But now Torres is nervous about what 2025 may bring. A lawsuit threatens to unwind the law against immigration jails, and the attorney general’s directive is still not codified into law, meaning that a new official who is more hostile to immigrants’ rights could quickly undo it. And New Jersey is electing many of its state and local leaders this year in a host of races that will test much more than just candidates’ openness to immigration detention.

“Somehow I have been dreading 2025’s cycle for even longer than I did 2024’s,” Torres told Bolts about New Jersey’s upcoming elections. “It’s not guaranteed that we’re going to get the protections that these communities deserve.”

The coming year indeed carries high stakes for policing and criminal justice, in New Jersey and beyond. There will be roughly 160 elections for prosecutor and sheriff this year. Most are concentrated in just four East Coast states—New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Filing deadlines are still months away. But at this early juncture, there are already several elections to keep an eye on including the re-election bids of Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, the former civil rights attorney turned prosecutor, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, fresh off prosecuting Donald Trump. This year will also see important elections for prosecutor in Brooklyn and several Virginia cities, as well as sheriff races in Buffalo and New Orleans. (The full list of prosecutor and sheriff races is available here.)

Sheriffs and prosecutors are central to local criminal legal systems, with wide discretion over a large range of issues from sentencing to detention conditions, so Bolts closely tracks them each year. But criminal justice policy also hinges on offices that have broader purviews. This year, New Jersey and Virginia are selecting their state governments. The partisan or ideological majorities on Pennsylvania and Wisconsin’s supreme courts are also on the line.

Plus, dozens of cities are electing their mayors and city councilors in 2025, including places with major recent conflicts over policing like Atlanta, Minneapolis, and New York City.

Today Bolts is launching its coverage of these races by fleshing out six storylines that will define the cycle.

1. How will two prosecutors emblematic of the reform movement fare against national headwinds?

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who brought Trump to trial this spring on felony charges of falsifying business records, famously secured 34 convictions against him. With Trump now headed back to the White House, this may well remain the only criminal trial Trump sits through. 

This has earned Bragg the intense enmity of conservatives nationwide, who have attacked his prosecution of Trump, as well as his affinities for criminal justice reforms. In 2024, a Republican prosecutor in Arizona even refused to extradite a suspect to New York, citing Bragg’s politics. When he first ran in 2021, Bragg positioned himself as a reformer and courted progressive voters, though his proposals were not as far-reaching as some of his rivals. 

MAGA fury is unlikely to mean much in a Democratic primary in Manhattan, which is the main hurdle standing between Bragg and a second term this year. Despite the New York Post’s negative coverage of Bragg as responsible for crime, he has touted the decline in shootings, homicides, and property crimes in the borough over his time in office. 

And some local progressives have distanced themselves from his policies. Eliza Orlins, a public defender who ran for DA against Bragg in the 2021 Democratic primary, has criticized him for breaking his campaign promises to scale back the tactics that ballooned incarceration locally, such as heavy prosecution of low-level offenses. “The political landscape has shifted significantly since 2021,” she told Bolts. “However, I think there’s still room to shape the debate—especially in races like the one for Manhattan DA,” she added. “Reformers need to push back against the fear-based narratives and ensure that the real impact of policies like bail reform and decarceration is part of the conversation.”

Just 100 miles away, in Philadelphia, Larry Krasner came to embody the “progressive prosecutor” movement after his 2017 victory. He curtailed prosecutions of low-level offenses, restricted the scope of probation, overturned many wrongful convictions, and clashed with police unions for taking a harder line on officer misconduct.

Krasner also comfortably won reelection four years ago despite a major push to oust him, and then also survived a GOP effort to remove him from office. However, as he now approaches his second reelection race, the national context has changed. Losses by high-profile reform DAs in California have put progressives interested in prosecutor reform on the defensive. Krasner may also face several challengers this year, including local judge Patrick Dugan, who recently divulged that he plans to run. 

Heavy spending against California reformers by the tech and real estate industry was a key factor in their losses in the state. And Krasner might have an even bigger target on his back: Last fall, he tried to stop Elon Musk’s electioneering schemes on Trump’s behalf in Pennsylvania. Musk has recently said he wants to fund campaigns against reform DAs, and he spent heavily in a failed effort to oust Austin’s chief prosecutor last year, fueling speculation of new confrontations between Musk and Krasner this year.

2. Can proponents of prosecutor reform keep or expand their footing in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia? (Plus, who will even run?)

Even if the other prosecutors on the ballot this year don’t have such national profiles, their fates still matter for local criminal justice policy.

DA Eric Gonzalez is also up for reelection in Brooklyn, which is the biggest county with a prosecutor race anywhere in the nation this year. A self-proclaimed ‘progressive prosecutor,’ Gonzalez has unveiled policies to shield some immigrants from deportation and dropped cases against hundreds of against sex workers, among other reforms, while also facing criticism from the left for not being bold enough. He ran for a second term unopposed in 2021.

In upstate New York, reformers in 2024 got rid of David Soares, one of their more vocal foils. Soares spent years railing against pretrial reforms as DA of Albany County and former president of the state’s DA association. Reformers have a similar opportunity in 2025 in Orange County, where David Hoovler, another former president of the DA association and critic of pretrial reforms, is up for reelection. Also on the ballot are Nassau County DA Anne Donnelly and Suffolk County DA Raymond Tierney, two Republicans who oversee Long Island’s two populous counties and keep calling for the state to roll back its 2020 bail reform.

In Virginia, a group of 11 reform-minded prosecutors formed an alliance in 2020 to advocate for statewide criminal justice reforms like ending mandatory minimum sentences. But the group’s agenda was sidelined when Democrats lost their governing majority in late 2021. 

Several members of this alliance face reelection in 2025. They include Stephanie Morales, the Portsmouth prosecutor who helped spearhead the creation of the reform alliance five years ago and who clashed with police during Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as well as Ramin Fatehi, the Norfolk prosecutor who faces critics who favor a more punitive approach to prosecution. If they survive this year, they could reprise their statewide advocacy, but that could also hinge on Democrats regaining control of the state government (more on that below).

Finally, roughly a third of Pennsylvania’s counties are electing their DA, including populous Bucks, Westmoreland, and York counties. As is often the case with prosecutors, the first test will be who even files by the March deadline; in the state’s most recent DA races, in 2023, most races saw a complete lack of competition, with candidates running unopposed across the state.

3. Will sheriff races question the harsh status quo on jail deaths, detention conditions, and collaboration with ICE?

The jail in Buffalo, New York, has drawn lawsuits and scrutiny for the mounting deaths of people in custody. When longtime Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard, a named defendant in these lawsuits, retired in 2021, his preferred candidate, Republican John Garcia, narrowly prevailed in the race to replace him. Deaths have steadily continued in the lock-up under Garcia, and local activists say detention conditions have remained just as gruesome as under Howard. 

In the city of Virginia Beach, an investigation conducted this fall revealed that a man died earlier this year due to the way in which he was restrained by sheriff’s deputies. 

And in Monmouth County, New Jersey, the sheriff’s office was hit by a lawsuit in 2024 that alleged that it was covering up drug-related deaths and overdoses in custody.

Each of these three jurisdictions is electing its sheriff this year, which could at least give local advocates a platform to further expose these detention conditions. And similar questions could surface in the other sheriff’s races taking place in New York and Virginia, plus parts of New Jersey. (Note that Pennsylvania also votes for sheriffs but in that state, as well as in some New Jersey counties, jails are run by the county board and the sheriff’s authority is much more narrow.)

Local detention conditions are also worrying advocates in Louisiana, which adopted legislation last year that is set to balloon local jails. New Orleans, which has a long history of deadly conditions, is the only parish to hold a sheriff’s race this year. Sheriff Suson Hutson, who won with the support of many local reformers in 2021, broke with the other state sheriffs who cheered the 2024 legislation and warned that it would create an “unmanageable population explosion in the New Orleans jail.” 

Sheriffs who run jails also have leeway in deciding how much to collaborate with federal immigration agents; for instance, many get to decide whether to rent out their space to ICE to detain people. Amy Woolard, chief program officer of the ACLU of Virginia, who is tracking how this issue plays out across her state’s 38 sheriff’s races this year, says it’s often difficult to even ascertain where sheriff candidates stand on it. 

“I would ask them, point blank, what are their policies and practices for working with ICE; what are their intentions around protecting immigrant communities in their jurisdictions” Woolard told Bolts. “I think having that knowledge is going to help immigrant communities understand what they may be facing depending on where they live.”

4. How will city elections impact policing? 

This year, 23 cities of at least 250,000 people will elect their mayor, a position that often comes with some control over the local police department. 

The most obvious highlight is the mayoral race in New York City, where incumbent and former police officer Eric Adams is preparing to run for a second term while under indictment on federal corruption charges. 

Under Adams, the New York Police Department has been rocked by incessant scandals and resignations, including over corruption and sexual misconduct allegations. Adams has championed more aggressive police tactics such as adding armed officers to public transit and reviving plainclothes police squads. He has already drawn a wide field of challengers, including a pair of progressive state Senators, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, who have each been more critical of the NYPD. The possible candidacy of former Governor Andrew Cuomo may still rock the race. 

Then there’s Atlanta, where Democratic leadership remains locked in a battle with local activists over plans to construct a police training center widely known as “Cop City.” Mayor Andre Dickens has championed the proposal and secured the city council’s approval; these officials also blocked a ballot initiative that would have asked Atlantans to weigh in on Cop City. This year, Dickens is running for reelection; all city council seats are on the ballot as well. 

Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. Mayor Jacob Frey has agreed to reforms over the years but has drawn scrutiny over their faltering implementation. He has also resisted more ambitious overhauls; he won reelection in 2021 on the same day as voters defeated a proposal to replace the police department, which he vocally opposed. 

Omar Fateh, a progressive state lawmaker who backed the 2021 policing referendum, has announced that he’ll challenge the mayor in 2025 and has signaled that he’ll run to Frey’s left.

Other cities with mayoral elections in 2025 include Boston, where first-term Mayor Michelle Wu promised to reform policing but backtracked on some key commitments like ending a controversial police surveillance center. In Pittsburgh, a mayor who is generally allied with local reformers is up for a second term. In Omaha and Seattle, candidates who ran on growing their local police departments and defeated more left-leaning opponents in 2021 are again on the ballot. Plus, Bolts will track similar dynamics in cities ranging from Buffalo and Cleveland to St. Louis and Oakland. 

5. Will conservatives flip supreme courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?

Just two years after a liberal takeover that paved the way for fairer election maps, control of Wisconsin’s supreme court is again on the ballot this spring. An open race to replace a retiring liberal justice, Ann Welsh Bradley, could flip the court back to the right. 

Conservatives have a similar opportunity in Pennsylvania, where three Democratic justices are up for reelection this year; Republicans need to win two of these seats to secure a majority on the court, and their chances largely depend on whether any incumbents retire.

The stakes around control of these courts are most clear around abortion rights, labor issues, and redistricting. But on criminal cases, these supreme courts also hear individual appeals and decide broader questions like the constitutionality of punishments. In Pennsylvania, cases currently on the supreme court’s docket include a challenge to draconian life sentence schemes and a dispute over an effort by Krasner to vacate a death sentence. 

But the Democratic majority on Pennsylvania’s high court has not delivered consistent wins for criminal justice reformers—for instance, declining to consider the legality of the death penalty.

And Wisconsin’s court, typically split by ideological conflicts, is strikingly uniform when it comes to justices’ professional backgrounds. Five of its seven members are former prosecutors; none is a former public defender. The 2025 front-runners, conservative Brad Schimel and liberal Susan Crawford, have both stressed their prosecutorial experiences as a former attorney general and former deputy attorney general, respectively.

6. Who will come to govern New Jersey and Virginia? 

Voters in New Jersey and Virginia will each elect their next governor and lawmakers this year.

Amy Torres, the New Jersey advocate for immigrant justice, says that, depending on who wins Democratic primaries and then the November elections, she could see New Jersey become more acquiescent toward the Trump administration. Or alternatively, she says, “There’s an interesting opportunity for New Jersey to be the voice of what resistance looks like.” She stressed that her state’s outlook feels especially uncertain due to a legal ruling last year that revamped primary ballots and loosened the control of party machines.

One unusual layer to the governor’s race: New Jersey does not elect local prosecutors, so the discretion to set prosecutorial policies rests largely with the attorney general, another office that itself is not elected but rather appointed by the governor. New Jersey has been under full Democratic control since the 2017 elections. 

Meanwhile, Virginia’s government has flipped back and forth during that time, with major ramifications for criminal justice policy.

In their brief stint running the state from 2019 to 2021, Virginia Democrats abolished the death penalty, banned life without parole sentences for kids, and ended prison gerrymandering, among other changes. But their agenda came to an abrupt halt in 2021 with the election of Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who effectively froze voting rights restoration and parole grants and vetoed other reform legislation. Another Republican, Attorney General Jason Miyares, has also targeted local reformers but lacks legislative allies to preempt their policies. 

These issues are sure to come to a head in 2025. Youngkin is barred from seeking a second term as governor. Miyares is running for reelection as attorney general. And legislative races will decide which party can pursue its priorities, from Democrats hoping to codify voting rights for people with felony convictions to the GOP pushing to ramp up policing of immigrants.

Amy Woolard with the ACLU of Virginia says the 2025 elections could be an opportunity to expand criminal legal reform in her state, but that some of the rhetoric around public safety makes the work tough. “It’s tough to get people to listen to community members inside the legislature. It’s tough to push back against the fearmongering,” she told Bolts.

But she is also excited about a new generation of officials who first came into office in 2023 and whose ranks she hopes expand this year. She said, “They brought with them a kind of excitement, fearlessness, energy around having candid conversations around excessive sentencing, about the racial implications of our criminal justice system.”

The post The Local Elections That Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2025 appeared first on Bolts.

Dyer is a road patrol deputy-turned social worker who campaigned on a reform vision that includes trying to steer people away from the justice system rather than draw them into it. Her win in November is a culmination of prior wins by a coalition of reformers in the county that also brought progressives into the prosecutor’s office and courts. 

Dyer has worked with these reformers to lay out plans to reduce unnecessary police encounters and arrests by limiting officers from making stops for certain low-level violations. She has pledged to address the stark racial disparities in traffic enforcement by ending quotas for traffic stops, and says arrests are the wrong tools for dealing with substance abuse and the opioid crisis: Her approach rejects the war on drugs and aims to steer people towards support rather than criminal punishment.

“Looking at the disparities involving drug arrests, there was a general understanding that we don’t want officers wasting their time,” Dyer told Bolts in an interview. “There is a frustration when officers are nickel and diming or getting involved in low-level things, and a frustration with pretext stops in general was resounding countywide.”

Dyer’s platform appealed broadly to voters in the liberal college town of Ann Arbor, as well as the surrounding rural areas where even many voters with more conservative values are fed up with the kind of policing that cycles people through the legal system without addressing their needs. 

But to effectively carry out her plans, Dyer will also need allies in the justice system. She has at least one in Eli Savit, who was just reelected as Washtenaw’s Prosecuting Attorney after running unopposed. Savit first won office in 2020 at the height of the racial justice movement that swept through the country following the police killing of George Floyd. The movement helped give rise to a brand of progressive prosecutors including Savit, who embraced a less punitive approach that broke away from his tough-on-crime predecessor. His office took aim at the issue of racial profiling by announcing he would drop the charges in situations where officers use minor traffic violations as an excuse to search for drugs or other contraband. A slew of other policies offered leniency towards juveniles arrested on minor offenses, and declined charges for consensual sex work and certain low-level drug crimes — but those reforms can only make an impact after an arrest has already been made. 

Now with Dyer as the county’s top cop and Savit as its lead prosecutor, they hope to move these reforms forward by working collaboratively on policies that were previously siloed in different parts of the justice system. 

“What you see in Washtenaw is a lot of different partners in conjunction with the community are largely working towards the same goals and from the same playbook,” Savit said. “It reflects our community values. Ultimately, what people in Washtenaw want is for us to work together to get people on the right track, rather than cycling them through the justice system over and over again in an ineffective fashion.”

In November of 2020, Savit’s win was hailed as a success for the progressive prosecutor movement that for at least a decade has sought to reform local DA offices across the country. His policies gave reformers in Washtenaw an inroad for curbing the harm wrought on by excessive criminal punishment by deflecting some low-level arrests. 

Savit regards his policy on pretextual stops — where minor traffic violations are used as an excuse to search cars for contraband — as a success. His office initially declined several of those cases, Savit told Bolts. But soon, police agencies across the county largely stopped sending those kinds of cases to his office. The approach later gained support in Ann Arbor, the county’s largest city, where the city council unanimously voted last year to limit police from stopping drivers for minor violations like cracked windshields or broken taillights that do not pose any risk to traffic safety. 

Now with Dyer in office as well, organizers hope to stop even more of those arrests from happening in the first place. 

“Our racial disparities in low level traffic stops are through the roof at the sheriff’s office,” Dyer told Bolts. “Regardless if the prosecutor decides to charge a case, the harm is still caused at the forefront. Avoiding those stops when possible, when it’s not a safety-related issue, is really important. There are so many instances where somebody has been pulled over, pulled out their car and searched. The police find nothing. They let them go, but the harm stays with that person.”

Like Dyer, Savit also embraced a legal strategy for addressing drugs that is focused on harm reduction and rehabilitation rather than punishment. His office decriminalized the possession and distribution of controlled medications like methadone and buprenorphine that are used to treat opioid addiction and curb fentanyl use. Like with the traffic stop arrests, very few of those cases now come across Savit’s desk. The remaining arrests for illegal possession of methadone or buprenorphine mostly come from people incarcerated in nearby prisons, and Savit’s office typically drops those cases, he said. Even though prosecutors rarely need to decline charges now, it is critical to have a public policy in place so the fear of criminal penalties will not deter people from accessing life saving medications, he said. 

“Why on earth would we want to be discouraging somebody from using a medicine that we know is an alternative to using a dangerous drug that could kill them? We want less overdose deaths, not more. ” Savit told Bolts.

But a policy of non-enforcement is only effective if the entire criminal legal system is aligned across prosecutors and police, which isn’t the case for most places in the state. As Michigan has scaled up harm reduction initiatives in recent years—funded in part by payouts from pharmaceutical companies acquired through opioid settlements—the enforcement around controlled methadone and buprenorphine has been a patchwork across the state and even within Washtenaw County. 

Dyer’s position—that criminal enforcement and arrests are the wrong way to address addiction issues—is rooted in her background as a social worker and therapist. She has advocated for unarmed community responders and public health outreach workers to deal with opioids, rather than police. And she plans to end internal quotas that encourage officers to make stops, search people for drugs, and cite or arrest them for minor drug violations.

Having a sheriff who’s onboard with harm reduction tactics helps establish a uniform approach to managing the opioid crisis, said Jonathan Laye, program director for Supportive Connections, a social service group aimed at steering people away from the justice system.

“The county is definitely starting to go in the right direction when it comes to prioritizing treatment or engagement rather than locking people up over petty stuff. The question is really getting people in the right places who understand the difference between a symptom and a crime,” Laye said.

Even when police don’t make arrests for drug paraphernalia, those items are sometimes still used by officers as probable cause to justify a search, said Cindy Bodewes, president of the Washtenaw Regional Organizing Coalition, a grassroots group pushing for reforms in the county. She hopes Dyer will bridge the “disconnect between the prosecutor’s strategy and arrest strategy,” Bodewes said.

“That’s why it is so important to have a law enforcement policy in place in order to have harm reduction in a community where they don’t have to be looking over their shoulder, afraid of the police taking action, regardless of whether they can be charged or not,” Dyer said.

Even when prosecutors signal that they will not pursue certain cases, changing the culture and behavior of police departments can be more difficult. Police leaders don’t always know what is happening on the ground, and are sometimes unaware that officers need to be brought up to speed on policy changes, Bodewes said. That is why it is important for grassroots organizations and community members to have a way to “report directly to the sheriff,” she said.

Dyer says her experience as a rank-and-file deputy showed her the extent to which officers are often slow to adapt to new policing strategies, especially when changes are not written into department policy and backed with additional training. 

She is forming community advisory committees on issues like traffic stops, jail visitation and mental health to bolster transparency and accountability by allowing the public to help shape department policy. Savit formed similar committees after first winning office to develop his reforms, which also helped prosecutors develop a restorative justice process that diverts people from criminal punishments. Dyer aims to create another group of diverse community voices to make policy recommendations directly to her office. It’s another step, she says, to ensure that her advisors are not just an echo chamber of police brass: critics will have access to the inner workings of the department.hold their elected officials accountable. 

“Having a community that is educated around what we’re doing, our operations, our policies, can be a really powerful ally to make sure that what I think is happening at the top is what’s actually happening at the bottom,” Dyer said.

Dyer’s and Savits’ victories last month were an exception to what was largely a nationwide turn away from reform politics. 

In Chicago, retiring State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who championed reforms like the abolition of cash bail statewide and the development of the nation’s first restorative justice community court, will be replaced by tough-on-crime Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke, who has promised to roll back some of Foxx’s policies. In Los Angeles and Alameda Counties, progressive prosecutors George Gascon and Pamela Price were unseated amid complaints that their lenience was to blame for crime, which has largely declined since the pandemic, and social issues like opioids and homelessness. On the national stage, the Democratic party’s national platform abandoned issues like police violence and mass incarceration that were at the core of past campaigns. 

For many observers, this election signaled a waning in the strength of the criminal justice reform movement that came into full force just four years ago. 

But criminal justice reform has managed to remain on the agenda in Michigan. In October, the state enacted an overhaul of the juvenile justice system to eliminate most of the fines and fees that saddled young people with debt and penalized them for being unable to pay. Widespread dissatisfaction with the juvenile justice system helped stoke an appetite for continued change in Washtenaw, according to some of Dyer’s supporters. She wasn’t the only progressive candidate running for sheriff in Washtenaw. She narrowly won the primary against Derrick Jackson, the current director of community engagement at the sheriff’s office who works closely with grassroots reform groups and has a track record of boosting diversion efforts. In many communities, Dyer’s message resonated more deeply in many Washtenaw communities because her vision for reform was more bold, said Carolyn Madden, co-chair of Friends of Restorative Justice. 

“It was a matter of being a bit more progressive, a bit more out there, a bit more bold. And that is what we need in our criminal justice system right now—some boldness—and Alyshia seems to want to make some real change,” Madden said. 

Madden’s organization has already worked with Savit to help develop his office’s restorative justice process to repair the harm caused by a crime without “heaping on punishment,” Madden said. The program puts charges on hold for 18 months while the perpetrator of a crime works with the victim and community-based mediators to repair the harms they caused and address the underlying issues that led to their actions. Prosecutors drop the case if there are no new violations at the end of the period—though offenses that pose a serious risk to public safety or involve domestic or sexual abuse are not eligible for restorative justice. She hopes Dyer’s expertise in social work will help expand restorative justice practices in Washtenaw and improve opportunities for rehabilitation both in the community and in the jail.

“When police work very closely with the community, they know the people and they can go about addressing issues with different kinds of programs. Even if you’re not going to arrest them, particularly young people, you have to help them. You have to give them other things, especially if it’s a result of young people being confused or impoverished,” Madden said.

The county is already piloting a program to that effect: the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion and Deflection (LEADD) initiative, which was spearheaded in part by Jackson’s community engagement team within the sheriff’s office. Unlike typical diversion programs, where the court drops charges once a person meets certain conditions like completing drug treatment, LEADD allows county officers to connect someone to a case manager to get the support they need in lieu of making an arrest in the first place.

“The goal is to provide an alternative to arrest or citations for individuals who have unmet basic needs that stem from things like mental illness, substance abuse, and severe poverty and homelessness. It can increase the number of people getting the services they need and decrease the number of people in contact with the criminal justice apparatus,” said Hailey Richards, the program coordinator for LEADD.

Many of Dyer’s supporters hope she will continue to build upon the LEADD program, which is currently being tested in Ypsilanti Township, and expand it across the rest of the county. The pre-arrest diversion model “is a less harmful way police can offer someone assistance, and it can really help change people’s lives,” Dyer said. But there remains a need for community-based alternatives for responding to many issues that armed law enforcement officers are not best suited to deal with. Dyer says she also plans to support these by using a portion of the county’s budget dedicated to mental health and public safety initiatives.

“We as a country have dumped everything on law enforcement. But officers are not doctors, are not social workers, they’re not therapists, and we keep expecting them to be. I talk to officers who say they don’t like to go on low-level calls or calls involving mental health when they’re not trained to understand how to handle it,” Dyer said.

 “We have a unique opportunity to really start building safety net responder programs that avoid the legal system.”

The post A Michigan Sheriff and Prosecutor Join Forces to Implement Progressive Policy appeared first on Bolts.

Gascón and Price’s backgrounds are starkly different—he’s a former beat cop who left his job as San Francisco DA to run in LA; she’s a longtime civil rights attorney—but both came into office vowing to use the power of the DA to redress the harms, abuses, and disparities of mass incarceration. Both issued ambitious policy proclamations that involved keeping young people out of the adult criminal system, ending the use of the death penalty, holding police accountable for wrongdoing, and tamping down on harsh sentencing. And both became the target of intense and sustained opposition campaigns from virtually the day they stepped into office. Reform DAs “are being watched so closely, not only by their constituents, but by people all around the country with big pulpits,” Mona Sahaf, the director of the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me back in January. 

In 2020 and 2022, Gascón and Price represented a new chapter in counties where decades of top prosecutors embracing harsh sentencing had led to extensive racial disparities without making residents feel particularly safe. Gascón’s election was fueled by the George Floyd uprising that summer; Black Lives Matter’s LA chapter had protested every week outside his predecessor Jackie Lacey’s office. Describing the sentiment that led to Price’s win two years later, Ella Baker Center political director Jose Bernal said, “We want community members to thrive. We want to feel safe walking on the street. And in order to do that, we need to address the root causes of these social problems.” 

Voters embraced the vision that both candidates laid out—a vision of racial justice, restorative justice, second chances, and accountability for police who abuse their power. But this time around, many of those same residents have rejected the two prosecutors.

“We all have a lot to learn here around how to get past the policy-politics divide,” Sahaf told me when we spoke again on Wednesday. “There’s no evidence that the reforms that Gascón and Pam Price and other reform candidates promote don’t work,” she said, but “what’s very real is people feeling that they are not safe, people feeling that they’re not being heard, people not understanding how these solutions are going to actually make their lives better. That’s where we have a lot of work to do.”

The election results have left reformers asking where the progressive prosecutor movement goes from here. Sahaf cautioned against interpreting the losses as a referendum on the movement’s viability. “I do see wins outside of California for the same exact policies that Gascón and Price put forth,” she said. In Orlando, for instance, Democratic prosecutor Monique Worrell won her job back after Governor Ron DeSantis removed her and installed a Federalist Society member instead. In Austin, reform DA José Garza beat back tough-on-crime challengers in the March primaries and again on Tuesday to hold onto his seat. 

“I think this is about a much larger bucket of frustration that people have with government that they feel is not providing for them,” Sahaf said. But, she added, “it is also that larger frustration that opens up this environment where justice reform is an easy target.” 

The repudiation of Price and Gascón was part of a broader shift in California politics. This week, residents also voted down a ballot measure that would have outlawed forced work in prisons and passed another to increase penalties for certain drug and theft crimes, functionally repealing a landmark 2014 sentencing reform that helped reduce severe prison overcrowding. 

This didn’t happen in a vacuum: Since 2020, right-wing politicians, corporations, and police associations have waged a coordinated backlash campaign that has successfully capitalized on people’s fear and anguish during a devastating pandemic. And Democratic leaders in the state and across the nation have responded by shrugging off the mantle of prison and police reform, ramping up the criminalization of homelessness, endorsing tougher penalties for retail theft, and even in some cases directly undermining local Democratic officials elected on a reform platform. In 2020, reform DAs were held up as a solution—perhaps an unrealistically quick fix for decades of mass incarceration. In 2024, they were left holding the bag.

“It was really left on the backs of the people, of grassroots organizers, to push for Gascón,” Black Lives Matter LA co-founder Melina Abdullah told me. “The Democratic Party should have been pushing for Gascón.” 

In the intervening years, the fountain of money that fueled progressive wins back in 2020 has slowed to a trickle: Democratic megadonor George Soros spent nearly $2.5 million on Gascón’s initial election, only to avoid the race entirely this time around. Meanwhile, both candidates’ campaign promises to prosecute abusive and violent cops spurred police groups into action: All 14 law enforcement associations in Alameda County endorsed the Price recall, and at least eight donated to support it. In LA, local and statewide sheriff, police, and prison guard associations gave over $2 million to support Hochman, Gascón’s challenger. Both DAs were opposed by the deputy prosecutors in their office, sparking embarrassing lawsuits and bolstering a narrative of internal turmoil. 

And with the successful ouster of reform DA Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022, recalls were ratified as a viable playbook for monied interests seeking to unseat democratically elected candidates whose policies they opposed as quickly as possible. Gascón, for his part, survived two recall attempts before his defeat at the polls. In Price’s case, a petition urging her recall circulated as soon as a month after she took office, and an official recall committee was organized within seven months. The campaign ultimately raised more than $3 million, receiving hefty donations and loans from the same donor who spent big to recall Boudin. 

“When you’re doing recalls, you gotta have some money somewhere,” Brenda Grisham, the public face of the Price recall movement, told me. “Somebody’s got to pay for those signatures.” 

Price and Gascón were widely seen as flawed leaders who made strategic missteps while in office. They both struggled to rise to the challenge of transforming calcified bureaucracies staffed with people who broadly opposed the sort of change they heralded. Gascón disappointed many by backing away from nearly all of his blanket policies to varying degrees, and by failing to more vigorously prosecute police officers responsible for a number of high-profile shootings that outraged Angelenos. Alex Trantham, secretary for the LA public defenders’ union that endorsed Gascón in 2020 but withheld its endorsement this year, told me that the DA was “definitely an improvement from under Jackie Lacey, but he still, as many elected officials can, changed his policies based on public perception of what was going on with certain cases.” 

Price didn’t have much time to disillusion her supporters. “She had it tough going in…I don’t think she got a lot of support,” Bernal said. From the start, the DA contended with community anger over youth crime and demands for harsher punishment, which clashed with her platform for juvenile justice, which prioritized rehabilitation and keeping young people in the youth system rather than transferring them to adult criminal court. 

But Bernal also noted that the high staff turnover that characterized the office under Price gave the appearance of dysfunction: “It’s not a good look, that many transitions while in office.” He added that Price would have benefited from doing more and better community outreach. Both DAs failed to effectively communicate their accomplishments to the broader public, were prickly and at times hostile to media, and could come off as tone-deaf when dealing with crime victims’ families. 

“You gotta have allies—and she doesn’t feel she needs to,” Grisham said of Price when we spoke in May.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is now responsible for selecting an interim DA, a task with high stakes considering the appointee will be in office for at least two more years, as much time as Price has spent in office; voters won’t select a DA to serve out the remainder of her six-year term until 2026. (Meanwhile, the president of the Oakland City Council will serve as interim mayor until a special election is held to replace Thao.) Bernal noted that the passage of Proposition 36, which will reduce funding for mental health services in Alameda County, only raises the stakes for the DA appointment. He urged that the board “really look at someone who’s going to continue to really prioritize mental health for our community members, expand mental health courts and pretrial diversion.” 

Grisham, who pushed for the recall, said she hopes the next DA will eschew blanket policies for young people who commit crimes and be more open to working with victims’ families.

In LA, Hochman has vowed to overturn all of Gascón’s blanket policies, including what has been the least controversial and only blanket policy Gascón has stuck to during his first term: his prohibition on seeking the death penalty. Trantham with the public defenders’ union also worries that a return to widespread use of sentencing enhancements and prior “strikes,” both of which Hochman has vowed to revive, will strain the public defender’s office and coerce defendants into unfair plea deals. “You’re forcing people to plead because they’re so afraid of the total maximum time they could be facing,” she said. 

While Gascón walked back his blanket prohibition on charging young people as adults, the office currently only seeks transfers to the adult system in cases of murder. The public defenders’ union believes that Hochman may begin seeking adult prosecutions of young people for a wider variety of crimes. The DA-elect has pledged to seek a “hard middle” that doubles down on long punishments for repeat offenders but preserves second chances for first-timers, but both Abdullah and Trantham say they’re skeptical. 

“No such thing as a hard middle,” Abdullah told me. “What Hochman threatens for Los Angeles County is a new era of lock ‘em up—and devastating and decimating Black communities especially.” 

After we spoke, Tranthem sent me a follow-up message: “We hope that we are wrong about Hochman and that he proves to us that he sees our clients as human beings who deserve a chance at rehabilitation.” 

“The loss of Gascón and that seat is devastating,” Abdullah said. She still thinks it’s worth focusing on DA offices as an important lever of power, but noted that Gascón’s election, and the policy vision he outlined, was always a response to community demands. “An electoral strategy is an important strategy, but it’s also only one strategy,” she said. “November 5th was for voting…I think the answer for November 6th is to organize. To keep the movement going, to redouble our efforts.”

The post Voters Dismiss Two of California’s Leading Progressive Prosecutors appeared first on Bolts.

Monique Worrell, the Democratic state attorney in Orlando who was suspended by DeSantis last year, won 57 percent of the vote, defeating incumbent Andrew Bain, a member of the conservative Federalist Society whom the governor had appointed to replace Worrell after accusing her of neglecting her duties as a prosecutor. 

“Tonight’s results underscore the resilience of our democracy and a powerful message from the people: No governor’s petty political maneuvers and no amount of dark money can silence the voices of thousands who demand a fair, smart approach to justice over the failed, outdated policies of the past,” Worrell said in a statement released by her campaign. “We’re bringing back a State Attorney who knows this role isn’t about racking up convictions but about pursuing justice without bending to a political agenda.” 

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren lost to incumbent Suzy Lopez, who was appointed by DeSantis in August 2022 after the governor removed Warren, arguing that he had also neglected his duties by vowing to not prosecute abortion cases and ending the aggressive prosecution of Black cyclists and pedestrians. Lopez won 53 percent of the vote.

In a statement, Warren defended his record and slammed the governor’s actions. “The best candidate doesn’t always win, especially when the other side cheats—illegally suspending you, then spending millions of dollars lying about you,” Warren said. “I hope Ms. Lopez grows into this role to become an effective and independent state attorney—not beholden to the governor or sheriff, but accountable to the people.”

Worrell and Warren had fought their suspensions in the courts, alleging that DeSantis overstepped his authority and removed them for political reasons. In August, the Florida Supreme Court, which is largely filled with DeSantis appointees, upheld the governor’s decision to remove Worrell by a vote of 6–1. Warren had found more success—two federal courts ruled that the governor’s conduct violated his First Amendment rights, but a decision by the federal appeals court hearing Warren’s case was stalled after DeSantis requested to argue his case in front of the full panel of judges. 

In the lead-up to Election Day, Warren and Worrell faced questions about whether DeSantis would ultimately remove them from office again and replace them with his appointees. In an interview with Bolts this summer, Warren acknowledged that he and other Democrats were being watched by DeSantis on the campaign trail. “Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” he said. 

Ahead of the election, DeSantis would not commit to deferring to voters if they again elected Worrell and Warren, suggesting he might remove them again. 

“When both of those folks were in office, they took the position that they didn’t have to enforce laws they disagreed with that caused people to be put back on the street who then victimized folks that should not have been victimized,” DeSantis told reporters at a September press conference when asked about what he’d do if they won. 

Under state law, Florida’s governor has sweeping authority to suspend local elected officials for several reasons, such as neglect of duty, drunkenness, or malfeasance. Louis Virelli, a constitutional law professor at Stetson University, told Bolts there’s a high standard for neglect of duty, the reason for which DeSantis suspended Worrell and Warren, and it usually requires being able to show that someone won’t do their job, not just that they’ve established certain policies. Virelli, who would only speak about Warren’s case because he was not familiar with Worrell’s, said DeSantis’ removal of the prosecutor didn’t rise to that standard. 

“Honoring the outcome of elections is what makes us a democracy,” Virelli told Bolts. “There’s nothing else to a democracy. Either we get to choose our representatives and our elected officials, or we don’t, and if we don’t, we’re not a democracy anymore.”

Beyond ousting local elected prosecutors, DeSantis was also accused of meddling in Orlando’s race for state attorney. Thomas Feiter, a Republican who lost in the August primary, said in a lawsuit last month that DeSantis’ team tried to bribe him to drop out of the race and help clear the way for Bain, who ran as an independent; the candidate who beat Feiter quickly dropped out of the race after winning the GOP primary. Feiter also wrote in a complaint to the Florida Bar Association that if Worrell won, DeSantis planned to remove her again and replace her with Bain. A local judge dismissed Feiter’s case last week on procedural grounds and the bar association did not follow up on the claim. 

“If Monique wins, I think—well, they told me that the plan is to remove her again, and just put Bain back in,” Feiter said in September on local radio channel WMNF. 

DeSantis did not respond to questions from Bolts about whether he plans to again remove prosecutors who were elected by voters. 

Residents in Tampa and Orlando quickly felt the impact of DeSantis’ removal of their elected state attorney. In Tampa, the governor’s appointee, Lopez, swiftly rolled back Warren’s policies. Warren had instructed line prosecutors to stop pursuing nonviolent, misdemeanor cases resulting from bicycle and pedestrian stops after a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation showing such police stops overwhelmingly targeted Black people. Within four days of her appointment in 2022, Lopez sent out a memo lifting restrictions on how her office handled bicycle and pedestrian stop cases. 

On Tuesday night, Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP, an organization that helped craft Warren’s policy, said she was disappointed with the results. “Not good for Black people,” she wrote in a text message. 

In Orlando, Worrell had campaigned on a platform to reform the criminal justice system. Among her goals was to tackle mass incarceration and cut down on the number of kids tried in adult court. Worrell was also the director of the conviction integrity unit under former State Attorney Aramis Ayala and had approved DNA testing for two capital cases through her own unit shortly after taking office.

This story was updated on Nov. 6 to include a statement from Worrell. 

The post Orlando Prosecutor Ousted by Governor Wins Her Job Back appeared first on Bolts.

While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

Last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods, and said: “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”

Price was talking about her childhood. She described how she was arrested as a teenager, how she spent time in foster care, and how the criminal legal system might have been her future if things had gone slightly different. 

Price—battling a recall attempt that kicked off just months after she took office as Oakland’s first Black female DA—had shown up to the town hall that night to defend her vision for the office, which included an unwavering refusal to over-criminalize young people. She ran on a 10-point plan to reform criminal justice. And since taking office, she has instituted policies to keep 16- and 17-year olds in the youth justice system instead of transferring them to adult prisons, and reevaluated how the county treats young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. These issues, Price said, were what had inspired her to run for DA in the first place. She told the crowd, “When I looked at our racial disparities for our young people in Alameda County, I could not look away.” 

Price was making this appeal in enemy territory. Montclair, whose location abutting a freeway may have made it a target for theft, had not voted for her. Neither had the rest of the Oakland Hills, where handsome Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets perch high above the much poorer city with which they share a chief prosecutor. And so after the DA spoke about racial disparities in youth justice—87 percent of children in the county’s juvenile system are Black or Latino—and emphasized her belief in redemption for young people, a member of the neighborhood association that hosted the event took the mic and asked about “one of the elephants in the room”: a series of recent robberies allegedly committed by teenagers. Rumors had been going around that Price’s office had let the young people go without so much as a charge. 

The issue of youth crime has become a flashpoint in Oakland politics. Local news stories of retail theft, robberies, and a small number of serious crimes have captured public attention. People grimace over the news that more than half of Oakland’s students are chronically absent from school, double the national average. This spring, The Berkeley Scanner, a local paper that has been relentlessly critical of Price, broke the news that the DA had decided to keep in the juvenile system a young man who was 17 when he opened fire at a birthday party, killing teenage brothers Angel and Jazy Soleto. This outraged members of the Soleto family, who later held a press conference supporting the recall.

Citizens at the town hall—and especially those backing the recall effort—are looking to the DA to use her prosecutorial powers to halt what they see as a crime wave. “It has gotten out of hand,” one attendee told local news outside the event. Violent crime was up in Oakland in 2023, sparking talks of a “crime surge,” though homicide numbers were lower than in 2022; overall crime is now down 33 percent this year, with reduced rates of homicide, assault, and burglary. Only robbery numbers are up. Still, residents are frustrated at the feeling that nothing is being done to stop young people who commit crimes from developing into violent and unaccountable older people.

Price, meanwhile, wants people to see how the system’s traditional response often forges broken adults as well. With her invocation of her younger self, the DA was asking the town hall attendees to consider an alternative path for young people who have committed crimes. Given the right guidance and resources, she argues, someone they see as a threat now could grow up to become someone like her. In these differing visions lie the fundamental problem: How should the state meaningfully intervene in a young person’s life? What is the line between doing nothing and sending a kid to prison? 

At one point, Price made a request to the audience in Montclair. She asked people to volunteer with the organizations and advocates who work with young people—plenty of whom went through the criminal legal system as teenagers themselves. 

These youth justice workers are Price’s partners in trying to enact a system that prioritizes care over criminalization. For the most part, they argue that the inflamed rhetoric around youth violence bears little resemblance to the teenagers and young adults they see in their daily work. “It feels like young people are being scapegoated,” Dieudonné Brou, the youth advocacy and program coordinator for the nonprofit Urban Peace Movement, told me. 

“We’re hearing things like this is as bad as we’ve ever seen it—without any mention of the pandemic,” and how it affected young people’s mental health and development, said Vamsey Palagummi, the managing director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ). Palagummi spent time in juvenile hall and on probation as a teen and now works on a number of county initiatives that focus on juvenile justice. The recall, he said, “has absolutely consumed our work daily, whether we’re in the commission spaces, whether we’re on the streets talking to folks.”

As recall proponents argue that the county’s approach toward youth crime has become too lenient, people who work on juvenile justice point to a complex mix of issues—legislative changes, resource allocation, trauma and mental health needs—that shape the system long before the district attorney comes into play. Ultimately, Price’s position, influential as it is, represents just one point in this matrix of courts and probation and youth services and school. 

“We also have to work in collaboration with many other actors who are able to intervene in many other points in this complex arena,” Cynthia Chandler, the Alameda County DA’s senior assistant policy chief, told me. “The DA can only intervene in a very small subset of harm.” And by definition, by the time the office is poised to intervene, that harm is almost always already done. 

Palagummi said he appreciates that the DA’s office seems to be considering how to “provide the support that this young person needs, thinking outside of the box, working more with community members,” but he added, “quite frankly, it’s not too different and drastic from the previous administration.” The problem, advocates argue, is not that the system has changed too much or too swiftly—it’s that it hasn’t changed enough.

In theory at least, the juvenile justice system is predicated on the notion, backed by extensive scientific evidence, that young people are both less culpable for their actions and more capable of change than older adults. In this sense, it’s arguably the most compelling place to make the case for criminal legal reform, because it’s where the connections between societal and personal adversity—poverty, discrimination, disinvestment, abuse—and crime are the most obvious. 

“I don’t think that punishment is often, if ever, the answer for young folks,” said Celsa Snead, the executive director of Oakland’s The Mentoring Center, whose work on violence prevention puts the organization into contact with adolescents caught up in the criminal legal system. “Rehabilitation, support, recognition, accountability—all those things are important.” 

With youth crime rates broadly declining since the mid-’90s, many states have tried to overhaul their youth justice systems, with varying degrees of success. Hawaii has touted its investments in community-based alternatives to youth incarceration; in 2022, the state announced that it had reached zero girls in juvenile detention. Maine, meanwhile, has attempted to transform its own approach to juvenile justice, but failed to provide and fund the services necessary to do so, leaving the state a “cautionary tale about the path to reform,” as a joint investigation by the Bangor Daily News and The New York Times put it.

In recent years, California has sought to reshape its youth justice system, but its efforts at improvement have had mixed results. For a long time, young people convicted of serious offenses and kept in the juvenile system—in Alameda, about five people a year—would be sent to youth prisons run by the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice, which were rife with abuse, violence, and neglect. But a “realignment” law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2020 closed down the remaining facilities and put youth custody in the hands of counties—specifically, their probation departments. Now, teenagers from Oakland who would have once been sent to state facilities that could be hundreds of miles from the Bay Area are housed in juvenile detention centers much closer to their communities. 

“While that’s a great thing, because DJJ [facilities] were essentially gladiator schools and really horrible places, and young people now have an opportunity to be closer to home, from my perspective, we’re replicating a lot of the harms that we worked really hard to rally against,” said Palagummi.

Since the realignment law, Palagummi and Brou have both remarked that judges are sending more kids to juvenile hall’s “secure track”—essentially, long-term confinement. They worry that judges are expanding their criteria to determine which young people deserve this comparatively punitive outcome (their observations are borne out by Probation Department data).

At the same time, Palagummi said, not enough investments are being made in the sort of care and support-oriented services that kids need. The problem is not in overall criminal legal funding levels, he said, but in how the money gets allocated: “We firmly believe that there are enough resources as it exists right now to provide robust therapeutic services.” On the realignment commission, he tries to advocate for using state juvenile funding “to focus more on diversion and community based solutions” rather than things like overtime for probation staff, a significant chunk of the current budget. Palagummi also cited a therapist shortage combined with a higher level of need after the pandemic’s total disruption to kids’ school routines and mental health. “We do not have 24/7 clinicians—we don’t even have clinicians that can work regularly on the weekends,” he said.

Groups like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) now have contracts to send “credible messengers,” formerly incarcerated adults who can act as mentors, into the juvenile detention facilities to work with young people. But these types of offerings are still a small part of the overall system, and they’re up against a daunting level of need. Teiahsha Bankhead, RJOY’s executive director, told me that the org also ends up providing critical post-release services for kids—holding welcome-home circles within 24 hours of release, helping them out with groceries, or calling them a rideshare so they can make it to a new job—without a formal contract. (RJOY is currently in the process of applying for one.) “I get kids who are from juvenile hall calling me, my staff, telling us that they’re hungry,” she said. “I don’t care who’s funding us. We’re going to respond to that.” 

Today, Brou is in his mid-30s, a UCLA graduate who runs a footwear company in addition to his work with Urban Peace Movement. The organization is a member of the Alameda County DA Accountability table, a coalition of local organizations who have pushed Price to, among other things, end the practice of transferring youth to the prison adult system in her first 100 days in office. 

Brou knows intimately the harms that can befall a young person in an adult prison. After first coming into contact with the criminal legal system in middle school, he was arrested again at 18 and entered a California prison about a year later. In total, he was incarcerated for seven years—an eternity for an 18 year old, but far shorter than the average young person transferred into the adult system, who, depending on the severity of their crime, might receive a sentence of multiple decades.

Soon after his arrival at High Desert State Prison, about 250 miles away from home, Brou was stabbed in his sleep during a riot. He remains traumatized by the experience. “When I’m sleeping, my family has to be cautious about the way they wake me up,” he said. 

Brou said that any personal growth that he underwent in prison happened in spite of the environment. “There’s no real rehabilitation taking place in the adult system,” he told me. He also stressed that he had other advantages, like a family that cared for him and supported his efforts to enroll in school upon returning home, that many young people lack. “There’s plenty of other young men, I remember they would go home, and they would be back [in prison] within a week,” he said. “I know I can easily be in those other guys’ situation where they’re going back to a traumatic environment where there’s no real support there for them, and then they’re going to be faced with those same decisions.” 

Price has little sway over many aspects of the youth system, but one power the DA does enjoy is the ability to set charging priorities. In May 2023, Price released juvenile sentencing guidelines prohibiting transfers into the adult system absent “extraordinary circumstances” or a highly vulnerable victim. Chandler says that while the office is reviewing a small number of transfer requests made under Price’s predecessor, no new transfer processes have been initiated during her administration. 

Price’s commitment to this directive has drawn fire from critics, including Brenda Grisham, one of the organizers of the recall effort. “I don’t care if they’re 16, 17—when they use an adult gun to kill somebody, they need to be held accountable more than the juvenile system gives them,” she told me. Grisham’s son was murdered in front of her in 2010, but his killer was never caught. She feels as though Price has not done enough to listen to victims’ families or establish transparency about her office’s charging and conviction rates.

Snead of The Mentoring Center told me she suspects that people tend to conflate keeping a young person in the juvenile system with a lack of consequences for their actions. “The philosophy that says if you’re not charging 16 and 17 year olds with crimes as adults [you’re letting them off easy]… what they’re really saying is that you’re not punishing them,” she said. But she stressed that the youth system has always, at least theoretically, centered rehabilitation over punishment—Price didn’t come up with that paradigm. 

Of course, part of the issue is that some parents who’ve lost children to gun violence may want punishment—faith in personal growth and transformation can be difficult to extend to someone who has taken any possibility of a future away from your own children. Relatives of the Soleto brothers, who were killed at the birthday party, have said they thought the case should qualify as one of the exceptions that Price leaves room for in her youth sentencing policy. Grisham agrees. “Nobody said anything about locking people up and throwing away the key,” she said. “Over the course of 25 years, they could become a better person.” (Twenty-five years is the minimum sentence for first-degree murder within the adult system.)

Still, California law leaves the window for a transfer to adult court quite narrow. Owing to recent reforms passed both by the legislature and directly by voters, only minors who are at least 16 years old are eligible to be tried as adults, and then only if the court finds that the teenager in question is “not amenable to rehabilitation” within the juvenile system. According to data from the Alameda County Probation Department, only five teenagers in the county were recommended for transfer to the adult system between 2016 and 2022, when Price’s predecessor was in office. 

In March 2023, when Price’s office announced that the young man who allegedly killed the Soleto brothers would be kept in the juvenile system, CURYJ defended the decision, noting that the probation department also recommended that he be kept in juvenile court. The group has worked with the defendant since he’s been in custody. “While we’ve seen some young people who may not be tried as adults… it’s not like we’re letting kids free,” Palagummi said. He noted that the juvenile detention population has stayed essentially the same since Price took office. 

Another of Price’s campaign promises centered around establishing “age-appropriate programs” for transitional-age youth accused of a crime—essentially, an attempt to extend the rehabilitative principles of the juvenile system to young adults under 25. “When a child reaches the age of 18, that is not some magical line that they cross where they’re ready for the world,” Price told The Imprint after her campaign. 

These efforts are still preliminary. At various town halls, press conferences, and rallies, Price has touted a pilot program that pairs young men between 18 and 25 charged with firearms possession with a mentor, hoping to intervene in their lives, avoid the life-changing consequences that can attend a criminal record, and stop harm before it happens—a rare case where the DA may have some power. 

The DA’s office told me this program currently has three participants, who are being mentored by the Alameda County Probation Department. Participants who are selected have to choose to go through the program rather than follow the traditional path through the criminal legal system. It’s too soon to draw any real conclusions, according to Chandler. Still, she said, “our team has viewed it as successful in that no one who has been involved in this pilot project has engaged in any kind of recidivist behavior.” She said the office is in talks with the court to expand the program, and is also planning to establish other early-intervention models for young people under 18, though they’re far from being ready to implement anything. 

In the future, participants will be working with Youth Alive, an independent public health organization, through their Pathways program, a 12-month-long intensive case management and life-coaching process. “We’re helping them get those supports they need to live a healthy life, whether that be support in getting back in school, in finding a job so they have income security, making sure they have housing security,” Youth Alive’s executive director, Joseph Griffin, told me. “For many of them, what got them to this point was just a mere matter of survival.”

Youth Alive’s intensive mentoring has proved transformative for some of its past participants. “Today, we have many of them who are in college, who are gainfully employed, who have families, who got back in school and back on track,” Griffin told me. But the pilot program through the DA’s office only has the resources to work with six individuals for now, meaning that the vast majority of 18-to-25 year old Alameda County residents will still be routed through the traditional criminal system. Griffin said he hopes the DA’s office will partner with other organizations and county departments to expand the services available for that age group, including people who might not jibe with the Youth Alive model. “It’s important [for the DA] to really keep eyes open and recognize that addressing violence and addressing the type of healing and support that’s needed isn’t one size fits all,” he said.

During her campaign for DA, Price talked often about restorative justice. “Our goal is to keep people out of the system and to create a pathway that does not involve punitive prosecution,” she told me about a month before her election. But fully integrating restorative justice into the criminal legal system would require a level of transformative change that still feels a long way off, the youth justice advocates I interviewed said—even for young people, who already benefit from a more restorative approach than their adult counterparts. 

Grisham, the recall proponent, said that she hasn’t seen restorative justice as she understands it being employed in the Alameda County criminal legal system. “Restorative justice is the person that committed the crime is supposed to go to the person that they harmed and make amends,” she said. “None of that’s being done… none of the victims I know have talked to the people that killed their kids.” 

Palagummi argues that restorative justice can be practiced even without this type of formalized sit-down, though he said that CURYJ tries to engage with families of victims whenever they can. He praised organizations like RJOY’s work with young people in custody, but noted that “we have yet to see anything formalized as part of the court process” with regards to restorative justice. “We would love to see just more intentionality around that, but it would really take a paradigm shift from all parties, not just the DA’s office,” he added.

The idea of some greater paradigm shift toward restorative justice for youth offenders may have seemed possible, if optimistic, when Price swept into office in November 2022. Now, though, as her November 5 recall election date draws nearer, and voters bay for more punishment, including for young people, it seems positively fanciful. 

One issue may be how the office is explaining its distinct approach to the public. Price’s first goal in the 10-point plan she campaigned on was to “restore public trust in our criminal justice system,” but her administration’s relationship to the press ranges from bewilderingly disorganized to outright antagonistic. As I reported this piece, Price’s office stalled on my requests for an interview with the DA for months, while declining my entreaties to speak with any other member of the office who worked on youth justice until the last possible second.

Price’s sense that she has been subjected to unfair scrutiny and criticism because of her identity and goals for the office is doubtless legitimate. “Reform prosecutors are under a serious microscope,” Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, told me. “There’s very little grace or forgiveness given even though prosecutors all over the country are making mistakes and errors all the time.” And a special level of vitriol has been reserved for Black female DAs who advance a reform agenda. 

The recall against Price, which is majorly funded by one of the biggest donors to the successful effort to oust DA Chesa Boudin just across the bay, was launched before she’d had a chance to prove herself in the job, and Price has received little support from Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently announced he’d be sending National Guard prosecutors to take over narcotics cases from the Alameda DA’s office—an act of preemption that feels more in line with recent moves by hard-right Southern governors like Louisiana’s Jeff Landry and Florida’s Ron DeSantis than the act of a fellow Bay Area Democrat. But Price and her deputies’ unwillingness to communicate clearly about their policies and practices may have left the office more vulnerable to criticism, good and bad faith alike. 

There is no public polling available to give a hint of how Price may fare in November, but the recall committee has raised well over $3 million in their efforts to oust her, including large donations from real estate interests and hedge fund managers. A committee defending the DA has raised less than 10 percent of that. And even if Price holds on to her seat, she will still be attempting to realize her agenda in more or less the same climate as now: up against the disorganization of her own office, a generalized backlash to criminal justice reform, and a voter base with little patience for the time it would take to bring about the change in people’s lives that might reduce crime in the first place. 

“It took us 30 years, with those old policies, to put us in this predicament that we are now,” Brou reflected when we spoke. “It’ll take just as much time for us to get out of those practices of punishment, and really focusing and really investing in rehabilitation, alternatives to incarceration, and healing.” That’s the sort of work that can’t be measured on the same timeline as district attorney elections—or recalls, which happen even quicker.

The post In Oakland, a DA’s Vision for Youth Justice Collides with a Recall Movement Leery of Second Chances appeared first on Bolts.

Andrew Warren is running to win back his old job as Tampa’s top prosecutor. Since the Democrat joined the race in April, he has released campaign videos, basked in endorsements, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—all the staples of a typical campaign.

But this campaign is anything but typical. Two years ago, Warren was abruptly suspended from his office by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who said he had neglected his duties because of statements such as a promise to not prosecute abortion cases. DeSantis summarily replaced him with Susan Lopez, a Republican who immediately reversed some of Warren’s signature policies, including his effort to stop the aggressive prosecutions of Black cyclists and pedestrians in Hillsborough County. 

Voters will now weigh in for the first time since DeSantis ousted the state attorney they elected. Lopez is running for a full term, but it’s Warren who won the office the last two times it was on the ballot, in 2016 and 2020. If he wins the Democratic nomination next week, he’ll face Lopez, who is running unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. (Editor’s note: Warren prevailed in the Aug. 20 Democratic primary; he will face Lopez on Nov. 5.)

The circumstances of Warren’s removal loom large over his third run. Hillsborough County has leaned Democratic in the past, but if Warren wins, DeSantis could try suspending him again. Warren filed lawsuits arguing that DeSantis exceeded his authority when he removed him the first time, and a federal appeals court earlier this year kept his case alive. Some experts say it’d be harder for the governor to suspend him again in the future, but these legal questions remain unsettled.

“Every Democratic candidate in Florida has to campaign under the threat of DeSantis removing them solely because they’re a Democrat, solely for political reasons,” Warren told Bolts.

Last year, DeSantis also suspended the elected Democratic prosecutor of Orlando, Monique Worrell, whose sentencing practices he disagreed with. He had already removed Broward County’s Democratic sheriff, replacing him with a new sheriff who backtracked on a local reform.  

Lopez, too, rolled back Warren’s reforms within just days of replacing him. On Aug. 8, 2022, just four days after her appointment, she sent a memo to her staff announcing changes to the office’s policies. Among them: She lifted Warren’s restrictions on prosecuting people when their charges stemmed from bike and pedestrian stops conducted by the Tampa police.

“Effective immediately, any policy my predecessor put in place that called for presumptive non-enforcement of the laws of Florida is immediately rescinded. This includes the bike stop and pedestrian stop policy,” Lopez said in her memo. DeSantis had named this reform among his reasons for removing Waren, saying that it demonstrates a “fundamentally flawed and lawless understanding of his duties as a state attorney.”

Warren had set up his policy in the wake of a 2015 Tampa Bay Times investigation that revealed that the majority of cyclists stopped by the Tampa police were Black. The story sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that reached the same conclusion in 2016: Of 9,121 bicycle stops made by Tampa police over a 20-month period, 73 percent of those involved Black cyclists. Tampa’s population is 26 percent Black. 

The data ignited organizing in Hillsborough County. Civil rights organizations demanded reforms from both the local police and the state attorney’s office, which handles prosecutions. In some of these cases, the office was ensnaring cyclists in the criminal legal system by charging them with misdemeanors over nonviolent actions related to the bike stops, such as riding away from police or refusing to show identification.

Once he became the state attorney in 2017, members of the local chapter of the NAACP met with Warren to ask him to stop prosecuting those cases. “We were having conversations over and over again,” recalled Yvette Lewis, president of the Hillsborough County NAACP. The effort took years, with Warren forming a Racial Justice Work Group to examine the issue in the fall of 2020, after that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and finally releasing a new policy in January 2022.

In a memo to his staff, Warren instructed them to adopt a default approach of not prosecuting nonviolent, misdemeanor cases that result from these stops, broadening the policy’s purview to include pedestrian stops as well as bike stops. He also said line prosecutors should weigh whether the facts of the alleged crime still merit prosecution. “Actual or even perceived racial disparities in the use of bicycle and pedestrian stops undermine trust within the communities that law enforcement serves,” Warren said in a memo. 

In an interview with Bolts, Warren said “the reason why we were taking a critical look at those cases is because we don’t want to encourage that stop in the first place.” 

Prosecuting those stops without first examining them, he said, was “perpetuating the revolving door to the criminal justice system.” 

“Obviously, we want people to comply with law enforcement,” he said. “We also don’t want to put more people into the system that can have a negative impact on their ability to earn a living and potentially cost taxpayer dollars to prosecute them and take away their freedom when they hadn’t done anything wrong in the first place.”

Tampa’s Black residents cheered the change, Lewis said. “The community felt like, OK, they can take a deep breath.”

Since Lopez lifted Warren’s policy and signaled to police that the stops they made would get prosecuted again, the fear of aggressive prosecution has returned, Lewis says. 

“We were definitely devastated by what she did,” she said. “It took us 10 steps back when it comes to helping the most vulnerable people that need help.”

Lewis said she has met with Lopez about the change but has made no progress toward switching it back. “I don’t think she gets it at all,” she said. “She’s never walked in our shoes. When you try to talk to her to get understanding, she doesn’t come with an open mind.”

Erin Maloney, a spokesperson for Lopez’s office, told Bolts in an email that Warren’s policy was just for show. “By the time Andrew Warren instituted that policy, Tampa Police had already changed how bike stops were conducted altogether,” she wrote. “He took a problem that didn’t exist and offered a solution.” 

But Maloney also faulted Warren for going too far in refusing to enforce Florida law, saying, “State Attorney Lopez follows the law instead of creating blanket policies that change the law.”

In November 2022, months after she became state attorney, Lopez gave a deposition in which she seemed to confirm that the Tampa police were still sending over bike stop cases to the state’s attorney’s office during Warren’s tenure. Lopez worked as a staff prosecutor in Warren’s office for part of his tenure before she became a county judge in late 2021. She said she saw those cases come in, and criticized Warren for how he handled them. (Lopez gave this deposition as part of one of Warren’s lawsuits to be reinstated.)

It’s unclear how many people have been prosecuted under Lopez in cases that stem from bike stops. Maloney said the office does “not have a way” to  determine whether past charges were tied to such stops. Still, a review of the Hillsborough County court system database shows that Lopez’s office has pursued criminal charges in such cases. 

In March, for example, police arrested a 31-year-old Black man who was walking in South Tampa because he did not comply with commands to stop and show his hands. He was charged with resisting arrest without violence, a misdemeanor, and detained on a $500 bond. Lopez’s office took the case to trial and lost; the jury found the man not guilty. 

In another case, prosecutors sought charges against a homeless Black man who fled police on his bicycle after they tried to stop him for disobeying traffic signals. The case was dismissed, only after a judge declared the man incompetent.

Warren staunchly defended his past policy in an interview with Bolts, but he also was vague when asked whether he planned to bring it back if re-elected. 

He said he would look at the data to see whether there was a reason to implement it, noting that these cases make up just a small fraction of the 60,000 cases referred to the office each year. He also said he would “keep doing the types of things that we did before.”

Warren may be worried that DeSantis will use whatever promise he makes against him. In early January, Warren announced that he wouldn’t run for state attorney because he feared that the governor would just be able to remove him again. Up until that point, courts had rejected his pleas to overturn DeSantis’ suspension; even a federal district judge who said that DeSantis had probably acted unconstitutionally also ruled that he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren. 

Warren changed his mind about running after he secured a victory against DeSantis in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which instructed the lower court to reconsider reinstating Warren. 

Elizabeth Strauss, a local attorney, does not want Democrats to take the risk. She is running against Warren in next week’s primary and says she is a safer choice.

“A vote for Warren is a vote for Suzy,” she told Bolts repeatedly in an interview, warning that DeSantis could intervene to make sure Lopez remains in office if Warren wins.

“I just want people to vote with an informed decision and knowing that, okay, if I vote for him, there’s a chance he could get removed Day One,” Strauss said. “There’s other ways to challenge this and bring awareness to what the governor did without having the voters throw away their votes and end up with somebody that’s basically going to be his puppet.”

Strauss said she would not sign onto national policy statements like the ones Warren had joined while in office, which vowed to not prosecute cases involving abortions or anti-transgender laws. “I don’t plan on making myself vulnerable,” she said. In an email follow-up, she explained she would take a different approach to tackling issues with police stops by forming a civil rights unit. “While I will not refuse to prosecute based on any blanket policies, a Civil Rights Unit which actively investigates these matters is a more effective way to deter abuse of power by law enforcement officers,” she said.

Warren dismissed Strauss’ concerns, saying that he was focused on winning the general election in November. He has asked federal courts to expedite his case before the election, to no avail so far.

Carissa Byrne Hessick, director of the Prosecutors and Politics Project at the University of North Carolina, says she can see voters reacting to Warren’s comeback effort one of two ways. “It could be the sort of thing that really motivates voters to go to the polls and check the box for him,” she said. But, she added, “They might think that was too much chaos, and we don’t want to be fighting with the state.”

Robin Lockett, Tampa Bay regional director of Florida Rising, a voting rights advocacy organization that has endorsed Warren, told Bolts that she falls in the former group. 

“I think it’s brave of Andrew to still do what’s right for the people,” she said. “He can’t run in fear.”

Some Democratic voters, meanwhile, may be living in trepidation that the governor will just keep disregarding election results, no matter the office and the Democrat who wins. Other candidates running for local office have faced a similar cloud. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater,” a Democrat running for prosecutor in St. Petersburg told Bolts two years ago. This year, Worrell is seeking her old job back in Orlando, much like Warren is in Tampa.

At a political forum in May that featured the three state attorney candidates, as well as two candidates running for public defender, one attendee told them, “All of you are subject to being suspended by the governor.” 

The post Tampa Voters Get Their Say Two Years After DeSantis Axed Their Democratic Prosecutor appeared first on Bolts.

George Brauchler, a former prosecutor who was a face of tough-on-crime politics in Colorado for much of the last decade and a leading voice among death penalty proponents in the state, is close to completing his political comeback. 

In late June, he won the Republican primary in the race to become the next district attorney in Denver’s conservative south suburbs, where he already served as DA from 2013 to 2021 and is favored to win in the November general election. 

In his latest bid for office, Brauchler has added to his usual zero-tolerance arsenal: He is now promising to seek jail time for any adult who steals anything in his jurisdiction, from a candy bar to a car. “I’m going to put out a PSA, I’m going to do a press conference, and I’m going to let everybody that will listen know,” Brauchler told Bolts this week. “If you come to this jurisdiction and steal from us, you should expect to go to jail.”

This policy, which he described as an experiment, would be unusually punitive; Colorado courts often address small-value theft through fines, probation, or diversion programs. Tom Raynes, a former DA in western Colorado who now directs the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council, told Bolts he doesn’t know of any prosecutor in the state who has pursued jail time in every theft case. 

But if Brauchler is elected in November, he’ll no longer have any authority over a big chunk of the region he used to lead. That’s because the state has split his old 18th Judicial District in two. 

The populous and suburban Douglas County, plus the more exurban and rural Elbert and Lincoln counties, are forming a brand new and GOP-leaning 23rd Judicial District. That’s where Brauchler is running this year.

Arapahoe County, a blue swath of more than 600,000 residents that contains most of the city of Aurora, will now have a DA of its own, rather than share one with its redder neighbors to the south. (It’ll still be called the 18th district.) 

The frontrunner to win Arapahoe County’s first standalone DA race this year, Democrat Amy Padden, is a reform-minded attorney whose tone is very different from Brauchler’s.

Her belief, in stark contrast to his, is that “we need to find alternatives to incarceration.” While Brauchler vows to seek jail time in many low-level cases, Padden said she’s loath to take that approach because it risks destabilizing individuals, families, and, eventually, whole communities. 

“Someone is locked up over the weekend, for three days, for however long it is, and they may very well lose their job, their house, have all kinds of consequences,” she told Bolts. “That’s going to increase the chances they may reoffend.” 

“We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” Padden added. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.” 

With Brauchler’s and Padden’s opposing agendas, counties that used to form one behemoth district are now poised to take starkly divergent paths.

Assuming that the new districts vote according to their usual partisan leans in November, similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different prosecutorial responses—depending on which side of this new administrative boundary they occur.

This would mark a greater change in Arapahoe County, an increasingly liberal area whose residents’ voting preferences have been drowned out by the redder parts of the old 18th district. Residents there decisively voted against Brauchler in 2012, and against Brauchler’s Republican successor, John Kellner, in 2020. 

Arapahoe County, which is much more racially and economically diverse, has also long been a place with a particularly brutal and racist law enforcement presence, by the state’s own admission. By the end of Brauchler’s last term in office, in 2020, its imprisonment rate was four times higher than that of Douglas County.

Four years ago, Colorado lawmakers chose to divide the district due to its explosive population growth. A bipartisan law adopted in March 2020 split it in two, but provided that the split would only be effective after the 2024 elections. Coloradoans in 2022 overwhelmingly approved a measure to give each new district its own separate judges.

The state split no other judicial districts. Colorado will now have 23 district attorneys, up from 22. 

“The reason we do districting is to take account of the evolving nature of communities, and Douglas and Arapahoe counties have changed a great deal,” said state Representative Mike Weissman, a Democrat who was one of the law’s sponsors. 

“The two large counties were pretty politically distinct and had two different philosophies about criminal justice and public safety,” he added. Arapahoe County voted for Joe Biden by 25 percentage points in the 2020 presidential race. Douglas County voted for Donald Trump by 7 percentage points; overall, the new 23rd district backed him by 10 percentage points. 

When Padden ran for DA a first time in 2020, in the old district, she overwhelmingly carried Arapahoe County but lost Douglas, Elbert, and Lincoln counties by large margins. Kellner, who is not seeking reelection this year, beat her by 0.2 percentage points districtwide—a margin of under 1,500 votes, out of nearly 600,000 tallied. 

This year, Padden just has to win Arapahoe County. And she’ll face a familiar name in GOP nominee Carol Chambers.

Chambers, like Brauchler, is attempting her own comeback: She was DA in the 18th District from 2005 to 2013, during which time she generated plenty of controversy—she was accused of hiding evidence at in a high-profile trial, and offered “conviction bonuses” to deputies who hit quotas—and zealously sought the death penalty. (On the day Colorado repealed the death penalty, in 2020, two of the three people on the state’s death row had been prosecuted by Chambers. All three were Black men who attended the same high school in Aurora.) 

Chambers, who failed to carry Arapahoe County the last time she was on the ballot, in 2008, even as she won districtwide, isn’t running much of a campaign so far. She has no website and has spent no money this cycle, according to state campaign finance records. 

In the new 23rd district, Brauchler will face a Democrat who, by her own admission, also has no organized campaign for now. Karen Breslin told Bolts she was recruited to run for the position by Democratic Party leaders after her recent failed bid for the 4th Congressional District, but that she has not yet been able to turn her focus to the DA race. 

Asked how she’d be different from Brauchler as a prosecutor, Breslin told Bolts, “I’m going to have to punt on that. I don’t know his record with enough detail.” 

Padden’s approach to prosecution is much more in line with the statewide political trends that Brauchler has railed against during his campaign.

Since Democrats gained full control of the state government in 2018, the legislature has, among other reforms, lessened penalties for drug possession; limited the use of cash bail and pretrial incarceration in general; placed a slew of new restrictions on police power; mandated polling places in local jails; and abolished the death penalty.

“Every year I’ve said it’s the most offender-friendly legislature we’ve ever seen, and every year I’ve said it, I was right,” Brauchler said. “They’ve continued to whittle away at the amount of accountability that can be heaped on someone for their criminal conduct.”

During his earlier stint as DA, Brauchler frequently pushed back against statewide sentencing reforms. For instance, he resisted a law that allowed judges to resentence people serving life without parole for crimes they committed while they were children. He fought against resentencing requests and unsuccessfully tried to get the law struck down as unconstitutional. He also talked and wrote prolifically against the legislature’s move to repeal the death penalty.

Now, with his proposal for jail time in all cases of theft, Brauchler is practically inviting a showdown with the legislature, telling Bolts he expects Democratic lawmakers will draft a bill to reform theft sentencing laws once they see his policy in action.

Brauchler noted that he doesn’t necessarily want petty theft to result in defendants losing employment; he said he’s open, for example, to recommending sentences that can be served over weekends only. But it is essential, he feels, to create a standard of guaranteed incarceration for minor offenses, in order to stem more serious crimes. “I’m a firm believer that if we take this thing seriously and we do it right, it has an impact on a whole host of other crimes in the jurisdiction,” he said. 

Should Brauchler pursue this policy, he’ll face major opposition from civil rights groups and defense attorneys.

“It is deeply concerning if jail time is sought across the board, for low level offenses, because we know that’s not in the interest of justice,” said James Karbach, director of legislative policy for the state’s public defender office, and formerly the lead public defender in Arapahoe County during most of Brauchler’s time as DA. “We know that’s not effective at promoting public safety; it can be destabilizing and actually provide worse outcomes. It’s expensive. And the research shows that doing that doesn’t work.”

Indeed, research has shown that long prison sentences and short jail stints alike often harm, not aid, efforts to prevent recidivism. This is particularly pronounced among people with substance use issues and other behavioral health disorders that jails and prisons are commonly unequipped, or simply unmotivated, to treat.

Severe crackdowns against low-level offenses have also been found to disproportionately increase punishment of people of color—a population already disproportionately policed and incarcerated in Colorado and the country overall.

Rebecca Wallace, policy director at the Colorado Freedom Fund, works closely with people who face detention for minor offenses. The Freedom Fund pays cash bail to get poor people out of jail ahead of trial, and advocates at the statehouse, and Wallace has no doubt about how a blanket policy of jail time for every theft charge would play out.

“Most of the people who are picked up for petty theft are people experiencing extreme poverty, and many of them homelessness, and their theft is related directly to that scarcity,” Wallace told Bolts. “When people who are in those circumstances go to jail, quite frequently they lose all their possessions because they’re homeless. They lose their animals. They lose connection with service providers, with health providers, treatment providers, whatever community they have established. That loss can sometimes take months or years to reestablish after spending only a short time in jail.” 

While there is plenty of research supporting Wallace’s case, Braucher says he’s observed that theft, including petty theft, is motivated by “greed” and not by desperation.

“This mythical story of the mom that’s out there stealing a loaf of bread to feed her kids—I’ve been doing this since ‘94, man. I’ve never once seen anything that approaches that at all,” he said.

Wallace is skeptical that Brauchler would be able to carry out his plan, as it would require system-wide buy-in throughout the 23rd district. He’d need police to increase low-level arrests, judges to approve more jail time for petty charges, and cooperation from local sheriffs who run the jails Brauchler wants to fill. 

In her work at the Freedom Fund and in her previous role with the ACLU of Colorado, Wallace says she’s lately found general bipartisan disinterest in Brauchler’s kinds of ideas among law enforcement officials and lawmakers.

“What we have found in working to reduce incarceration for low-level offenses is that Colorado DAs want to spend their time working on people who commit serious offenses with victims,” Wallace said. “I understand he wants to come in and shake that up and take us backwards, and I have faith that he’s not going to have the ability as a one-man show to do that.”

Should he and Padden both become DAs, Bauchler said he’ll make a point to build a working relationship with the Democrat who’d lead prosecution next door. But, he added, “Obviously, I’d prefer to have someone who is more like-minded in that position.” 

He cited, among other differences between them, Padden’s views on prosecuting kids as adults. (Padden criticizes the DA’s office for transferring minors to adult system too frequently, and she has said she would only do so “in the most extreme cases.“) “That kind of an approach, if she sticks to that—yeah, that’s going to make things more challenging,” Brauchler said.

Padden, too, expects ongoing disagreements with Brauchler. 

“I’m not surprised by his frame of mind. That’s always been his frame of mind,” she said. “But what we’ve been doing in the past hasn’t worked. People’s entire lives can’t be defined if they make one mistake.”

The article has been updated to reflect Brauchler and Padden’s statements on juvenile prosecutions.

The post A New Boundary Sends Suburban Colorado Down Opposite Paths on Prosecution appeared first on Bolts.

In 2005, David Soares’ arrival to the Albany County district attorney’s office marked a victory for criminal justice reformers in New York’s capital county. Backed at the time by the progressive Working Families Party, Soares railed against the harsh mandatory minimum sentences imposed by the state’s notorious Rockefeller drug laws, ultimately landing 55 percent of the county’s vote. 

Two decades later, Soares is still in office, but his persona has changed markedly. He has used his pulpit in recent years to attack a trio of criminal justice reforms passed by New York’s Democratic legislature, and to pressure lawmakers sitting in the New York State Capitol, which is just a few minutes from his office by foot, to undo them.

Legislation that reformed the state’s bail and discovery laws, and raised the age at which young people can be prosecuted as adults, “sent the wrong signal to criminals; a green light,” Soares wrote in testimony submitted to a legislative hearing on criminal justice last February. His message in recent years, which has garnered support from tough on crime conservatives, has been consistent, drawing a direct line between these reforms and violent crime in Albany County. 

As president of the state’s influential DA association in 2018 and 2019, Soares became one of the state’s most vocal opponents of these changes. Since their adoption, he has helped lead a steady rhetorical drumbeat against them, undergirding a series of rollbacks that have attracted support from politicians of both parties. 

Next week, in the county’s Democratic primary, Soares faces a challenger with a different perspective on justice reform in New York. While longtime criminal defense attorney Lee Kindlon doesn’t shy away from pointing out high rates of violent crime in Albany County, and says the reforms in Soares’ crosshairs are imperfect, he has also seen their positive impact firsthand and doesn’t blame them for crime in Albany. 

Kindlon says Soares’ opposition to these policy changes is off-base, and a distraction from a larger problem. “I think he assails the system as a way to just have somebody to blame for his own failures,” Kindlon told Bolts. “I mean, I really just think it’s a cynical ploy to rail against these reforms, because he’s out of good ideas.” 

Throughout his campaign, Soares has painted himself as a voice of reason that won’t hesitate to continue his crusade against a legislature that he believes has endangered communities through its embrace of reforms.

“All in all, the implication that you can’t implement the laws, take note of their effect, then critique them, is absurd,” Soares told Bolts in a statement. 

The Albany County Democratic Committee withdrew its endorsement of Soares earlier this year, though it hasn’t endorsed Kindlon. This time, the Working Families Party, the group that was once a Soares ally but has also fiercely championed the state reforms he’s opposed, is backing his challenger.

Kindlon jumped into the race this spring as an alternative to the incumbent, after news broke that Soares had awarded himself a $23,000 bonus using grant funding from the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). After a flurry of press attention, Soares returned the cash, but defended his choice to take the funds in the first place, arguing that using the grant to give himself and other staff bonuses had been approved by DCJS. 

Kindlon, who previously lost a challenge to Soares in 2012, saw the funding snafu and decided this was his moment to offer Albany an alternative. 

On the campaign trail, he points out the controversial bonuses along with what he says is a staff retention problem in the DA’s office. But Kindlon also differs from Soares in his view of criminal law reforms and the role of a DA in carrying them out.

Local Democratic officials have split their endorsements since Kindlon’s entry into the race. While Soares has the support of law enforcement unions and Democratic County Sheriff Craig Apple, Kindlon has been endorsed by Albany County Executive Daniel McCoy, and by Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan, who announced she was backing him in May “because we deserve a District Attorney who follows the law, regardless of whether they agree with that law.”

Anita Thayer, a longtime Albany attorney and former secretary of the Working Families Party’s capital district chapter, is similarly concerned about Soares’ positions on reform. “The legislature has done a lot to pass good progressive criminal justice laws, and we need a district attorney that’s going to work to implement the laws and work to get the resources he or she needs to implement the laws,” Thayer said. 

“We don’t need someone that spends that time simply bashing the legislature,” she added. 

Some of Soares’ recent criticism has focused on the state’s “Raise the Age” law, passed in 2017. The law increased the age at which a child can be prosecuted as an adult from 16 to 18, bringing New York into line with the majority of states in the country. Since then, critics like Soares have said the law lacks clarity and creates a lack of accountability for young people who commit crimes.

“Raise The Age is the gentle parenting public safety policy for those in most need of the serious intervention teenagers need,” Soares told Bolts in a written statement. “As far as ‘programming’ to fully implement Raise the Age, we used to have a program that would stop teenagers headed to drive-by shootings. It was called ‘removal from the community.’ Short of that, I don’t think anything will work to stop the incessant violence among 16 and 17-year-olds in the inner city.”

In July 2023, Soares called on the legislature to amend the law and remove hurdles to charging young people with violent felonies. Weeks later, Republican Assemblyman William Barclay cited Soares when he introduced a bill to roll back Raise the Age. 

Soares’ critiques of the state’s recent criminal justice reforms echo those from members of both parties, as well as many other prosecutors, sheriffs, and police leaders in the state. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, opponents of these reforms leveraged concerns about crime in New York state to successfully push the legislature to amend the 2019 bail reform law, which eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and some nonviolent felony charges, as well as discovery reform, which change the rules for how prosecutors must share evidence with the defense in a case. 

In 2022, Republicans’ gubernatorial nominee Lee Zeldin also routinely highlighted incidents of violent crime throughout the state, while voters in both parties polled that year cited crime as their top concern. It was a message echoed by New York Republicans, who flipped several congressional seats. Zeldin came within five percentage points of Hochul in this overwhelmingly Democratic state.

But Kindlon believes the attacks on bail reform are misguided. 

“I don’t think that bail reform is the danger that Soares wants to turn it into,” he said. “It’s not the primary driving force in crime here in Albany County.” Kindlon also noted that the county’s violent crime problem long preceded bail reform, and that judges still have and exercise ample discretion to set bail for people accused of violent crimes. 

A recent study from neighboring New Jersey, which largely eliminated cash bail in legislation passed in 2014 and enacted in 2017, found bail reform did not increase gun violence in the state. These findings square with research in New York City that found no increase in arrests of people who were granted supervised release rather than being held on cash bail, and had no negative effect on court appearance rates.

For Lukee Forbes, a longtime Albany activist and executive director of the youth empowerment organization We Are Revolutionary, getting Soares out of office is personal. At 15 years old, he was prosecuted by Soares’ office for providing two other teens with a tree limb used to assault a University of Albany professor. Forbes, who ultimately served seven years in prison, tells Bolts he struggled as a teenager with the death of his mother, running away from home repeatedly, skipping class, and turning to substances to cope. When he was locked up as a teenager, Forbes says he felt “like the system was punishing me for my trauma.” That’s a pattern he continues to observe in the capital region—struggling teens facing prosecution from Soares’ office, rather than getting the support they need to succeed.

Following the enactment of Raise the Age, 16- and 17-year-olds facing felony charges had their cases heard in a newly-created “youth part” of the criminal court system, and 16- and 17-year-olds with misdemeanor charges were automatically funneled into family court, where punitive resolutions are less severe than criminal court. When the cases of teens facing felony charges are heard in the “youth part,” prosecutors have an opportunity to argue whether the case should stay in the criminal court system or be moved to family court. Between 2019 and 2023, the majority of 16- and 17-year-olds arrested in Albany had their cases transferred to family court or probation, but that percentage has mostly declined over time, according to data from DCJS.

“What I see from his office personally, I can’t ignore,” Forbes told Bolts about Soares’ charging decisions. “I see them taking advantage of a community that has a lack of understanding of the law, I see them taking advantage of family members who just want to get back home, I see them taking advantage of young people, of people who just don’t understand what is going on.”

In Albany County, Black people comprise roughly 14 percent of the population, but 44 percent of felony adult arrests. Doctor Alice Green, a lifelong advocate for racial justice and criminal justice reform in the county, is particularly concerned about how Black teens are being treated by Soares’ office, and says Soares, who is Black, has alienated a community that once supported him. “There has been concern in the Black community about how he treats Black people,” said Green, who is also Black. “There’s a mistrust there.”

Soares, however, insisted that Green doesn’t speak for Albany’s Black community, and told Bolts she “represents the political interests of defendants and white liberals.” 

Rather than leveraging the potential of Raise the Age to divert even more young people out of the adult system, Green says, Soares continues to insist dangerous young people should be funneled into adult facilities. “All the research tells us that if you put a kid into a secure facility or a prison, that they are going to eventually come back and recidivate and cause more damage, and they’re going to be harmed mentally,” said Green. 

Green says the county is failing to make use of state funding provided for diversion programs, and wants to see more cooperation between the DA’s office and other county offices and local nonprofits that serve kids. 

Forbes says he wants the DA’s office to do a lot more to confront the root causes of crime: “We need to really focus on addressing why kids are moving towards guns in the first place, versus just locking kids up and sentencing them to adult time.”

But Soares says that the failure to prevent kids from both perpetrating and being victimized by gun violence rests with legislators. 

“I still believe in second chances, and fairness, but as I did in 2004, I believe Black children should be able to learn and play without bullets whizzing past their heads on a regular basis,” Soares told Bolts in an emailed statement. “Holding gun-wielding teens accountable is a common-sense way to aid in that cause, which shouldn’t be controversial.” 

In spite of his opposition to Raise the Age, Soares has supported some new alternatives to incarceration and programming intended to help people with criminal convictions successfully reintegrate into the community. In 2017, he announced a “clean slate” initiative that diverted 16- to 24-year-olds with nonviolent felony convictions into a program designed to support them in finding work and staying in school, ultimately sealing their records if successfully completed. At the same time, Soares has blamed bail and discovery reform for decreased participation in diversion programs such as drug courts. 

Kindlon agrees with Soares on one thing: Gun violence in the county is a big problem. If he takes the helm of the DA’s office, Kindlon says he’ll focus on charging people and groups who funnel guns into the state, attempting to stem the tide of gun violence with conspiracy cases. Now, he says, the office is too focused on going after individuals.

“The main focus of gun prosecution here in Albany County is the young man with the gun and a car,” said Kindlon. “So they grab that guy, they grab the gun, they force him into a plea, and then it’s done.”

Kindlon also says he’s eager to invest the office’s resources in pretrial diversion programs, particularly for young people like those he has represented. He concedes that Raise the Age isn’t perfect and says he hopes the legislature will ultimately amend the law. But in the meantime, he thinks clarity about how to apply the law should come from litigation in the state’s appellate courts, which he would file if elected DA.

 “I would love for legislators to clear up some of the language and give some more guidance,” said Kindlon. “But in the absence of that, I understand that that’s what the courts are for.”

The DA’s office isn’t short on resources, particularly after the adoption of the laws Soares so fervently attacks. After the passage of discovery reform, Hochul secured $40 million to offset the costs of adapting to the law’s requirements. More than $2 million of that funding went to the Albany County DA’s office between 2022 and 2024, according to data shared with Bolts by DCJS, which administers the funding. 

Soares dismissed this investment as inadequate to address the burden imposed by the law. “Discovery reform has achieved nothing but the reduction of staffing in prosecutors’ offices,” he told Bolts. “No matter how much funding is thrown at discovery reform, it still burdens a prosecutor with administrative tasks as opposed to furthering investigations.

DA offices statewide also received a massive boost in “aid to prosecution” funding from the state in the last year. While in fiscal year 2022-2023 Albany County’s DA office received $176,540, that number soared to $943,253 in 2023-2024. Over the same time period, the office received a $400,000 boost in funding through Hochul’s Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) initiative. 

Kindlon wants to leverage some of these funds to ensure effective alternatives to incarceration exist.

“We’re Albany County; we’ve got resources, we’ve got brains, we’ve got opportunity,” he said. “Let’s bring together all the stakeholders and the nonprofits who want to see these things work, to community groups who want to see young men and women return to school, to support systems that we can build.”

Forbes believes Kindlon is more open than Soares to engaging in meaningful conversations with him and other concerned community members about how to address the root causes of crime in Albany. But ultimately, he needs to see him in action to believe he has something different to offer.

“We won’t see what a district attorney or any politician is really going to be like until they’re in those offices,” said Forbes. “David Soares was the golden child…and now, he’s flipped the script and is a completely different person.”

The post Albany’s Incumbent DA Battles a Challenger—And State Criminal Justice Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

Urmanski eventually lost in court, enabling Planned Parenthood to resume its services in Sheboygan. But he has appealed the ruling; if successful, his legal challenge could still criminalize abortion in Wisconsin. 

In the meantime, Urmanski won’t have to test his stance on abortion with the public. Sheboygan County hasn’t had a contested election for DA since 2002, and it won’t have one again this year.  The filing deadline for candidates to run passed earlier this month, confirming that Urmanski won’t face an opponent as he seeks reelection; he’s never faced one in his past bids, either.

In some regards, 2024 is a new era for democracy in Wisconsin: The state supreme court struck down the GOP’s legislative gerrymanders last year, enabling fairer maps, and candidates have rushed to run for the legislature. But that spirit hasn’t carried over into criminal justice elections.

Wisconsinites this year are electing their 71 DAs, powerful county officials with wide discretion over who gets prosecuted to what degree of severity. But voters only have a choice in four of those elections. Across the rest of the state, in 67 out of 71 DA races, just one candidate is running unopposed in both the primary and the general election.

This means that the final result is already known in a startling 94 percent of the year’s DA races, limiting what little public oversight and accountability exists for these powerful offices. These uncontested elections also immediately cut off any public debate that a competitive race could have sparked on issues rocking the state, like police oversight or abortion rights.

“It’s a missed opportunity for the public,” regrets Craig Johnson, a Milwaukee lawyer who is the board president of Wisconsin Justice Initiative, a group that advocates for criminal legal reforms in the state. “It’s a missed opportunity for the community to engage in the kind of conversation and discussion of ideas that would be helpful in trying to move the criminal justice system forward.”

“When someone is uncontested, they don’t tend to appear at candidate forums, they don’t tend to go out and campaign as much,” he said. “The conversation is not as vibrant and as vigorous as it would be if there were two candidates who had different thoughts.”

Even in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous county, a new prosecutor is poised to waltz into the DA’s office without facing any opposition. Incumbent John Chisholm is retiring, and Kent Lovern, a deputy DA under Chisholm, is the only candidate who filed to replace him. His website as of publication is not specific on policy, promising to be “tough on crime” while looking at alternatives to detention for low-level offenses; Lovern’s campaign did not reply to Bolts’ questions about how he’ll approach the job.

In seven other counties, the sitting DA is similarly retiring with one single candidate running in their stead, typically an assistant prosecutor who’s seeking to replace their boss. 

Fifty-nine incumbents, meanwhile, are running for new terms unopposed in both the primary and general election. 

That all leaves just four contested races: in Kenosha, Waukesha, and Washington counties, as well as in the sparsely populated district that joins Menominee and Shawano counties. 

It’s common nationally for DA races to be uncontested. Still, the scope of this phenomenon in Wisconsin far surpasses what we see elsewhere. Four years ago, over 90 percent of the state’s DA elections drew just one candidate. And an analysis of past election filings by Bolts found that many Wisconsin counties haven’t held a single contested race in decades.

Most of the state’s DA offices—58 percent of the total—have seen no contested DA election in over ten years. That means that one candidate has run unopposed in the last three cycles. 

In many cases, the streak goes back much further: More than one-third of Wisconsin counties have never held a contested DA race over the last two decades—a period that covers seven cycles of DA elections in the state.

Even in the counties that have experienced some competition, it’s still infrequent: Out of the seven election cycles from 2004 to 2024, roughly two-thirds of Wisconsin counties have seen no more than one contested election. 

And this isn’t just a dynamic in the sparsely populated parts of the state. Three of Wisconsin’s ten most populous counties have held no DA race with multiple candidates since at least 2002. None has held more than two.

And this isn’t just a dynamic in the sparsely populated parts of the state. Three of Wisconsin’s ten most populous counties have held no DA race with multiple candidates since at least 2002. None has held more than two.

Overall, one fourth of Wisconsin residents live in counties that have had no contested DA race since at least 2002.

“It’s a problem for democratic accountability, given DAs have so much power, when there isn’t a choice for voters in the vast majority of counties,” said Amanda Merkwae, director of advocacy at the ACLU of Wisconsin. “If residents of a county are fighting for transparency and accountability with the DA’s office, the primary avenue of democratic accountability is through an election every four years and having a choice at the ballot box.” 

For Merkwae, the ongoing litigation around abortion rights in Wisconsin is a stark example of the powers of prosecutors. “Depending on some decisions that are pending, if there is a gray area in the law, it’s functionally up to DAs whether to criminalize someone for accessing reproductive health care,” she said. “There are so many issues outside of what people typically think of when they think of the power of a prosecutor within the criminal legal system.”

Wisconsin, for instance, has been ground zero for baseless conservative conspiracies about the 2020 presidential race, with some Republicans endorsing aggressive investigations into the election officials who oversaw the results. “When you think about election conspiracies and baseless allegations of voter fraud, it is the DA who has the power and discretion to potentially endorse those conspiracies with prosecutions,” said Merkwae.

Eric Toney, the Republican DA of Fond du Lac County, is known for aggressively prosecuting election crimes since the 2020 presidential election and the conservative conspiracies about the result. He also sought the ouster of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, and aligned himself with the investigations of former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, a far-right figure now on the outs with the state’s Republican leadership. 

Toney is running for reelection unopposed this year for the third consecutive four-year cycle.

Prosecutors in Wisconsin also are responsible for making sure there are consequences for police misconduct but often ignore that oversight function. An investigation by Wisconsin Watch last month revealed that many DAs fail to track or adequately maintain “Brady lists” of police officers with a history of lying or misconduct. 

Under Urmanski, the Sheboygan County DA’s office filed dozens of criminal cases last year that relied on the testimony of police officers with such a Brady determination, according to the Sheboygan Press. The office has also repeatedly tried to seal the police records showing misconduct when those officers appear in cases. Earlier this year, a local judge rebuked Urmanski’s office for routinely making these requests to shield police misconduct records from public scrutiny.

“At what point does the public have a right to know about this pattern of misconduct of police officers in this community that rises to the level of being exculpatory?” Samantha Bastil, the local judge, said at a criminal hearing in December. Bastil, a former prosecutor, said during the  hearing that she had never seen a policy of sealing police misconduct records so routinely in her time working in the criminal legal system. Urkmanski did not respond to a request for comment.

Merkwae hoped for contested elections as an opportunity for the public to ask DAs about their commitment to police accountability. She also wants prosecutors to revise their bail policies to reduce the state’s ballooned local jails, where people are detained in dismal and often deadly conditions. “Even spending a few days in jail can have devastating, long lasting consequences for folks who are presumptively innocent, both for them and their families,” Merkwae said.

But state Republicans have attacked rules around pretrial detention in Wisconsin as too lax, successfully championing a referendum last year to make cash bail more restrictive.

Republicans have also assailed the outgoing DA in Milwaukee, Chisholm, over the case of Darrell Brooks, who drove a car through a Christmas parade in Waukesha County in 2021 while he was out on bond, killing six people. Chisholm has long touted his efforts to reform the county’s bail system and reduce incarceration, even if Milwaukee’s brutal local jail during his tenure has regularly been over capacity. After the Christmas parade attack, Chisholm said that the bail amount his office had recommended for Brooks in an earlier assault case was “inappropriately low” and not consistent with internal policies.

For Johnson, of the Wisconsin Justice Initiative, the response to such “sensational crime news” underscores why it’s difficult to persuade people with an interest in criminal justice reforms to run for DA. “You can expect to be attacked, you can expect to have every decision second-guessed, and you can expect probably to be recalled if there’s a decision that people disagree with,” he told Bolts. 

“If you’re a prosecutor and you recommend a low bail on somebody, and that person pulls out and commits a bank robbery or shooting or something, it is going to get headlines,” he said, adding that it’s difficult to get similar coverage when reforms are successful. “If a person arrested on a burglary charge has mental health issues, and instead of being sent to prison, they’re put into some sort of program that gets them community-based mental health services, and as a result they connect up with a good program, they succeed, they go on to live a crime free life, that’s not going to be a big story. That’s going to be a quiet success.”

Darrol Gibson, the Wisconsin state director of Run for Something, an organization that recruits progressive candidates to run for local office nationwide, told Bolts that he’s always eager to find people who want to change the system and come from different communities than the average politician. But he says it’s particularly hard to find such candidates in DA elections, especially when it comes to recruiting candidates of color.

“Our justice system has not been kind to communities of color,” Gibson said, pointing to the record rates of incarceration for Black people in Milwaukee and in the state. “For me to fill this role, what do I have to put myself through to change the system? … Am I participating in the same system that I’m trying to fight against?”

Still, Gibson said he encourages people to think of the broader impact their candidacy could have even if they don’t prevail. He told Bolts that whenever he meets a candidate, he asks them, “What do you want to do in this election? What issues do you want to bring forth, what things we want to push your opponent to speak on and to take a stance on and hold him accountable to?” 

Contesting elections isn’t just winning elections, he said, it’s about “moving the way people think and perceive what is possible.”

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