Even Democrats can get sick of the crime that results from left-wing policies. So the voters in California’s Alameda County — which voted lopsidedly for the Democrats in every statewide and national election — have voted to remove a soft-on-crime mayor and district attorney. A San Francisco news source reports:
Voters in the East Bay appear to have delivered pretty decisive victories to the recall campaigns targeting Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and [Alameda County] District Attorney Pamela Price. Based on votes counted as of Wednesday morning, the recall of Thao is passing with 65% “yes” votes, and the recall of Price is passing with a strikingly similar margin…
The recall of Price, which has been framed as a backlash against progressive views of criminal justice and a push for more punitive prosecutions of those who commit crimes, was fairly widely predicted. The campaign to recall her followed much negative response to her handling of high-profile cases, including the 2021 freeway shooting of toddler Jasper Wu, and Delonzo Logwood, a man who received a relatively light sentence in a plea deal despite being implicated in three separate homicides.
As KRON4 reports, the recall of Price is passing by 64.8% of the vote as of Wednesday morning, with 35.2% voting “no.”
District Attorney Pamela Price was a nightmare for crime victims. Thanks to Price, a man who attempted to murder a colleague by poisoning her — leaving her with permanent health problems and shrinking her life span — spent only ten days in jail, despite his crimes being caught on camera. It would have been easy to send him to prison for many years, but he’s got off the hook with nothing more than probation. It’s part of the decarceration policies promoted by Price. The victim is unable to work full-time, suffered a heart attack, and continues to experience pain in the liver area. She suffered at least $460,000 in damage, but won’t be compensated more than $10,000 (perhaps far less) in the deal between the attempted murderer and the left-wing district attorney.
The recall campaign against Price began after she allowed a black man who deliberately set Asian students on fire to be released without doing any prison time, and sought to allow serial killers to avoid spending life in prison, by refusing to seek life without parole.
Price’s opposition to giving killers and would-be killers long sentences posed a threat to public safety. Studies of countries with short prison sentences have found that letting criminals out early increases the crime rate, making longer prison sentences a good investment. See, e.g., Barbarino & Mastrobuoni, The Incapacitation Effect of Incarceration: Evidence from Several Italian Collective Pardons, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 6(1): 1-37 (2014).
In June, after the recall election was already underway, the FBI raided Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s house, looking for evidence of criminal activity.
