night. With 83% of the vote counted one week after the election, 69% of Californians voted to approve Prop 36, which has the most support of any of the state’s ballot measures.
California was not the only place to see voters back tougher crime restrictions. In Arizona, voters approved Proposition 313, which would require a life sentence without parole for criminals convicted of a Class 2 felony for child sex trafficking. Arizonans also approved Proposition 314, which created a new crime for fentanyl sales resulting in death, and criminalized illegal immigrants using false information to apply for benefits or employment in the state.
Meanwhile, Democratic Colorado wrote off the 2020 “defund the police” movement, as Coloradans voted in favor of a ballot proposition to provide $350 million to help police departments across the state train and retain police officers. The proposal even explicitly banned the use of those funds “for other human services functions,” such as the “social workers” that antipolice activists want to take over several police functions. Colorado voters backed the measure over the objections of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, and they also increased the time violent criminals must serve before they become eligible for parole on another ballot measure.
Ballot measures were not the only way voters tried to restore law and order to their communities. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon has been one of the most prominent defense attorneys occupying a district attorney’s office in the country. Gascon’s greatest hits include releasing violent criminals who went on to kill police officers, trying to get criminals released on parole without informing victims or their families, and not using gun or gang enhancements in sentencing for violent criminals because that would be “racist.” Before the election, Gascon tried to cement his status as a model criminal justice reformer, trying to free the infamous Lyle and Erik Menendez.
Gascon survived a recall attempt only because nearly 200,000 signatures were declared invalid. On election night, in a blowout, Gascon was defeated by Nathan Hochman by 20 points and his reign of terror came to an end. Hochman served former President George W. Bush’s administration and was the GOP’s attorney general nominee in 2022. Crime has become so bad in Los Angeles that even the city’s Democratic voters are willing to look past the usual electoral fearmongering about how bad Republicans are.
Up the coast in California, two more Democrats got the boot from voters. Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price made ensuring criminals spend no time behind bars her top priority, even in the case of a gang shootout that killed a toddler in the crossfire. Price arrogantly asserted that arresting, prosecuting, and jailing criminals (or actively refusing to do any of those things) had no effect on crime.
Price was recalled after just two years on the job, as was Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, who was caught up in her own crime scandal (complete with an FBI raid on her home) while overseeing a crime crisis so bad the NAACP publicly bucked the city’s reform mindset, and Newsom sent California Highway Patrol in to try and solve the problem.
Price was one of many district attorneys across the country backed by Democratic megadonor George Soros, who flooded local district attorney races with money to back his procriminal “reform” candidates. As leftwing New York magazine put it in 2016, “Soros Is Buying America a Less Racist Justice System,” as the worldview of Soros and his allies is that putting criminals in jail is racist.
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The concept of reform to defeat “mass incarceration” sounds nice and rosy to voters in Democratic cities up until they have to deal with the effects. Criminals who know they won’t be behind bars for long, if at all, will continue to commit crimes with more frequency and more aggression until they get any resistance. In Price’s Alameda County, no such resistance ever took hold.
Soros-linked prosecutors across the country went down alongside Price, including Deborah Gonzalez, the district attorney in Athens, Georgia, where college student Laken Riley was murdered by an illegal immigrant. San Francisco’s reform-focused district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was ousted in a recall in 2022, and his replacement won reelection against his chosen reform-minded successor by nearly 40 points. Criminal justice reform candidates lost in half of the country’s top 25 district attorney races, according to the New York Post.
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It would appear that the only criminal who won on election night this year was President-elect Donald Trump, who became a convicted felon after being targeted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Bragg’s prosecution of Trump was entirely political and designed to brand Trump as a felon before the election. Bragg has spent time since the case trying to imprison a Marine for protecting women and children from a raving homeless man on a subway car. Unfortunately, Bragg wasn’t up for reelection this cycle. Fortunately, he could follow Price, Gascon, and others out the door next year when his term ends.
All across the country, the results of the 2024 election mean people will be safer from crime, whether it be from violent criminals or the spread of fentanyl. All it took was a disastrous four years (or more in some Democratic enclaves) of coddling criminals in response to the antipolice sentiment that has been stoked by race-obsessed activists who have no interest in data or reality. The Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the frantic screaming about “mass incarceration” made for great social media posturing, but running the criminal justice system based on those sentiments was always going to lead to disaster. Evidently, even Democratic voters see that now.
