Addressing voter anger about crime doesn’t have to mean abandoning reform

Elections, like scripture, are read in different ways for different purposes. The recall of San Francisco’s liberal District Attorney Chesa Boudin (D) is being widely cast as a political earthquake that will shatter the movement for police reform and reinforce calls for tougher law enforcement.

The first round of the Los Angeles mayor’s race is being read much the same way. Rick Caruso, a Republican turned (at least nominally) Democratic, spent at least $40 million on a campaign pledging stern action against crime and homelessness. He stormed into a runoff with Democratic Rep. Karen Bass, once the contest’s heavy favorite.

Let’s stipulate: Something big is happening, not unlike the backlash in the late 1980s and early 1990s when voters reacted against much higher crime rates than the ones we’re seeing now. In 1993, Republican mayors were elected in very Democratic cities — Rudy Giuliani in New York and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles — by promising to restore order.

But the California vote is not this week’s only news. On Wednesday, the House heard testimony from families affected by mass shootings. Despite the media’s focus on what’s wrong with liberals’ approach to crime, conservatives continue to do the gun manufacturers’ bidding by dragging their feet on efforts to strengthen our nation’s pathetically weak weapons statutes.

We are told to be patientas Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a champion of sane gun laws, tries to wheedle modest concessions from Republican negotiators in the wake of the heart-rending and preventable tragedies in Uvalde and Buffalo that demand so much more.

The GOP is utterly opposed to a ban on assault weapons and seems to be resisting raising the age for purchasing them. Why? Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) explained. “In my state, they use them to shoot prairie dogs and, you know, other types of varmints,” Thune said. “And so I think there are legitimate reasons why people would want to have them.”

Varmints? Really?

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) had some news for Sen. Thune. “Across the country,” he tweeted, “ ‘they use them to shoot’ human beings in schools, grocery stores, hospitals, churches, synagogues, malls, bars, and workplaces.”

As for calls for police reform after the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and others, they were and are rooted in the same moral sense that leads to demands for safer streets and neighborhoods: Innocent people should not be killed, whether by criminals or those we count on to be the forces of order. We need better policing in both senses of that word: Better, as in more effective, and better, as in more just and more responsive to community concerns.

Ousting Boudin will not suddenly solve San Francisco’s crime problems, partly because the city’s challenges are broadly similar to those in other cities — including jurisdictions with old-fashioned, pre-reform-era prosecutors. My guess is that many who backed the recall know this but saw their ballots as the one vehicle they had to shout out their frustration.

Progressives will be lectured in the coming weeks about the need to take the public’s desire for order seriously. The hectoring will be annoying, but they shouldn’t resist the advice. The desire to contain crime crosses racial, ethnic and political divides. The current sense of insecurity undercuts every goal progressives have — including police and criminal justice reform as well as more effective and compassionate policies on drug addiction and homelessness.

At the same time, they should not abandon those objectives, which are as urgent today as they were last month or last year. And liberals must continue to call the right wing’s bluff on regulating weapons. Those who remain under the control of the gun and varmint-patrol lobbies have no standing to cast themselves as champions of law and order.

Our nation needs an honest and comprehensive reckoning with the sense of vulnerability so many of our fellow citizens feel. It must start not with polling or focus groups but with the sense of our shared humanity that Robert F. Kennedy invoked in 1968 during another cycle of division and violence.

“Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily,” Kennedy said, “whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence — whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”

We need order. We need justice. And a free society will never get one without the other.