After more than a decade of criminal-justice reforms running in one direction—to the left—some pockets of the United States seem to be having a law-and-order moment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American West. Arizona, California, and Colorado delivered public-safety voters some significant wins on November 5. The lesson policymakers should draw from those outcomes can be distilled in three words: public order matters.
Arizona offered several ballot initiatives related to crime, law enforcement, or public safety and order. Proposition 311 proposes new court fees triggered by criminal convictions to fund death benefits for first responders killed in the line of duty; it also proposed harsher penalties for assaulting first responders. The measure passed by a nearly two to one margin. Proposition 312, which also passed with 58 percent of the vote, suggests tax refunds for residents when the government fails “to enforce laws and ordinances prohibiting illegal camping, loitering, obstructing public thoroughfares, panhandling, public urination or defecation, public consumption of alcoholic beverages, and possession or use of illegal substances.” Proposition 313, which got nearly two-thirds of the vote, puts life sentences on the table for child sex trafficking; and Proposition 314 creates new state-level offenses related to illegal immigration and created a new felony offense that dealers can now face when they knowingly sell fentanyl to an individual who dies as a result. Prop. 314 got 63 percent of the vote.
In California, as I’ve noted, voters ousted the state’s most prominent “progressive” prosecutor, George Gascón in Los Angeles. And his Bay Area counterpart, Pamela Price, has also been recalled by a wide margin in Alameda County—home to Oakland, whose anti-police mayor, Sheng Thao, has also been recalled. Perhaps the biggest development was the overwhelming support among statewide voters for Proposition 36, which, among other things, rolled back the criminal-justice reforms enacted through Proposition 47 a decade earlier, which had disastrous results.
Coloradans voted last week to amend their constitution to remove the right to bail in first-degree murder cases, conditional on an initial evidentiary showing. In addition to that change, 62 percent of voters supported Proposition 128, which created a new truth-in-sentencing (TIS) regime that requires those convicted of certain offenses “to serve 85 percent of the sentence imposed before being eligible for parole.” Certain repeat offenders would become ineligible for parole until they’ve served the entirety of the sentence imposed. TIS was one of the three commonsense model policies that I proposed in a recent Manhattan Institute paper released last November. Also passing was Proposition 130, which directs the legislature to “appropriate 350 million dollars to the peace officer training and support fund for municipal and county law enforcement agencies to hire and retain peace officers.”
Not long ago, the criminal-justice reform movement seemed to have insurmountable momentum—especially in deep-blue enclaves. That these reconsiderations have come so quickly in bedrock Democratic states like Colorado and California (Arizona was one of this cycle’s seven swing states) is striking. What explains the shift? The most obvious answer: a desire to restore public order. In cities like Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Denver, residents have seen basic standards of public order eroded beyond the point of political tolerance: homeless encampments, people getting high in the street, protesters blocking traffic, vagrants urinating and defecating on sidewalks, gangs of thieves snatching what they want from department store clothing racks and pharmacy shelves. All these trends threaten the vitality of city life. Just as in an earlier era, permitting such “broken windows” to remain unaddressed has imposed a cost on urban living that many aren’t willing to pay any longer.
Disorder hits all the senses. It can, as George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson put it in their seminal 1982 essay, lead residents to “think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and . . . modify their behavior accordingly.” As we saw this week, such modifications also affect how citizens vote. Many policymakers desperately needed the reminder.
Photo: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images