Case study Portland: Another far-left DA gets the boot
Image by Wikimedia Commons
National Review suggests that the clock is running out for far-left politicos, as the City of Roses joins SF and LA (and perhaps Oakland?) in bidding adieu to soft-on-crime prosecutors.
The removal of Mike Schmidt, a feckless progressive prosecutor in the city of Portland, Ore., is the most dramatic of several recent indications that, at long last, the tide is turning in America’s most beleaguered metropolises.
In recent years, Portland has become a byword for fashionable left-wing guff, including the notion that crime and homelessness are little more than voluntary social constructs that are better fought with kind words and substantial welfare spending than with the assiduous enforcement of the law. After he was elected as the Multnomah County district attorney in 2020, Mike Schmidt implemented every bad idea in circulation. He supported the ending of cash bail. He reduced the prosecution of misdemeanors. He flirted with defunding the police. He resisted calls to clear the city’s many homeless encampments. Despite Portland having hosted some of the worst riots of the long summer of 2020, Schmidt steadfastly refused to go after any of the perpetrators — including those who had damaged the city’s center, engaged in disorderly conduct, resisted arrest, or otherwise interfered with the work of the police. This wolf, as a great man once wrote, came as a wolf.
The results were utterly predictable. Portland’s murder rate rose precipitously in 2021 and 2022 — and it remains higher than it was prior to Schmidt’s arrival. Rather than responding to the reduced use of cash bail by staying on the straight and narrow and then gratefully showing up in court, the number of people who committed crimes while awaiting trial increased. In the meantime, Portland’s pretty downtown became known nationally for homelessness, petty crime, open-air drug deals, and the slow response time of the police. In return, the voters have sent Schmidt away — and emphatically so. Tuesday evening, local media in Portland called the race for Schmidt’s opponent within hours of the polls closing, and as of Wednesday evening, the incumbent was losing by nine points to his more conservative challenger, a former Republican named Nathan Vasquez who once worked as a deputy in his office.
Schmidt’s departure is by no means an isolated incident. Three years ago, the citizenry of Seattle preferred to pick a Republican as their city attorney rather than to assent to the peculiar ideas of Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, who had proposed abolishing jails. Two years ago, San Francisco kicked out its progressive prosecutor, Chesa Boudin. And, this November, voters in California’s Alameda County (home to Oakland and Berkeley) will decide whether they wish to recall Pamela Price, a district attorney who has presided over similar results as did Boudin and Schmidt. Still, for this to have happened in Portland of all places is remarkable and telling, and ought to confirm for the remaining skeptics that, even in this fractious moment in our history, crime remains a fundamentally pre-political question. Americans may disagree on all manner of important issues, but, quite rightly, they will not put up forever with their cities becoming dangerous dens of blight and iniquity — especially when they have been made so deliberately, and with ample warning.
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