Pirate's Cove

Usually, we just hear about things happening when it comes to crime. Rarely are faces put to it

Can progressive prosecutors survive America’s crime wave?

Two months after Sheria Musyoka was killed in San Francisco, his family buried him in the Kenyan village where he had been born and raised. Musyoka’s sisters “wept uncontrollably” during the ceremony, a local outlet reported. Some “fainted as they eulogised their brother.”

The 26-year-old Musyoka had come to the United States to study at Dartmouth College. After graduating at the very top of his class, he married an American woman and settled with her in Connecticut. In late 2020, after a year of pandemic lockdowns, they decided to move across the country, to San Francisco. They had a 3-year-old son named Theo.

On the morning of Feb. 4, 2021, Musyoka was jogging near San Francisco State University when a stolen 2003 Ford Explorer flew through a red light at Lake Merced Boulevard and Higuera Avenue, crashing into seven other cars. The crash killed Musyoka and injured three other people.

The Explorer had been stolen in San Jose by a man named Jerry Lyons, who had proceeded to drive north to San Francisco, where he lived.

Lyons had only recently left prison, only to fall back into the same patterns that had seen him cycle through the criminal justice system for years. In October 2020, he was arrested for allegedly stealing a car and possessing methamphetamine, but San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, decided not to bring new charges against him, even though Lyons was in violation of his supervised release from prison.

Lyons was arrested again in December for drunken driving, again in a stolen car. He spent the better part of that month in jail, but Boudin’s prosecutors — many of whom were, like him, former public defenders — did not move quickly to press new charges, effectively letting the case languish. Lyons was thus set free. The next time he would come to Boudin’s attention, it would be for killing Musyoka.

That puts a face to the pro-crime policies of people like Boudin. You hear about the massive wave of shoplifting due to declaring that theft under $1000 won’t be prosecuted, you see the stories about Walgreen’s and Target stores closing in San Francisco. You see the videos. What you don’t usually hear about are the people affected directly. Those who are robbed and the police go “meh” because they know the perps won’t be prosecuted. Those who close their businesses because of the crime.

Across the country, more and more prosecutors had run or were running on near-identical platforms. They were anti-prosecutors, in a way, steeped in social justice interpretations of policies like Rockefeller drug laws and stop-and-frisk. They saw traditional prosecutors as enablers and abettors of aggressive policing, which in turn they saw as enforcing systemic racism. The new prosecutors vowed to redress these injustices by serving in the very offices that had perpetuated some of them.

Those promises are increasingly imperiled by rising crime rates across the country, including in every major city. Boudin is facing two separate recalls, which on some days has him sounding like the very type of law-and-order prosecutor he promised he was never going to become.

But, really, don’t feel bad for a goodly chunk of the people affected, because they voted for this with their progressive beliefs. Progressives usually believe the Bad Things will affect Someone Else. They rarely stop to think what the policies will do in their own lives. And now that they’re seeing the results of their policies, they want to recall the folks doing what they were elected to do.

Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, probably the nation’s most prominent progressive prosecutor, spent the spring fighting off a primary challenger. His rival was supported by the city’s Democratic establishment, which had refused to endorse Krasner, the incumbent. Speaking a few days before that election, Krasner told me the backlash was nothing more than “Trumpian bullshit.”

He went further, saying that far from being embattled, the progressive prosecutorial movement was just beginning, supported by a society that has become increasingly aware of racial inequalities. “You can see it in the music. You can see it in the movies,” Krasner said. “You can see it in the books. You can see it in popular culture. You can see it in the marches and the discussions that are going on. So there’s a tremendous cultural shift happening here, which is essential for any successful grassroots movement.”

Yeah, scroll through the First Street Journal, which provides plenty of Krasner’s results. Such as these ones. But, hey, the people of Philly re-elected Krasner, so, let them deal with the consequences of their votes.

It’s a very long article. Have at it.