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    DeSantis’s Efforts to Make Education in Florida Less ‘Woke’

    More from our inbox:‘The Carnage Must Be Stopped’Trump, Still FormidableThe Danger of Anti-Boycott BillsLiving Without Plastic Marta Lavandier/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Under Pressure, Board Revises A.P. African American Course” (front page, Feb. 2):It is, of course, sadly ironic that your article about the stripped-down African American course curriculum ran online on the first day of Black History Month.Either Gov. Ron DeSantis genuinely believes that critical thinking, a foundational understanding of how the United States came to be, and the reading of books that deepen kids’ sympathy for other kids will actually mess kids up, or he’s just pandering to the masses.Whether the governor likes it or not, our country’s history, like that of all empires, isn’t wholly pretty. Is it upsetting to learn that the land you live on was taken brutally from its original occupants and that the house you live in was bought with a loan that was denied to another person because of the color of his skin? I would hope so.But the purpose of teaching kids their country’s history isn’t to make them feel bad about themselves personally. If a kid, any kid, comes away from a classroom feeling lousy about themselves, that’s just poor teaching. They should, though, understand that not everyone has had those advantages, be grateful for their good fortune and work to make sure everyone else’s path is equally opportune.Teachers have a tough enough time helping children become empathetic and engaged citizens with the skills and knowledge necessary to thrive in the global community without becoming shuttlecocks in a soulless game of political and cultural badminton.Kevin BarrBethesda, Md.The writer was an English teacher and administrator for over 40 years at Georgetown Day School in Washington.To the Editor:I’m a current high school junior who has taken a number of Advanced Placement courses. The College Board is absolutely spineless for bending to demands from the likes of Gov. Ron DeSantis. As much as he — or anyone else for that matter — might not like the Black Lives Matter movement, there is no way to neglect it in a course that studies the contemporary history and culture of African American people.And, of course, being presented with information doesn’t mean that it will be “indoctrination.”The blatant erasure of Black, queer and feminist scholars from the course is egregious. Nobody deserves to have their experience or perspective left out.At the center of this debate is the student’s right to learn, and I believe that the student’s right to learn trumps all. History isn’t meant to be watered down.Charles YaleOmahaTo the Editor:Gov. Ron DeSantis revealed one of the reasons for his rejection of the A.P. Black history course. “This course on Black history,” he said during a press conference. “What’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory. Now, who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory?”Who would say that? How about the lesbian poet Audre Lorde? The author James Baldwin? The trans activist Marsha P. Johnson? Barbara Jordan, Bayard Rustin, Alvin Ailey and countless others?These layers of disenfranchisement have a detrimental effect on health equity, justice and more.Donna L. TapelliniLambertville, N.J.‘The Carnage Must Be Stopped’ Pool photo by Andrew NellesTo the Editor:As a Black man and a retired police officer, I have been crying quite a bit lately. Crying from a deep sense of outrage, grief, shame and fear.Outrage, because yet another unarmed Black man has been brutally killed by police officers. In communities of color throughout the United States, police use of deadly force and acts of misconduct and abuse have seemingly grown to epidemic proportions. People of color may now feel victimized by the very people who are supposed to protect them, worrying that they will become one of the ever-growing statistics.Grief, because of the pain that I know Tyre Nichols’s family and friends must now be going through.Shame, because the officers who killed Tyre looked exactly like me. They swore the same oaths that I did to protect and serve the community. They debased and dishonored the badge that they carried.But most of all, fear, because I worry that my grandsons, great-grandsons and sons-in-law may one day become victims of this insanity. I can only pray that they will remember the things I have taught them about how to survive a police encounter, and that they are able to live to fight another day.I know in my heart that Tyre Nichols will not be the last death of a Black man at the hands of police this year.There must be change. There must be accountability. The carnage must be stopped.Charles P. WilsonBeltsville, Md.The writer is webmaster and immediate past chairman of the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers.Trump, Still Formidable Eva Marie Uzcategui/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Trump in ’24? G.O.P. Leaders Aren’t So Sure” (front page, Jan. 27):Lately there have been many reports of Donald Trump’s imminent political demise, but despite the predictions he remains a dangerous opponent and a formidable campaigner.His power has always come not from politicians but from ordinary people who see him as a bigger, more successful version of themselves. However inarticulate he sounds to the rest of us, the message his base hears is always clear.Many of his handpicked candidates lost in 2022 because of their own failings; his appeal to the MAGA base appears undimmed.He is a fighter, with the constitution and mentality of an alligator, striking back ferociously when attacked. He has no regard for the truth, but he has realized that millions of voters don’t either.Certainly none of the sorry bunch of Republicans mentioned in your article have anything like his power on the campaign trail.Tim ShawCambridge, Mass.The Danger of Anti-Boycott Bills Robert NeubeckerTo the Editor:Re “Politicians Push Back on Having E.S.G. Funds,” by Ron Lieber (“Your Money,” Jan. 30):The fight between red states and the asset manager BlackRock is a symptom of a much larger danger facing American democracy today: the attempt by state legislators to take away the right to boycott as a tool for social and political change.The first anti-boycott bill introduced in 2015 to punish Americans boycotting Israel has since been passed in 28 other states. Starting in 2021, Republicans used it as a template to punish companies engaged in environmental, social and governance investing in several states, leading to the current face-off with BlackRock in Texas.Bills introduced earlier this year in South Carolina, Iowa and Missouri follow the same template as the original anti-boycott law punishing boycotts of Israel, but expand the target to punish state contractors that may be engaged in boycotts of companies that do not offer reproductive health care or gender-affirming care and companies that do not meet workplace diversity criteria.From civil rights leaders to farm workers and anti-apartheid activists, Americans have relied on boycotts throughout the country’s history. We are currently at a crossroads where such a crucial tool may no longer be available for future generations.Julia BachaNew YorkThe writer is a filmmaker and director of “Boycott.”Living Without PlasticMust avoid: All of these items, which are part of the reporter’s everyday life, contain plastic.Photographs by Jonah Rosenberg for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Plastic Surgery: No Phone, No Credit Cards, No Bed” (Sunday Styles, Jan. 15):I enjoyed reading your report about living without plastic for 24 hours after taking out my home-delivered Times from its plastic wrapper.David ElsilaGrosse Pointe Park, Mich. More

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    America Is Breaking Our Hearts

    Gail Collins: Bret, I have a lot to ask you about government spending and deficits and … all that stuff. But first, we really need to talk about all the recent mass shootings and what to do about them, right?Bret Stephens: In Britain or Germany these sorts of mass shootings are, at most, once-every-other-year events. Over here, hardly a day goes by without something like this happening. And the horror doesn’t just lie in the carnage. It’s that we’ve become accustomed to it. Dostoyevsky wrote, “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” That’s the state of our nation.Gail: I wondered whether I should even bring the matter up yet again. But we can’t just give up and shrug in silence.Bret: You know I’m in favor of repealing the Second Amendment, not for the sake of banning guns but for making it much harder for just anyone to own them. Otherwise, in a country with more firearms than people, I doubt that ordinary gun control can make a real difference. Your thoughts?Gail: Do love the fact that I converse with a conservative who wants to repeal the Second Amendment. Sign me up.Bret: Don’t get your hopes up that I’m speaking for other conservatives.Gail: It may seem crazy in the face of all this carnage, but I’ve always wondered if we could change the argument to gun pride — that people shouldn’t be allowed to own guns until they prove they can shoot. Just hit a reasonably sized target. Obviously you don’t need a good aim to fire an assault rifle into a church or movie theater, but if we could just come to a consensus on requiring competence, that might be a first step toward rational firearm regulations.Bret: I would design the test differently. Start with a 100-question test on gun use, safety and legal requirements, with a passing grade of 90. Next, a psychological fitness test, conducted in person by trained personnel. Then heavy liability insurance requirements for gun store owners. Oh, and a drug test for purchasers. Anything to hinder disturbed young men, who are most frequently the culprits in the worst of these mass shootings, from getting their hands on rapid-fire weapons.After that, gun owners can boast to their friends that not only can they shoot, but also that they’re smart, sane, solvent and sober. But you wanted to discuss … government spending.Gail: That’s the issue of the moment, right? Congress has to do something about raising the debt ceiling or the economy will collapse somewhere down the line. Or at least that’s the theory.Republicans want to tie the raising of said ceiling to major league cuts in spending. No matter how much Kevin McCarthy swears that won’t involve cuts to Social Security or Medicare, it’s almost impossible to imagine they aren’t on the table. What’s your recommendation?Bret: Well, the Republicans’ current strategy has all the intelligence of Foghorn Leghorn, the Looney Tunes rooster: They’re trying to play a game of chicken with the Biden administration when, deep down, they know they’re the ones who are going to chicken out. It would be economically destructive and politically suicidal to let the federal government default on its debt. So we will probably go through this terrifying charade until a handful of swing-district Republicans break ranks and vote with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling.Gail: I do like that last scenario you mentioned. But don’t you think the bottom line is problematic, too? If Congress cuts spending to balance the budget as some Republicans have suggested, it could mean big cuts to very popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.Bret: Other than trying to find ways to slow the rate of spending growth, I can’t imagine there would be cuts to either program. They’re popular with Republican voters, too, after all. And there’s no way anything is going to happen except on a bipartisan basis. Any suggestions for fixes that don’t involve large tax increases?Gail: Well, some people may regard this as a tax increase, but I want to propose some tax fairness. For some reason, Social Security payroll taxation stops at about $160,000. So a person making a million dollars a year doesn’t pay anything on about $840,000.Let’s get rid of that ceiling, Bret. What do you say?Bret: I wouldn’t object to raising the cap provided Democrats would be willing to push up the retirement age by four or five years. As for Medicare reform, my guess is it will never happen. Instead, I’m betting that in 20 years we’re going to have a terrible but “free” single-payer system for part of the population and an excellent but expensive universe of private providers. As for actual budget cuts, maybe we could end stupid subsidies like the one for ethanol production. But that one is way too popular with farm-state Republicans.Different subject, Gail: Memphis.Gail: Bret, I spent a lot of my early career — way back in the ’70s — hanging out with the chief of police in New Haven, Ed Morrone, who was just so smart. He told my husband Dan, who was a police reporter then, that the most important job of a cop was “to keep people who hate one another apart.”Bret: Oh, it’s like figuring out the seating arrangement at Thanksgiving. Sorry, go on.Gail: In those days, that made so much sense. But in Memphis, the people doing the hating were the police themselves, who apparently got mad because a driver they had targeted for some reason made them run until they were out of breath and then started crying for his mother while they began beating him up.Now we have a dead young man, a bereaved family and a city in turmoil. Every well-run law enforcement organization in the country is going to have to cope with a new level of suspicion. Those cops have ruined their own reputations, deeply wounded community relations, and I am confident they’re going to pay for their terrible misdeeds after criminal trials.Your thoughts?Bret: I was moved by Tyre Nichols’s mom, RowVaughn Wells, when she said she’d pray for the police officers who killed her son, along with their families. It’s a spirit of compassion and dignity the city desperately needs now.Gail: Not just the city, the whole country.Bret: That said, I’m also reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions, either about this case or from it. Memphis has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the country, and the city desperately needs competent and effective policing. Police brutality obviously remains a serious challenge throughout the country. But so do reports of de-policing, in which cops retreat to their precinct stations because they don’t want to be out on their beats, or the equally dangerous trend of demoralized and demonized police departments that have led to serious staffing shortages across the country.Gail, at the end of our conversation last week — sometime after I’d committed the mortal sin of endorsing gas over electric stoves — we promised readers that we would discuss who, among Democrats, would be the best candidate to face Ron DeSantis should he become the G.O.P.’s presidential nominee. Give me some names.Gail: Well gee, I was looking forward to another discussion about kitchen stoves, but OK.Bret: Of all the ways I’ve irritated our readers over the years, who knew that my ignorance of induction cooktops would be the worst?Gail: We both wish Joe Biden would retire and open the door for someone younger, but it sure doesn’t look likely. If he runs, Governor DeSantis, who’s 44, would be a daily reminder that Biden is in his 80s.Bret: If it gets to that, Biden had better hope that Donald Trump brings back Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party to split the conservative vote. Because otherwise, President DeSantis it shall be.Gail: Age isn’t a problem for most of the Democrats who’d be likely to succeed Biden as nominee. And there’s a raft of promising possibilities people are talking about — a half-dozen governors, several senators and a couple of members of Biden’s administration.Some of the names I like hearing are Senator Amy Klobuchar, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, and Josh Shapiro, the newly ensconced governor of Pennsylvania. Kamala Harris, you will note, is not on my list.Bret: I noticed.Gail: The public needs a chance to look all these people over in a serious, long-term way. Which would happen if Biden announced he isn’t running again. Please, Mr. President …Bret: One other strong contender I’d like to mention: Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary and former governor of Rhode Island. She would be the best candidate in a general election because of her strong centrist appeal — and the best president, too. And people ought to start keeping an eye on Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, even though it is probably much too soon for him — or Josh Shapiro, for that matter — to start considering a presidential bid.Gail: Yeah, I guess it’s only fair that people who get elected governor should put in a year or two before they start running for higher office.Bret: Before we go, Gail, I was saddened to read about Victor Navasky’s death this month at 90. I probably disagree with 99 percent of what gets published in The Nation, the magazine he led for so many years. But he was a happy warrior for his causes, wrongheaded as some of them were (like championing the innocence of Alger Hiss). But I’ll take a cheerful opponent over a sour fellow-traveler any day.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Your Monday Briefing: The Fallout from a Police Beating

    Also, violence is flaring in Israel and the West Bank.People gathered in protests across the country after the footage was released.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesU.S. grapples with another police beatingThe release of a video on Friday showing five officers with the Memphis Police Department pummeling and pepper-spraying Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, prompted horror and disgust from law enforcement officials, lawmakers and other people across the U.S.The officers, according to the video, escalated their use of physical force and gave conflicting orders. It does not appear that Nichols fought back during the beating. At one point, he yelled out for his mother. Once medics were on the scene, they stood by for more than 16 minutes without administering treatment.Nichols had been stopped for what the police originally said was reckless driving. He died three days later, and an independent autopsy found that he “suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating.”The City of Memphis released the video a day after the officers were charged with second-degree murder and other felonies. The five officers are all Black, a fact that has shifted the national conversation toward police culture itself. Many argue that the police system and its tactics foster racism and violence more than the racial identity of any particular officer does.Response: The country has grappled repeatedly with high-profile cases of Black men and women being killed by police officers. The relatively swift release of the footage reflects a national shift about how police investigate and talk about those cases.Fallout: On Saturday, the Memphis Police Department announced that it had disbanded the controversial unit in which the five officers had worked.Tyre Nichols: A skateboarder and nonconformist, Nichols cut his own path from California to Tennessee.In January alone, at least 30 Palestinians have been killed, including five children. So have seven Israelis.Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesViolence flares in Israel, the West BankA series of raids and attacks since Thursday in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jerusalem have left more than 20 people dead. Yesterday, an 18-year-old Palestinian man was fatally shot outside an Israeli settlement.Israel’s new far-right government has been in power for only a month. But on its watch, Israelis and Palestinians have already experienced one of the most violent phases, outside a full-scale war, in years. Nine Palestinians were shot dead on Thursday morning, in the deadliest Israeli raid in at least a half-decade. Yesterday, a tenth person died. On Friday, a Palestinian gunman killed seven people outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, the deadliest attack on civilians in the city since 2008. On Saturday, an attacker who the police said was 13 years old shot and injured two Israelis near a settlement in East Jerusalem.In response, Israel’s government on Saturday said it planned to expedite gun licenses for Israeli citizens, reinforce military and police units to carry out more arrests of Palestinians and conduct operations aimed at seizing Palestinians’ weapons.What’s next: Analysts fear that Israeli policies are likely to inflame an already volatile situation, our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, reports. Rising frustration and violence among young Palestinians are also contributing to a combustible situation.The missing capsule came from a Rio Tinto mine.Jorge Guerrero/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA missing radioactive capsule in AustraliaAuthorities in Western Australia are searching for a dangerously radioactive capsule. It’s smaller than a penny and could be anywhere along a vast desert highway.The device, part of a sensor used in mining, is believed to have fallen off a truck that drove from a Rio Tinto mine in Western Australia’s remote north to Perth, the state capital. The 870-mile trip (1,400 kilometers) took several days. The search involves the use of radiation detectors. “What we are not doing is trying to find a tiny little device by eyesight,” an official said.If you spot it: Stay at least five meters away. The capsule contains cesium-137. An hour of exposure at about a meter away equals having had 10 X-rays. Prolonged contact can cause skin burns, acute radiation sickness and cancer.THE LATEST NEWSThe Australian OpenNovak Djokovic beat Stefanos Tsitsipas of Greece in straight sets.Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNovak Djokovic won the men’s singles title at the Australian Open, a year after he refused to get vaccinated against the coronavirus and missed the tournament. It’s the 10th time he has won the tournament, and his 22nd Grand Slam title.Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus won the women’s singles title. She beat Elena Rybakina of Kazakhstan.Asia PacificA bus in Pakistan fell into a ravine and caught fire, killing at least 40 people.Floods in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, killed at least four people, the BBC reports, after the area suffered its worst recorded downpour.China’s oil and gas consumption fell in 2022 for the first time in decades.Most Australians under 35 support moving the date of Australia Day from Jan. 26.Asia is cold. Blame the polar vortex.The War in UkraineUkraine’s military said its soldiers had repelled Russian attacks on villages near the eastern city of Bakhmut.The Kremlin outlawed Meduza, a leading independent news site based in Latvia.The Czech Republic decisively elected Petr Pavel, a retired senior NATO general, as its president, cementing its position as a supporter of Ukraine.U.S. officials overseeing aid insist that Ukraine is tackling corruption after the recent dismissal of top officials.Two men facing Russia’s draft used a fishing boat to seek asylum in the U.S.Around the WorldPeru’s government is portraying demonstrators as pawns for nefarious interests.Marco Garro for The New York TimesProtests are growing in Lima, led largely by Indigenous, rural and poorer Peruvians who are calling on the president to resign.Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain fired Nadhim Zahawi, the chair of the Conservative Party, over his tax affairs.Donald Trump held his first public events after formally opening his comeback bid for the White House.The Netherlands and Japan will join the U.S. in banning some shipments of their chip technology to China.A Morning ReadPeople with Gallic inclinations. Or, perhaps, people under the influence of French civilization.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesThe Associated Press caused a brouhaha when it offered a style tip: “We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled.” That didn’t sit well with the French. (What else would we call them, “people of Frenchness”?) “In fact, the French rather like being stereotyped as the French,” our Paris bureau chief writes. “They undergo Frenchness with considerable relish.”ARTS AND IDEASFuture cringeOne day we’ll look back on the early 2020s and wonder: What were we thinking? The Times asked more than 30 people from academia, the media, the arts and beyond to weigh in on what they think will one day make us cringe.Their responses include: the monarchy, plastic bottles, selfies and gender-reveal parties. Also, the pandemic and our responses to it, and using the word “journey” to describe anything other than a perilous trek.Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired magazine, gave my favorite answer, which includes: “Eating dead animals. Not being able to have two spouses at once. Fearing human clones. (They are serial twins.) Wrapping food in plastic. Thinking you needed permission to visit another country.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookChristopher Testani for The New York TimesPeanut butter-glazed salmon is fast and fun.What to Watch“Poker Face,” starring Natasha Lyonne, just might be the best detective show in 50 years.What to Listen toSam Smith’s fourth album, “Gloria,” includes bold, danceable tracks.The News QuizHow closely did you follow last week’s headlines?Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Doctors’ org. (three letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. The Times is on TikTok. Check us out @nytimes.Start your week with this narrated long read about threats to the Amazon. “The Daily” is about Iran’s protests.We’d like your feedback. You can reach us at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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    Charlene Mitchell, 92, Dies; First Black Woman to Run for President

    She was the Communist Party candidate in 1968 and later led the campaign to free Angela Davis. But she eventually split with the party.Charlene Mitchell, who as the Communist Party’s presidential nominee in 1968 became the first Black woman to run for the White House, died on Dec. 14 in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by her son, Steven Mitchell.Ms. Mitchell joined the Communist Party in 1946, when she was just 16, and over her long career worked at the intersection of issues that have come to define the left’s agenda for the last 50 years, including feminism, civil rights, police violence, economic inequality and anticolonialism.Her rise in the party leadership came at a moment of crisis. The Communists had been decimated by the repressive tactics of the McCarthy era, then by the exodus of members disaffected by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. By the late 1950s it counted barely 10,000 members, down from its height of about 75,000 in 1947.To find new recruits, the party drew on its roots in radical civil rights activism to appeal to a new generation of Black leaders. Ms. Mitchell joined the party’s national committee in 1958; she was its youngest member ever.In the 1960s, she founded an all-Black chapter in Los Angeles called the Che-Lumumba Club, which quickly became one of the most active in the country. The club’s choice of namesakes, the Argentine Marxist Che Guevara and the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, pointed to Ms. Mitchell’s abiding insistence that the American left had to be rooted in an international matrix of freedom struggles.She traveled widely, meeting fellow leftists in Europe, South America and Africa, and she was among the first Americans to highlight the plight of Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. By 1968 she was one of the best-known and most widely respected American Communist leaders.“I don’t know of anything that Charlene was involved in where she was not the leader,” Mildred Williamson, who met Ms. Mitchell at a 1973 anti-apartheid conference in Chicago, said in a phone interview.Ms. Mitchell became the Communist Party’s presidential nominee when she was just 38. At its convention in Manhattan, she accepted the nomination below a banner that read “Black and White Unite to Fight Racism — Poverty — War!”“We plan to put an open-occupancy sign on the White House lawn,” she declared and, taking a swipe at the pet project of the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, added, “We propose to put a woman in that house to beautify not only our highways but to beautify ourselves.”Her run for office came four years before the New York congresswoman Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek the nomination for president from a major party.Though she and her running mate, Michael Zagarell, appeared on just four state ballots and received just over 1,000 votes, her candidacy put a new face on the Communist Party at a time when the student-led New Left was gaining ground in left-wing politics and some party members had grown disillusioned with its uncritical support of the Soviet Union.The Communist Party ticket in 1968 included Michael Zagarell, left, for vice president, and Ms. Mitchell, right, for president. At center is the party’s general secretary, Gus Hall. Courtesy of the Communist Party USAIn contrast to the student movement, which was largely male, middle-class and white, she offered a vision of the left that was rooted in the experience of working-class women of color. Among her acolytes was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, named Angela Davis.After Dr. Davis was arrested in 1970 for providing weapons used in the killing of a Marin County judge, Ms. Mitchell led her defense committee.Dr. Davis was acquitted in 1972, and Ms. Mitchell used the experience to create the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a group that, in its focus on police brutality and the legal system, foreshadowed later racial justice movements.“Black Lives Matter and modern Black feminism stand on the shoulders of Charlene Mitchell,” Erik S. McDuffie, a professor of African American studies at the University of Illinois, said in a phone interview.Among Ms. Mitchell’s many successful campaigns was the acquittal of Joan Little, a North Carolina inmate accused of murdering a prison guard who had sexually assaulted her. She also lobbied on behalf of the Wilmington 10, a group of nine Black men and one woman, also in North Carolina, who were convicted of arson and conspiracy in 1971 and later exonerated.“I don’t think I have ever known someone as consistent in her values, as collective in her outlook on life, as firm in her trajectory as a freedom fighter,” Dr. Davis said at a 2009 event honoring Ms. Mitchell.Charlene Alexander was born on June 8, 1930, in Cincinnati. Her parents were part of the Great Migration of Black Southerners who moved north in the first part of the 20th century — her father, Charles, came from Georgia and her mother, Naomi (Taylor) Alexander, from Tennessee.Her marriages to Bill Mitchell and Michael Welch both ended in divorce. Along with her son, she is survived by two brothers, Deacon Alexander and Mike Wolfson.When she was 9, Charlene, her parents and her seven siblings moved to Chicago, where her father worked as a Pullman porter and a hod carrier. He was also active in the labor movement and served as a precinct captain for Representative William L. Dawson, one of the few Black members of Congress.The family settled in Cabrini Homes, a mixed-race public-housing development on Chicago’s Near North Side, which was a center of left-wing politics. When she was 13, Charlene joined the local branch of American Youth for Democracy, the youth branch of the Communist Party.By the early 1940s she was already an activist, helping to lead a protest against a nearby theater, the Windsor, that required Black patrons to sit in the balcony. Black and white students, attending a matinee, simply switched places one day, and the theater dropped its segregation policy soon after.Ms. Mitchell studied briefly at Herzl Junior College in Chicago (now Malcolm X College). She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and to New York City in 1968.Although Ms. Mitchell remained a committed socialist, she drifted from the Communist Party in the 1980s, especially after the death of Henry Winston, its most prominent Black leader, in 1986. The party, she came to believe, was becoming too focused on class issues at the expense of fighting racial and other injustices.“I am not suggesting that all of a sudden there was racism in the party, or that some people were mean, or anything like that,” she said in a 1993 interview. “You had a situation where attention to certain questions that African American comrades felt were important was downgraded.”After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ms. Mitchell joined more than 100 other party members in calling for the party to reject Leninism and take a more democratic socialist path. In retaliation, the party’s longtime general secretary, Gus Hall, froze them out of subsequent national committee meetings.Ms. Mitchell later left the party to help found the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, which sought to rebuild the left along more pluralistic lines.But she remained committed to the values of the far left, and of communism as she understood it.“The country’s rulers want to keep Black and white working people apart,” she said in a 1968 campaign speech. “The Communist Party is dedicated to the idea that — whatever the difficulties — they must be brought together, or neither can advance.” More

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    To Understand the F.B.I., You Have to Understand J. Edgar Hoover

    In recent years, as I finished writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I. for nearly half a century, liberal-minded friends often came to me with a confession. They were, they whispered, cheering for the F.B.I. During the Trump era, they began to see the bureau as the last best hope of the Republic, after a lifetime of viewing it as a bastion of political repression.Public opinion polls bear out this shift in opinion. In 2003, Republicans liked the F.B.I. far better than Democrats did, by a margin of 19 points, at 63 percent to 44 percent. Today, nearly 20 years later, that equation has flipped and then some. According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 75 percent of Democrats now have a favorable view of the F.B.I., in contrast to 30 percent of Republicans. Gallup puts the numbers further apart, with 79 percent of Democrats expressing approval and 29 percent of Republicans disapproval.From James Comey’s firing in May 2017 through the Mueller report, the Jan. 6 investigation and the Mar-a-Lago raid, the F.B.I. has not always delivered on Democratic hopes. But its showdowns with Donald Trump have fundamentally changed its public image.To some degree this switch simply reflects our hyperpartisan times. But the F.B.I.’s surge in popularity among Democrats also reflects a forgotten political tradition.Since the 1960s, liberals have tended to associate the bureau with its misdeeds against the left, including its outrageous efforts to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists. Before those activities were exposed, though, liberals often admired and embraced the F.B.I., especially when it seemed to be a hedge against demagogy and abuses of power elsewhere in government.They pointed to the bureau’s role as an objective, nonpartisan investigative force seeking to ferret out the truth amid an often complicated and depressing political morass. And they viewed Hoover as one the greatest embodiments of that ethic: a long-serving and long-suffering federal civil servant who managed to win the respect of both Republicans and Democrats.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. leaving the office of J. Edgar Hoover in 1964. The F.B.I. conducted extensive surveillance of Dr. King’s private life.Bettmann/Getty ImagesWe now know that much of that admiration rested on wishful thinking — and today’s liberals would be wise to remember Hoover’s cautionary example. But for all his failings, all his abuses of power, he also promoted a vision of F.B.I. integrity and professionalism that still has resonance.J. Edgar Hoover was a lifelong conservative, outspoken on matters ranging from crime to Communism to the urgent need for all Americans to attend church. He also knew how to get along with liberals. Indeed, he could not have survived in government as long as he did without this essential skill. First appointed bureau director in 1924, Hoover stayed in that job until his death in 1972, an astonishing 48 years. He served under eight presidents, four Republicans and four Democrats.It has often been said that Hoover remained in power for so many decades because politicians feared him — and there is much truth to that view, especially in his later years. But Hoover’s late-in-life strong-arm tactics do not explain much about how he rose so fast through the government ranks, or why so many presidents — including Franklin Roosevelt, the great liberal titan of the 20th century — thought it was a good idea to give him so much power.Hoover spent his first decade as director establishing his good-government bona fides; he championed professionalism, efficiency, high standards and scientific methods. So in the 1930s, Roosevelt saw Hoover not as a far-right reactionary but as an up-and-coming administrator thoroughly steeped in the values of the modern state — a bureaucrat par excellence.Roosevelt did more than any other president to expand the F.B.I.’s power: first, by inviting Hoover to take a more active role in crime fighting, then by licensing him to become the nation’s domestic intelligence chief. Hoover’s agents became known as G-men, or government men, the avenging angels of the New Deal state.Hoover, center, taking aim while giving the Broadway actors flanking him, William Gaxton and Vincent Moore, a tour of F.B.I. headquarters in 1935.Underwood and UnderwoodToday’s F.B.I. still bears the stamp of the decisions Roosevelt made nearly a century ago. A hybrid institution, the F.B.I. remains one part law-enforcement agency, one part domestic-intelligence force — an awkward combination, if one that we now take for granted.It also retains Hoover’s dual political identity, with a conservative internal culture but also a powerful commitment to professional nonpartisan government service. This combination of attributes has helped to produce the F.B.I.’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory reputation, as different groups pick and choose which aspects to embrace and which to condemn.Hoover went on to do outrageous things with the power granted him during the Roosevelt years, emerging as the 20th century’s single most effective foe of the American left. But many Washington liberals and civil libertarians did not see those abuses coming, because Hoover continued to reflect some of their values as well. During World War II, he distinguished himself as one of the few federal officials opposed to mass Japanese internment, labeling the policy “extremely unfortunate” and unnecessary for national security.After the war, despite his deep-seated racism, he stepped up the F.B.I.’s campaign against lynching in the South. “The great American crime is toleration of conditions which permit and promote prejudice, bigotry, injustice, terror and hate,” he told a civil rights committee convened by President Harry Truman in 1947. He framed white supremacist violence not only as a moral wrong but also as an acute challenge to federal authority.By contrast, he promoted himself as the embodiment of professional law enforcement, the polar opposite of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilantes or the conspiracists of the John Birch Society. Many liberals embraced that message, despite Hoover’s well-known conservatism. “If a liberal came in, the liberal would leave thinking that, ‘My God, Hoover is a real liberal!” William Sullivan, an F.B.I. official, recalled. “If a John Bircher came in an hour later, he’d go out saying, ‘I’m convinced that Hoover is a member of the John Birch Society at heart.’ ”The height of Hoover’s popularity came during the Red Scare of the 1950s, when he emerged as both a hero of the anti-Communist right and the thinking man’s alternative to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Today, we tend to view Hoover and McCarthy as interchangeable figures, zealots who ran roughshod over civil liberties. At the time, though, many liberals viewed them as very different men.Truman feared the F.B.I.’s “Gestapo” tendencies, but far preferred Hoover to a partisan brawler and obvious fabricator like McCarthy. President Dwight Eisenhower heaped lavish praise on Hoover as the nation’s responsible, respectable anti-Communist, in contrast to McCarthy the demagogue. Both presidents cast the story in terms that might be familiar to any 21st-century liberal, with Hoover as the protector of truth, objectivity and the law, and McCarthy as those principles’ most potent enemy.One irony of the liberals’ stance is that it was actually Hoover, not McCarthy, who did the most to promote and sustain the Red Scare. Long before McCarthy burst on the scene, Hoover had been collaborating with congressional committees to target Communists and their sympathizers, conducting elaborate campaigns of infiltration and surveillance. And he long outlasted McCarthy, who was censured by his fellow senators in 1954. Hoover’s popularity grew as McCarthy’s fell. A Gallup poll in late 1953, the peak of the Red Scare, noted that a mere 2 percent of Americans expressed an unfavorable view of Hoover, a result “phenomenal in surveys that have dealt with men in public life.”Hoover with President Richard Nixon in 1969.Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesAnd with President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.Associated PressThat consensus finally began to crack in the 1960s. Hoover’s current reputation stems largely from this late-career period, when the F.B.I.’s shocking campaigns against the civil rights, antiwar and New Left movements began to erode earlier conceptions of Hoover as a man of restraint.Its most notorious initiative, the bureau’s COINTELPRO (short for Counterintelligence Program), deployed manipulative news coverage, anonymous mailings and police harassment to disrupt these movements. In 1964, in one of the lowest points of Hoover’s regime, the F.B.I. faked a degrading anonymous letter implicitly urging Dr. King to commit suicide. Agents mailed it to him along with recordings of his extramarital sexual activities, captured on F.B.I. microphones planted in his hotel rooms.Even then, though, key liberal figures continued to champion Hoover and the F.B.I. President Lyndon Johnson, a friend and neighbor of Hoover’s, proved second only to Roosevelt in his enthusiasm for the director. And he urged his successor, Richard Nixon, to follow suit. “Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar,” he told Nixon in the Oval Office in late 1968. “He’s the only one you can put your complete trust in.”Despite such official support, by the early 1970s polls were starting to note that Hoover’s reputation among liberals and Democrats seemed to be in swift decline, thanks to his advancing age, aggressive tactics and conservative social views. “Now the case of J. Edgar Hoover has been added to the list of issues — ranging from the war in Vietnam, to race relations, welfare and the plight of the cities — which are the source of deep division across America today,” the pollster Louis Harris wrote in 1971.While conservatives still expressed widespread admiration for the F.B.I. director, liberals increasingly described him as a danger to the nation. The decline was especially precipitous among coastal elites and university-educated young people. By contrast, working-class white Americans in the Midwest and South expressed support.Today, those sentiments are reversed. According to Rasmussen, the F.B.I. is now most popular among Americans making more than $200,000 per year. Young voters like the F.B.I. better than older voters do. This division is being driven by national politics: When Mr. Trump attacks the F.B.I. as part of an overweening “deep state,” his supporters follow while his critics run the other way.But it also reflects a larger clash of values. Mr. Trump has long scored political points by attacking the administrative state and its legions of career government servants, whether at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the State Department or, improbably, the National Archives. In response, Democrats have been forced to reaffirm what once seemed to be settled notions: that expertise and professionalism matter in government, that the rule of law applies to every American, that it’s worth employing skilled, nonpartisan investigators who can determine the facts.Hoover failed to live up to those principles — often spectacularly so. And today’s F.B.I. has made its own questionable choices, from surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters to mismanagement of delicate political inquiries. But its history of professional federal service, of loyalty to the facts and the law, is still worth championing, especially in an era when suspicion of government, rather than faith in its possibilities, so often dominates our discourse. Whatever else we may think of Hoover’s legacy, that tradition is the best part of the institution he built.Beverly Gage (@beverlygage) is a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Our Racial Reckoning Could Have Come Sooner. What Made 2020 Different?

    Why was there an all-encompassing racial reckoning in this country starting in the spring of 2020? And why then? Examining that question reminds us that history is driven — by general trends classifiable as progress or decline — but also just happens. Specifically, chance factors, what historians sometimes call “contingency,” have greater effects than we are always inclined to notice.As the physicist Cameron Gibelyou and the historian Douglas Northrop note in their useful “Big Ideas: A Guide to the History of Everything,” “To state that an event was contingent in general, without further qualification, means that the event would not have been possible without a certain sequence of previous events or actions being taken by particular actors, that it did not have to happen the way it did.”Ancient examples include the Ming dynasty’s decision not to pursue imperial goals across the sea after 1433. Otherwise, China might have established worldwide colonies in advance of Europeans, and the trajectory of world history would be quite different. The Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.E. held the Persians off from Greece, after which Greek culture flowered in ways that helped forge the intellectual and artistic culture of Europe. It is interesting to imagine the different cultural developments that might have ensued if Persia had conquered and maintained dominion over Greece and then beyond.Contingency matters in our times as well. We might propose, for example, that the murder of George Floyd set off a reckoning on race in America. However, that is more a description than an explanation.There have been other relatively recent cases of gruesome and unjustifiable killings of Black people by the police that have become national touchstones and yet did not result in racial reckonings of the kind we’ve seen since 2020: When, in 1999, the police gunned down Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of a New York City apartment building as he was reaching for his wallet, the media coverage was intense and sustained. The Rev. Al Sharpton, in a role now quite familiar, served as a kind of spokesman for Diallo’s family.Yet there was nothing we would describe as a racial reckoning in the wake of Diallo’s death, nor did the initiative on race that President Bill Clinton started in 1997 result in anything like the intensity of discussion, or changes in language and norms, that our current reckoning has.We might suppose that social media needed to emerge before such a thing could happen. But then social media was largely the reason the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin (though not by a police officer) and Michael Brown became national causes célèbres in 2012 and 2014. Yet while these cases did intensify national awareness of the generally uneasy and often perilous relationship between Black people and law enforcement in this country, they didn’t occasion a comprehensive reassessment of racism, its nature and its role in creating today’s inequalities in the way Floyd’s murder did.One might propose that what happened in 2020 happened because Black America was by then especially fed up — weary and disgusted with the nation’s refusal to more seriously address police violence. I imagine that analysis when I recall historian and former assistant attorney general Roger Wilkins in 2005 describing some Watts rioters of 1965 as “fed up” with the bleak circumstances of many citizens in Watts and South Central Los Angeles at the time. He was responding to my query about why it was in the late 1960s — after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — that the nation experienced 1967’s “long, hot summer” riots and, in 1968, more riots in Black neighborhoods in various parts of the country, including Washington, D.C. (in response, in part, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.). Those riots were initiated by Black people in protest, rather than, as I wrote, earlier race riots in American cities that “involved white bigots storming into Black neighborhoods and terrorizing residents.”Today, I cannot help wondering whether we can really say that Black people in the late ’60s were more fed up than at times past. And I similarly wonder if there is reason to suppose that Black Americans were less fed up post-2005, after Hurricane Katrina, the miserable government response to it and the nationwide discussion of what that signaled about racism — inspiring Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke” and David Simon’s succès d’estime, “Treme” — than we were in 2020.I would suggest that what conditioned the racial reckoning of 2020 was partly contingency. To wit, I think the pandemic was the determining factor.Tragically, hideously, Americans learn of Black people dying under appalling circumstances, involving police officers, quite often. Think of Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner — whether these circumstances lead to criminal convictions, or charges, which they often don’t. Few of us, especially those of us who live in New York City, will ever forget Garner’s words, “I can’t breathe,” though even his death wasn’t a fulcrum in quite the way Floyd’s was. In May 2020, there was something besides the injustice and brutality of Floyd’s murder that motivated the surge of nationwide demonstrations: the fact that we had been in pandemic isolation for two months and that around that same time it was becoming clear that conditions were not going to change anytime soon.I don’t mean to imply that this outcry was insincere or cynical. But I suspect that what helped make the difference was the pandemic lockdown. At that unusual and challenging time, for many people, being outdoors and connecting with other people was understandably a uniquely powerful temptation. The lockdown also gave a broader range of people — beyond those already committed to activism — the time to reflect, and to devote their energies to things beyond themselves, something they may not have done under normal circumstances.As such, it could be that if there had not been a lockdown, the Floyd protests would have been smaller in scale and shorter in duration. Further, one could surmise that if the sequence of events had taken place a few months earlier, with the lockdown beginning in the fall and Floyd’s murder happening in the colder months of January or February, this, too, would have, hypothetically, made protests smaller, less likely or shorter-term in many locations. And this probably would have decreased the chances that the protests stimulated a think-in about racism that would still be going strong two years later.There’s a case that the pandemic shaped the racial reckoning in another way. A controversial aspect of the reckoning has been the examples of workplace disciplinary actions that have become commonplace in its wake, out of a general sense of these actions as inherent to the mission of reconsidering racism. (In this newsletter, I’ve written about more than one.) That a number of these instances involve social media should come as no surprise: These platforms place a kind of scrim curtain between people that can lessen our sense of dehumanization as unnatural.It’s not unlike what can happen to us on video chat applications such as Zoom or messaging programs such as Slack. Contempt and condemnation can come more easily to us when directed to a static avatar on Twitter or someone in a box on a screen than to a person we are in the same room with. Chat features and direct-message side exchanges also allow factions to build up opposition as a general meeting runs, in a way that passing notes and sharing dismissive facial expressions cannot. The way we’ve learned to communicate in the past few years, sometimes normalizing real-time shaming and dismissing, has set new norms that now feel like the default, even as live meetings become routine again.In short, I think that without a pandemic, and an ensuing year-plus when a good deal of our interactions were virtual, America would not have entered an extended racial reckoning. It wasn’t that Black Americans were, two years ago, at some unique tipping point, nor was it that white Americans opened in an unprecedented way to hearing out Black America’s concerns from the sheer goodness of their hearts.It was the confluence of a pandemic, a grievous murder and the time of year in which these occurred, with the magnitude and tone determined partly by the fact that all of this happened when handy group communication technologies had become widely established and were available to spend workdays on.History is like this, including that of race and racism. On race, contingency should be included in how we chronicle it, and not only now but in the past and the future. The civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s were related, in part, to the novelty of television. Future progress on race will almost certainly be driven by factors beyond protest and critique, in ways no one could have predicted beforehand.Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

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    As Crime Surges, Roll Back of Tough-on-Crime Policies Faces Resistance

    With violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s.Four years ago, progressive prosecutors were in the sweet spot of Democratic politics. Aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement but pragmatic enough to draw establishment support, they racked up wins in cities across the country.Today, a political backlash is brewing. With violent crime rates rising in some cities and elections looming, their attempts to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s are increasingly under attack — from familiar critics on the right, but also from onetime allies within the Democratic Party.In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall vote in June, stoked by criticism from the city’s Democratic mayor. In Los Angeles, the county district attorney, George Gascón, is trying to fend off a recall effort as some elected officials complain about new guidelines eliminating the death penalty and the prosecution of juveniles as adults. Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, quickly ran afoul of the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, and his new police commissioner over policies that critics branded too lenient.The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less — forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren’t rushing to their aid, with some saying they’ve soured on the officials they once backed.“I think that whole honeymoon period lasts about five or six hours,” said Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County in Missouri, who is seeking re-election this fall.St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, center, surrounded by area police chiefs before a news conference about a police officer who was shot and killed in 2019.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Bell, a former city councilman in Ferguson, Mo., is part of the group of prosecutors elected on a promise to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Most support eliminating the death penalty and cash bail, limiting prosecutions for low-level, nonviolent offenses and scaling back sentences.In a show of political strength, progressive prosecutors in Chicago and Philadelphia handily defeated challengers in recent years. Mr. Bell’s re-election bid in November is one of several races being watched for signs that voters’ views have shifted on those policies as violent crime has risen and racial justice protests have fallen out of the headlines.Homicide rates spiked in 2020 and continued to rise last year, albeit less slowly, hitting levels not seen since the 1990s. Other violent crimes also are up. Both increases have occurred nationally, in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities without.That’s left no clear evidence linking progressive policies to these trends, but critics have been quick to make the connection, suggesting that prosecutors have let offenders walk and created an expectation that low-level offenses won’t be charged. Those arguments have landed on voters and city leaders already grappling with a scourge of pandemic-related ills — including mental health care needs and housing shortages, rising drug use, even traffic deaths.Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York City found that 74 percent of respondents considered crime a “very serious” problem — the largest share since the survey began asking the question in 1999 and more than 20 percentage points greater than the previous high, which was recorded in January 2016.Politicians are heeding those concerns. In New York, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has promised to crack down on crime, and his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, slammed Mr. Bragg’s proposals as threatening the safety of police officers and the public. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Boudin’s approach, which emphasizes social services over policing.“This is not working,” Ms. Breed said recently on The New York Times podcast “Sway.” “We’ve added all these additional resources — the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the services, the buildings we purchase, the hotels we purchase, the resources. We’ve added all these things to deal with food insecurity. All these things. Yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”The criticisms from two prominent Black mayors are particularly biting. In their liberal cities, the leaders’ nuanced complaints have far more influence with voters than familiar attacks from Republicans or police unions. Both mayors have argued that the minority communities that want racism rooted from the justice system also want more robust policing and prosecutions.President Biden, who was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime criminal justice overhaul of the 1990s, recently spoke highly of Mr. Adams’s focus on crime prevention. Some prosecutors and their allies took that as sign that the Democratic establishment is digging in on a centrist approach to criminal justice reform.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the Democratic Party worried about retaining the support of moderate suburban voters in midterm elections this year. Many Democratic lawmakers and strategists believe that protest slogans like “defund the police” hurt the party in the 2020 elections — particularly in Congressional swing districts and in Senate races. Republican candidates, eager to retake control of Congress in November, already have run advertisements casting Democrats as soft on crime.Most progressive prosecutors oppose the calls to gut police department budgets, but that is a nuance often missed. At one liberal philanthropic group, some newer givers have said they will not donate to any criminal justice groups — or to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors — because they don’t want to endorse defunding the police, according to a person who connects donors to criminal justice causes, and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist who has been involved in several organizations pushing progressive prosecutors, said prosecutors hadn’t been as forceful as law enforcement unions in selling their solutions to rising violence in cities.“Police are spending a lot of money convincing people the appropriate response to that is more policing and incarceration,” he said. “I think that individual cities and counties are having to push back against that narrative. But I think they’re struggling to do that right now.”In San Francisco, Mr. Boudin argued that the effort to recall him was fueled by politics, not voters’ worries about crime. He pointed to the Republican megadonors who have funded the recall efforts and said Ms. Breed has a political incentive to see him ousted — he beat her preferred candidate for district attorney.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this week. He faces an effort to recall him.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images“These are Republican talking points,” Mr. Boudin said. “And it’s tremendously destructive to the Democratic Party and the long-term progress that the party is making at the local and national level around public safety and criminal justice to allow a few folks dissatisfied with a local election to undermine that progress.”Mary Jung, a Democratic activist leading the recall campaign, said those who painted the efforts as fueled by conservatives or moderates were missing the point. Many of their supporters, she said, are lifelong liberal Democrats.Those voters, she said, don’t view the effort to recall Mr. Boudin, who was elected in 2019, as a broad shift away from progressive policies, but as a local response in a community that feels unsafe. She cited several attacks against Asian immigrants and incidents of shoplifting as the sort of crimes that have rattled residents, regardless of political ideology.In another sign of Democrats’ discontent, San Francisco voters ousted three progressive members of the Board of Education in a recall election driven by pandemic angst.“Over 80,000 San Franciscans signed our petition and we only needed 53,000 signatures,” Ms. Jung said. “There’s only 33,000 registered Republicans in the city. So, you know, you do the math.”Some progressives warn against ignoring people’s fears. Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, which includes Chicago and some of the country’s most violence-plagued communities, said that any dismissive rhetoric could make prosecutors risk looking out of touch.“You can’t dismiss people,” Ms. Foxx said. “I live in Chicago, where we hit 800 murders last year, and that represents 800 immediate families and thousands of people who are impacted.”Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, right, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police First Deputy Supt. Eric Carter announcing charges last month in a fatal shooting.Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Foxx faced a well-funded opponent and won re-election in 2020, as did Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, the following year. Those victories show the resilient support for progressive ideas, Mr. Krasner said, warning the Democratic Party not to abandon them.“Put criminal justice reform on the ballot in every election in almost every jurisdiction, and what you’re going to see is a surge in turnout,” Mr. Krasner said. “And that turnout will overwhelmingly be unlikely voters, reluctant voters, brand-new voters, people who are not connected to what they see as governmental dysfunction between the parties — but they are connected to an issue that has affected their communities.”But there are signs that attitudes about overhauling the criminal justice system are changing even among progressives. Many activists have shifted their focus away from electoral politics and toward policies they think address root of the problem, such as reducing the number of police and abolishing prisons.That “makes it very difficult to even defend or support particular prosecutors, because at the end of the day, they’re still putting people in jail,” Mr. Sinyangwe said.In 2020, Mr. Bell, the St. Louis prosecutor, faced the ire of the same progressive activists who had helped elect him. That July, he announced that his renewed investigation into the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr., a young Black man, which ignited weeks of protests, had delivered the same results: no charges for the officer who killed him.Mr. Brown’s mother denounced Mr. Bell’s investigation. Speaking to reporters then, Mr. Bell said the announcement was “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official.”Asked to discuss the incident and the investigation, Mr. Bell declined.Josie Duffy Rice, the former president of The Appeal, a news outlet focused on criminal justice, said that in some ways the voters were learning the limitations of the progressive prosecutor’s role.“Prosecutors have the power to cause a lot of problems,” Ms. Duffy Rice said. “But not enough power to solve problems.” More

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    George Gascón Is Remaking Criminal Justice in L.A. How Far Is Too Far?

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Last December, when George Gascón took over the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country, he made a complete break from the past. His inaugural speech as district attorney of Los Angeles County at once thrilled progressive activists and alienated many of the lawyers sizing up their new boss. Standing alone at a lectern as a pandemic precaution, Gascón put his hands to his forehead and half-bowed, yogi-style, to thank the judge who swore him in over a video connection. He flashed a smile and spoke in Spanish, his first language as a child growing up in Cuba, to honor his mother, who fled Fidel Castro’s Communist rule with his father and Gascón when he was 13.Switching to English, Gascón, who is 67, acknowledged his long career in law enforcement. “You know, it was 40 years ago when I walked my first beat as a young Los Angeles police officer,” he said. “However, I am not the same man I was when I first put on the uniform.”Then Gascón leveled an all-out attack on the status quo. The new district attorney described being arrested as “traumatic and dehumanizing,” lifting his hands for emphasis. “Our rush to incarcerate generations of kids of color,” he said, has torn apart “the social fabric of our communities.” Signaling that the police should expect new scrutiny, Gascón promised to review fatal shootings in the county by officers, going back to 2012.He turned the argument for the “tough-on-crime approach” of other local law-enforcement leaders on its head, blaming their strategy for an eight-year rise in violent crime. He accused his opponents of making “unfounded and self-serving claims” about how more punishment increases public safety. “The status quo hasn’t made us safer,” he said, jabbing his fingers into the air.In effect, Gascón was telling his new staff that they had been not guardians of the public, as they might have believed, but rather agents of harm. He backed up his words with an even more confrontational set of directives, delivered to every employee in his office over email before he even finished speaking, at 12:02 p.m. Gascón’s orders touched nearly every aspect of the criminal-justice system. He mandated an end to seeking cash bail, the death penalty, the sentence of life without parole and the prosecution of anyone younger than 18 as an adult. And in a rare, if not unprecedented, move by an American prosecutor, Gascón declared his intent to effectively end very long sentences — in pending cases as well as new ones — for some of the most serious crimes, including murder.Along with reconsidering more than 10,000 pending cases, Gascón pledged in his speech to make “an unprecedented effort to re-evaluate and resentence” thousands of prison terms. He referred to at least 20,000 that were “far longer than those they would receive under the charging policies I announced today. That is one-fifth of California’s total prison population.”Other district attorneys elected on progressive platforms have implemented some similar policies but stress that they are maintaining the discretion to make exceptions. Gascón, by contrast, gave blanket orders. Until the night before his speech, he told us, he considered giving prosecutors some leeway to bend his rules. “Do we fight one fight at a time?” he asked himself. No, he decided, because change would come too slowly.Gascón’s speech was unmistakably aligned with the goals of the progressive activists who propelled his campaign. “We felt like, wow, we could have written that speech,” says Lex Steppling, the director of Dignity and Power Now, a Los Angeles-based group that urges sweeping reform of the “megacomplex of mass incarceration,” as Steppling calls it.Inside the prosecutor’s office, about 900 deputy district attorneys (as rank-and-file prosecutors are called in Los Angeles) and an additional 1,100 staff members clicked through the nine attachments of orders, which would go into effect the next day. There were no explanations or scheduled question-and-answer sessions or channels for feedback. An employee, who works with victims, tried to make sense of the directives. (Like other employees of the office, she requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.) One in particular caught her attention: In California, prosecutors routinely add sentencing “enhancements,” which state lawmakers first created in the 1970s. When prosecutors charge them, enhancements can more than double a sentence, according to the Stanford Computational Policy Lab. For example, a murder conviction can carry a penalty of 25 years or 15 years to life, which can translate to fewer years behind bars. But prosecutors routinely use enhancements that add up to 20 years or even life, depending on the crime, if the offense is gang-motivated or involves the use of a gun. Another enhancement for prior convictions, called “strikes,” doubles the sentence. Now Gascón was instructing the office to jettison these enhancements as well as stop asking for life without parole.Men’s Central Jail, which county officials and progressive activists want to replace with a village for mental-health care.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesReading the directives, the victim representative, who worked with the families of 50 people who were murdered, asked a deputy district attorney who sat nearby what the new policies meant for them. The enhancements would be dropped in every case, he said. Her supervisor told her to start calling the families.“People were asking: ‘Why? What changed?’” she says of the calls to the families of those who had been killed. “Some people cried.”To many prosecutors, Gascón’s speech and orders felt like a hostile takeover. They remembered an interview he gave during his campaign in which he referred to employees who might oppose him if he took office as “internal terrorists.” The image was indelible. “I heard that and thought, OK, I consider myself an honorable man,” a veteran prosecutor says. “The lines are clearly drawn.”Even prosecutors and prominent lawyers who voted for Gascón now thought his approach was wrongheaded. “If you want to make sustainable change,” says one veteran of the office who supported Gascón, “you don’t treat people like the enemy. You build respect.” The doubts rippled outward from there. Some of them involved Gascón’s leadership team, which included several former public defenders, some of whom identify as prison abolitionists, rejecting the system they would now work within. “Huge reforms were needed in the culture of that office, and Gascón has good ideas,” says Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School who has worked with the office for years on innocence claims. “But he came in with his own people. Some were not familiar with the work of the office. Instead of getting to know the players and trying to change people’s perspectives, they came in and said, ‘This is the way to do it now.’”In response to criticism, Gascón issued an order allowing for exceptions to certain directives in a small number of narrow circumstances. It didn’t mollify most of his critics. The deputy district attorneys forged ahead with an extraordinary act of collective defiance: Their union filed a lawsuit to block his directives against using sentencing enhancements. This was the first time a progressive prosecutor faced this sort of direct challenge from inside his or her office. The deputies argued that their new boss was ordering them not just to do something they thought was wrong, but to violate their oath and break the law.In the last year and a half, the work of reform-minded prosecutors across the country has been complicated by a spike in killings. The murder rate remains far below the terrible peaks of the 1980s and ’90s, and crime overall has fallen slightly. The escalation is national — in small as well as big cities — affecting places with more traditional prosecutors as well as those like Los Angeles. And the rise in violence, which also includes an increase in aggravated assault, has coincided with the anomaly, and profound dislocation, of the pandemic.But while there is no clear evidence that the progressive policies of prosecutors are responsible for the rise in violence, no one knows for sure what is causing it or how to reverse the trajectory. (Such uncertainty bedevils the search for the cause of any momentary crime trend.) Tough-on-crime advocates blame reform-minded district attorneys, accusing them of releasing the wrong people and making their communities unsafe.It’s a well-worn law-and-order attack, repurposed from Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon starting in the 1960s, that is now being leveled against the self-identified progressive prosecutors, who have become a growing national phenomenon in the last five years. These new district attorneys have won in metropolitan areas all over the country, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Kansas City, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco and St. Louis. They succeeded at the polls in large part as a response to the protests for racial justice that began in Ferguson, Mo., a few years earlier. Local organizers who wanted to hold the police accountable and end mass incarceration saw prosecutors’ offices as the best vehicle for taking political power.The new breed of district attorney threatens a deeply entrenched system, with tentacles in multiple agencies and the backing of many of the police officers, judges, rank-and-file prosecutors and probation and parole officers who determine what justice, or at least law enforcement, actually means day to day. Some of those insiders stiffly resisted the calls for change. When Larry Krasner took over the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia in 2017, more than 100 lawyers and employees walked out the door; Krasner also dismissed 31 others. (Gascón, by contrast, couldn’t clean house: In Los Angeles, prosecutors have the rare benefit of civil-service protections and a union.) Local law-enforcement leaders in Kansas City, Kan., tried in 2018 to block District Attorney Mark Dupree from receiving county funds to review past wrongful convictions. In Boston, Rachael Rollins faced a bar complaint the same year from a national police group accusing her of “reckless disregard” for state law. Opponents inside and outside prosecutors’ offices also foiled change simply by slow-walking it.The new district attorneys had to pick their battles. Most of them recognized a gap between “what it takes to fix the whole prison system and what the public is ready for,” says Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a group of former public defenders who provide policy and research support to reform-minded prosecutors. They mostly took incremental steps — the low-hanging fruit of reform, so to speak — to send fewer low-level offenders to jail.Barbie Perez, whose cousin was killed in Palmdale, Calif., by a 17-year-old in 2015. She is critical of Gascón.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn most states, misdemeanor charges make up about 80 percent of the criminal docket, and nationally, 10.3 million people, many of them accused of nonviolent offenses, churn through local jails every year. Nearly two-thirds of the jail population have mental-health problems, according to estimates by the Urban Institute. So the new prosecutors pushed for more mental-health services, as well as drug treatment and stable housing. And in the first few years after their elections, district attorneys like Krasner, Wesley Bell of St. Louis, Kim Foxx of Chicago and Eric Gonzalez of Brooklyn helped significantly reduce the jail population in their cities by largely ending the practices of locking up people for possession of marijuana or petty theft and demanding bail for nonviolent charges.Mercy for violence, however, remained more sparing. Some reform-minded prosecutors treated it like political dynamite. When Bell took office in 2019, for example, he promised to expand alternatives to incarceration and end warrants for minor felonies while doing more to “aggressively prosecute serious and violent crimes.”From 2016 to 2019, the reform-minded district attorneys benefited from falling crime rates. The welcome drop included murders and shootings as well as property crime and other offenses. As they headed into their first re-election cycle, the prosecutors had a win-win pitch: Despite all the prophecies of doom from their opponents, their efforts were saving money and improving lives without endangering public safety.But the recent rise in violent crime has muddied the picture. In 2020, fear started to pulse through community meetings, local news coverage and casual conversations among worried allies, including mayors and City Council members. Suddenly on defense, the district attorneys struggled to keep pressing for change — to take risks. “It has absolutely made the job harder,” says Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County, which includes Chicago, who was elected on a platform of reform five years ago. “As macabre as it is, there were people who were waiting for this moment. It allows for the convenient scapegoating of prosecutors who advocate for justice reform.”Foxx had to address a roughly 50 percent increase in murders and shootings from 2019 to 2020 while campaigning for re-election. Her Republican opponent ran a TV ad called “Too Many Children Murdered,” which quoted Chicago’s police superintendent saying there were “zero consequences” for some gun arrests. Foxx noted that the rise in murders and shootings mostly affected low-income families in Black neighborhoods. “A significant proportion of the victims we see have criminal backgrounds themselves,” Foxx says. “It’s an inconvenient truth for many who use the banner of victims that most of our victims have not been the ones they have empathy for traditionally.”In the end, Foxx and Krasner, whose city’s murder rate also soared, won their re-election races handily. (One of us has a sister, Dana Bazelon, who works for Krasner as a senior policy adviser.) Their victories showed that district attorneys could stand for progressive change and survive a rise in violent crime.But those elections differed somewhat from Gascón’s victory in Los Angeles: They suggested the political wisdom of making careful case-by-case decisions about releasing people who have committed serious acts of violence. In response to public outcry over a lenient plea deal to a man who shot and permanently injured a deli owner in 2018, for example, Krasner said his office made a mistake and created a policy to require prosecutors to consult with victims before reaching plea agreements in felony cases. Foxx reviews some sentencing offers her office makes in homicide cases but has not formally limited the length of punishment. “One lesson I learned in my early tenure,” she says, referring to tough-on-crime advocates, “is that if you make a pronouncement, they’re coming for you.”Last February, Judge James C. Chalfant of Los Angeles County Superior Court delivered a blow to Gascón’s policies. The judge partly ruled in favor of the employees who sued him, finding that the district attorney did not have the authority to order his office, across the board, to stop seeking longer sentences when the defendant has a prior-strike offense. “The district attorney has abandoned the Three Strikes law,” Chalfant wrote. The crux of a prosecutor’s job is to exercise discretion; the judge rebuked Gascón for taking it away. He said that Gascón was asking prosecutors to take a position that was “unethical.”Many deputy district attorneys felt vindicated. “He was wrong on the law, when we know we have to follow the law,” says the deputy who voted for Gascón. “And that was like, Holy smokes, he doesn’t understand the role of the prosecutor.”In February, barely three months into Gascón’s tenure, a campaign to recall him began, with support, if often behind the scenes, from inside his own office. Because of the pandemic, Gascón wasn’t visible much. He mostly worked from home in Long Beach. Deputies who opposed him started tracking how often he came to the office, posting pictures of his empty parking spot on social media. Frustrated prosecutors and detectives also took a highly unusual step: They helped the families of homicide victims find legal help to fight Gascón in court. The central node in that effort was a single lawyer, Kathleen Cady.After nearly 30 years of prosecuting offenses like sex and hate crimes, and leading a domestic-violence unit, Cady retired from the district attorney’s office in 2019 and spent much of her time volunteering with victims’ rights groups. Last winter, Cady was contacted by a woman who feared that a man who had threatened and stalked her would be released after two and a half years based on Gascón’s directive not to lengthen sentences because of prior convictions. It was a case that helped persuade Cady to come out of retirement. “I don’t think victims ever have the right to expect that whatever they want is what they are going to get,” she says. “But I try to make sure that victims aren’t forgotten.”‘For a state you’d think of as relatively liberal, and a liberal jurisdiction within that state, L.A. has been very slow to reform.’The woman showed Cady text messages that she had exchanged with Gascón. “I’m as good as dead if you do this,” she had written. Gascón responded: “If he attempts to contact you or disturb you in any way, please notify law enforcement. There is a protective order in place and no guarantee that he will be automatically released tomorrow.” Cady went to court as the woman’s lawyer, as California law allows for victims. They won, and the judge ordered the man to remain in prison, despite the prosecutor’s argument to release him.After that ruling, more victims called Cady, and she agreed to represent about 80 for free, and recruited a group of 15 former prosecutors to represent about 120 more, also without charge. In effect, Cady was calling on former colleagues to create a kind of shadow district attorney’s office.Cady says she is a lifelong Democrat who is “fairly liberal in many ways.” But she thought Gascón’s orders violated a prosecutor’s oath to use discretion wisely and were, “frankly, just lazy,” she says.Gascón largely relies on data to defend shorter sentences. Studies have shown that as sentences lengthen, they produce a diminishing return for deterring crime. Though the data is somewhat messy, it suggests that most people who commit crimes age out of the period when they are at high risk of reoffending by the time they’re in their 30s. Other research finds that people become slightly more likely to reoffend after they’ve been incarcerated, for a host of reasons, including the fraying of family ties and the resulting barriers to housing and employment. These results hold across more than 100 separate studies, according to a 2021 meta-analysis. “The connection between lengthy incarceration and public safety is not there,” Gascón told us. “After six or seven years” behind bars, “you start to see the likelihood that you’re going to reoffend when you get released” go up “significantly.”Concentrating almost entirely on how the state punishes nonviolent crime won’t get at the heart of the problem of mass incarceration, Gascón argues. The single largest group in state prisons, totaling around 55 percent nationally, have been convicted of crimes of violence, according to John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University. As sentences have grown longer, the state prison population has increased fivefold since the 1970s, to nearly 1.4 million. In the ’70s, the average time served for murder in state prison was seven to eight years. In 2018, it was 17 to 18 years. “If we truly want a smaller prison system, at some point we have to talk about the long sentences for the most serious offenses,” Pfaff says. “Is it politically risky? Yes. But if no one does it, we never change the way we think about what justice demands.”Gascón has also run into political headwinds by challenging the assumption that it’s his job to seek retribution for crime victims. “I don’t think the government is there to do that,” he says. He tried to address the needs of victims by setting up an advisory board, which meets regularly over Zoom. Most members supported the changes Gascón was making, says LaNaisha Edwards, who helps lead the committee. “It’s not like what we had before was keeping us safe,” she adds.But some survivors of crime and their families continue to feel abandoned. “Some people will be hurt and crushed,” says Ferroll Robins, who for nearly 30 years has run a grief counseling center, Loved Ones Victims Services, in Culver City. “How much are you reaching out to those families? I don’t see Gascón reaching out a lot.”For decades, victims have been the face of campaigns for harsh sentencing laws. In the early 1990s, the murders of Polly Klaas, who was 12, and Kimber Reynolds, who was 18, prompted a movement that led to California’s three-strikes law, which increased the state’s prison population by tens of thousands. The girls were white and middle-class — typical of the kind of victims who generate the most sympathetic attention.Alisa Blair, special advisor to the district attorney of Los Angeles County.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe victims Cady represents, or connected with other lawyers, were mostly Latino and Black. Gascón’s leadership team accused Cady of exploiting them. “What harmed people really want,” says Alisa Blair, a special adviser to Gascón and former public defender, “is to be able to sleep without nightmares, to be able to think of their loved one without falling apart” and to “live their lives with the confidence that they’re not going to be attacked.” She continues: “Kathleen Cady is a monster. There’s this pretense of a victims’ rights attorney — she is traumatizing these victims. She’s instilling anger.”Last spring, Cady says, victims started asking her how they could help with the recall campaign. She directed them to organizers, who asked them to appear at rallies and news conferences. The recall was also a vehicle for Gascón’s leading opponent, Alex Villanueva, the Los Angeles County sheriff. The rate of solving murders and shootings — already a struggle in Los Angeles, as it is in many cities — dropped after the pandemic began. When few people are caught, research shows, perpetrators have a sense of impunity, and that can lead to more crime, as Jill Leovy’s 2015 book about Los Angeles, “Ghettoside,” illustrates. Perhaps to deflect attention from his department’s role in this dynamic, Villanueva started blasting Gascón for the substantial increase in homicides and shootings that continued after he took office.Last April, Gascón’s supporters and opponents collided at a rally for National Crime Victims’ Week in front of the Hall of Justice, the building that houses the district attorney’s main office. Nathalia Marie Jackson, a 13-year-old Black girl, spoke tearfully from the lectern of her father’s murder. “The safety and security and love that he gave us every day,” she said, “was horribly interrupted in one single moment.”A group of Black Lives Matter protesters stood at a distance on the sidewalk, blocked by police officers in riot gear from getting near the rally. “They want to drown out the voices of victims,” Villanueva complained. “They want to drown out law-abiding citizens.”Some Black Lives Matter protesters chanted: “You’re being used! You’re being lied to!” The moment laid bare the fault lines between traditional victims’ groups and the progressive activists. The activists rejected putting the pain of survivors at the service of tough-on-crime policies. They asked why the rally didn’t include the stories of victims of police misconduct, who have benefited from Gascón’s policies. Speaking to TV reporters, Melina Abdullah, a local leader of Black Lives Matter and a professor at California State University, Los Angeles, said that she, too, had family members who were killed. “Our interests and their interests are aligned,” she said of the survivors of crime across the square. “They should be standing with us.”Los Angeles has attracted and repelled waves of reform since Watts erupted in 1965, after a drunken-driving arrest of a Black man by a white officer turned violent in front of a crowd. That year, a report by a governor’s commission found that large parts of the region resented and even hated the police. In the late 1980s, widespread corruption in the county sheriff’s office prompted promises of top-to-bottom change. In 1991, after several Los Angeles Police Department officers were filmed beating Rodney King, another report found that a “significant number” of officers in the department repeatedly used excessive force and that “the failure to control these officers is a management issue that is at the heart of the problem.” Yet several years later, more than 70 police officers in the anti-gang unit were implicated in unprovoked beatings and shootings and the planting of false evidence in what came to be known as the Rampart scandal. And in 2012, the sheriff’s department was rocked by the exposure of widespread violence and brutality in its jails. “For a state you’d think of as relatively liberal, and a liberal jurisdiction within that state, L.A. has been very slow to reform,” says Miriam Krinsky, who leads the group Fair and Just Prosecution, which works nationally with prosecutors on adopting reforms, and helped direct a Los Angeles citizens’ commission on jail violence in 2012.That year, Patrisse Cullors, then a budding activist, was searching for answers about the severe mental illness that plagued her brother. He had spent years behind bars and was beaten in jail; afterward, his struggles intensified. Cullors started going to meetings of the citizens’ commission that Krinsky helped direct, signing up to speak about her brother and others like him. “Patrisse was there at every hearing,” Krinsky says, “at first alone, and then she brought more people.” Over time, Cullors became a national leader of Black Lives Matter, and other local organizers, including Lex Steppling, rose to lead a growing coalition Cullors founded called JusticeLA. The activists worked with religious leaders, academics and foundations, largely persuading the liberal establishment of Los Angeles to adopt the cause of dismantling the megacomplex of mass incarceration.Among the biggest obstacles to reform in Los Angeles County are its size and governance structure. About 10 million people live in more than 80 cities spread out over 4,000-plus square miles. That’s close to the size of Connecticut, with nearly three times the population, but the county has no single elected executive to hold accountable when things go wrong. Instead, five county supervisors control the funding of its sprawling jail system, the sheriff is elected separately and the mayor of the city of Los Angeles nominates the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.Despite the challenges, the activists have scored exceptional wins. In early 2020, they campaigned for a successful ballot initiative, Measure R, which increased independent oversight of county jails. That summer, the Los Angeles City Council cut the police budget by $150 million (a small fraction of the 90 percent cut that activists wanted). Last November, along with electing Gascón, voters passed Measure J, a major priority for the reform movement, which set aside a percentage of the county’s funds — worth hundreds of millions of dollars — for housing, mental-health resources and substance-abuse treatment programs in an effort designed to keep more people out of jail. And this June, the county Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 to work toward closing Men’s Central Jail, the site and symbol of violence that has galvanized activists, and replacing it with a village for mental-health care.‘What we have been very good at in this profession is kicking the can down the road for somebody else to deal with it.’But the victories could prove fragile. In May, to pay for more police officers as some violent crime rose, the city effectively restored the funds it took from the Police Department. A county judge ruled Measure J unconstitutional, saying that it took too much discretion away from the county Board of Supervisors. And promising to close the jail is not the same as offering sufficient alternative services that will make its closing feasible.In 2019, when Gascón started exploring a run for district attorney of Los Angeles County, the office was a logical target for the activists who were gaining strength locally. During the tenure of Jackie Lacey, the incumbent and first Black person to hold the office, Los Angeles had a higher rate of incarceration than the state average, and prosecutors sought the death penalty in 22 cases, each time for a defendant of color. For most of the time Lacey was in office, fewer than 4,000 misdemeanor defendants, out of an estimated 100,000 a year, were routed to alternative courts focused on drug and mental-health treatment.At first, meeting Gascón, the Los Angeles activists were wary. He had spent more than two decades in the Los Angeles Police Department, moving up the ranks (and earning a law degree along the way). He had been the chief of police in two cities: Mesa, Ariz., and San Francisco. He was appointed district attorney in San Francisco in 2011, when Kamala Harris left the position to become the state attorney general.Gascón was elected later in 2011 and again in 2015, and as the district attorney of a liberal bastion, he participated in the progressive-prosecutor movement without emerging as a prominent leader. Lawyers took note that he had never tried a case in court. His office dismissed and sealed thousands of marijuana convictions, a standard example of picking the low-hanging fruit of reform. San Francisco police officers killed 24 people during Gascón’s tenure; he prosecuted none of them.But while Lacey refused to meet publicly with Black Lives Matter and other activists, Gascón courted them. “We had never had that kind of relationship building before,” says Ivette Alé, who works with the reform group Dignity and Power Now.Gascón benefited from liberal philanthropists, who matter for the viability of progressive district attorney campaigns. He raised a total of $12.4 million. The biggest donations came from the billionaire George Soros and Patty Quillin, who is married to Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix. Lacey, whose largest donors were law-enforcement unions, raised $7 million. In November 2020, Gascón defeated her with more than 53 percent of the vote and higher levels of support in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.The former public defenders who joined Gascón’s leadership team saw a chance to answer to a different constituency than that of a typical district attorney. “Can there be a progressive prosecutor who does no harm?” says Alisa Blair, the Gascón adviser, who met him before he started his campaign. “I’m still not sure. But after pushing a rock up the hill as a public defender for 18 years, to come to a place where there can be sort of sweeping change, with the stroke of a pen, was really exciting.”A month after Gascón announced his reforms, he put Blair in charge of implementing one of his most sensitive directives, which she helped write. It was the order ending the prosecution of 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, no matter the crime. Blair soon oversaw about 80 cases in which the office, under Jackie Lacey, had filed motions to transfer teenagers to adult court on charges of murder or other violence. There were an additional 20 cases in which teenagers had been sentenced for violent crimes in adult court but had won appeals that gave the district attorney’s office a chance to reconsider.In the United States, young people are shielded far more in theory than in practice from the most punitive consequences for committing crimes. Since the first juvenile court was established in 1899, states have recognized that until the age of 18, teenagers are less morally culpable and have the capacity to change. Juvenile justice sets rehabilitation as its main goal. In recent decades, brain science has shown that adolescents — and in fact, people in their early 20s — have not fully developed the functions of impulse control and thinking through consequences. A state most powerfully expresses the belief that youth affords the possibility of redemption by setting a categorical limit, in time, on punishment. By law, the California Division of Juvenile Justice generally must free the young people it holds when they turn 25.To try a minor as an adult is to set aside these principles. But many states routinely move young people who are accused of committing serious violent crimes to the adult system, where rehabilitation is often scant and punishment can be never-ending. At stake in Los Angeles, Gascón says, is the fate of 300 to 400 teenagers a year. If they went to adult prison, they “would probably fail the rest of their lives. Our community will suffer the consequences of that with their families. You’re talking about millions and millions of dollars” and “probably more crime in the future, more victims in the future.”Juan Meraz was one of the first defendants who came to Blair’s attention. He was sentenced to life without parole in 2009 when he was 16, after being convicted in adult court of killing two men and wounding another in a gang-related shooting. Then, in 2016, California voters passed a ballot measure, Proposition 57, which required a hearing and a ruling by a judge before a juvenile case could be transferred to adult court. (When Proposition 57 was on the ballot, Gascón, as the San Francisco district attorney, remained neutral on the measure rather than supporting it.)A state appeals court ruled in 2020 that Meraz, who is now 28, was entitled to a transfer hearing because he never had one. Without it, he would be freed. Most prosecutors in the state handled cases like his by simply requesting a transfer back to adult court to maintain the long sentence. But Blair instructed the deputy district attorney in Meraz’s case, Amy Murphy, to do the opposite.Meraz’s lawyer presented evidence of his exemplary record over 12 years in prison. Meraz got his high school equivalency diploma, completed a nine-month entrepreneurship program through Baylor University and earned 35 certificates for completing programs, including for anger management and parenting. He worked as a custodian and married a childhood friend. For his day in court, Meraz’s wife gathered nearly 80 letters of support from people willing to vouch for him. Juan Meraz, who was sentenced to life without parole when he was 16. He was released this fall.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesOn that day last February, Meraz listened to Murphy, the prosecutor, tell the judge that because of Blair’s instruction, this was her “worst day as a prosecutor.” The person wounded in the 2009 shooting, Jose De Jesus Santa Ana, rose to speak. “I don’t believe he should be free, but I do forgive him,” he said of Meraz. Family members of the murder victims, represented by Kathleen Cady, also spoke. One mother wanted Meraz “to pay for my son’s death.” Another person said she hoped he had changed and “gets a second chance to fix the mistakes.”In September, the judge ruled that he had to release Meraz because Gascón’s office did not request a transfer hearing (and because the California Division of Juvenile Justice said it had no services for him). Meraz moved in with his wife and started coaching her son’s baseball team, telling the parents of the other children about his record. He started a job at the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, a California-based organization that is one of the most successful in the country at working with people while they are in prison and when they come out. Meraz drives men home when they are released. He took one to visit the beach for the first time, writing in the sand for the man, “Welcome home, Jose.”The executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, Sam Lewis, served 24 years of a life sentence for a gang-related murder. The California parole board freed him in 2012, on his ninth try, after Lewis participated in several rehabilitative programs and created groups for other people to prepare for their release.For years, before Gascón’s election, Lewis went to parole hearings in Los Angeles for people who worked in prison to educate themselves. “The prosecutors would say they could not be rehabilitated,” Lewis says. “Well, if you believe that’s true, then I shouldn’t be here speaking to you.”Gascón’s reforms made a second chance possible for Juan Meraz after he earned it. In all likelihood, without a new district attorney, Meraz would still be in prison. But the district attorney’s orders have also forced the release of people who have little or no record of rehabilitation. In some cases, Gascón seems to be creating a point of vulnerability for himself as an elected official, and perhaps for public safety.One such case involves the defendant Andrew Cachu. On an evening at the end of March 2015, six weeks before he turned 18, Cachu drove with a couple of friends to Sky Burgers in Palmdale. The city, which is in the northern part of Los Angeles County, has about 150,000 residents, mostly white and Latino. Inside the restaurant, Louis Amela, who was 41, was waiting for food with his bicycle parked outside. When Amela saw Ernest Casique, one of Cachu’s friends, jump on the bike, he ran out and yanked Casique off it. Cachu got out of the car. As Casique and the other friend grabbed Amela, Cachu pulled out a gun and shot him in the back.Barbie Perez, Amela’s cousin, raised three children just a few miles away from where he was killed. Through her own inquiries, as well as from the police, she learned that Cachu and Casique were in a pair of associated gangs. Now along with her grief, she felt afraid.In May 2015, the district attorney’s office, led at the time by Jackie Lacey, filed murder charges against Cachu in adult court. While Cachu was awaiting trial, his brother Jorge parked near the car of a witness who was scheduled to testify against Cachu. While Jorge waited, another person in Cachu’s gang got out of the car and threw rocks through the witness’s car window. Jorge Cachu was convicted of intimidating the witness and went to prison.Where Louis Amela was shot and killed in 2015.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesPerez sat through every day of Cachu’s murder trial. When he was convicted of killing her cousin and sentenced to 50 years to life, she thought, “OK, justice is served, but we don’t feel like there’s ever going to be justice,” she said, sitting in her living room, where a large photo of Amela stands on a desk against the wall.Like Meraz, Cachu won an appeal based on Proposition 57, and his case was sent back to juvenile court. In 2018, the prosecutor’s office made the standard move, under Lacey, of requesting a transfer hearing so a judge could return Cachu to adult court. But the case sat, and after Gascón took office, the deputy district attorney handling the case was instructed to reverse course.Gascón told us that because the office would not ask to transfer Cachu to adult court if it was beginning the prosecution anew, it would also not do so now. “The question becomes, how do we unwind history?” Gascón says of Cachu, whose case his office suggested we follow. “Given what we know today and the way that we’re doing our work, would he be in the same place? And the answer to that is no.”Other reform-minded prosecutors, like Krasner, have policies that weigh against treating anyone younger than 18 as adults but allow prosecutors to do so in rare cases. (Prosecutors in Philadelphia have obtained adult convictions and sentences for about 2 percent of juveniles who committed serious violent offenses during Krasner’s tenure.) These decisions are especially difficult, Krasner says. “When you have a young person involved in a homicide, you have very little to look at,” other than the crime.In Los Angeles, the district attorney’s office focuses on whether a young person would be amenable to the services available to juveniles. “We have no evidence to suggest that he’s a sociopath,” Alisa Blair says of Cachu, “or that he’s going to be a serial killer, or that this was anything other than the response of a teenager, experiencing adolescent brain development.”Gascón’s decision caused a clash with Amela’s family — and the deputy district attorney handling the case. In court last February, Barbie Perez, her son, Amela’s aunt and his best friend implored the judge to keep Cachu in prison. The deputy district attorney, Edward Wiley, rose to speak. Breaking with the position of his office, Wiley said that “no interest of justice” justified the order he received to withdraw the motion for the transfer hearing.Wiley was soon taken off Cachu’s case. At the next court date in May, Blair appeared on behalf of the district attorney’s office. She argued that the judge had no authority to hold a transfer hearing without a request from the office.Then an audio tape leaked to the local Fox channel, which played a phone call between Cachu and his mother that occurred minutes after his court appearance. “Andrew, you know who that was?” she asked. “That’s freaking Gascón’s — that’s Gascón’s special adviser. Oh, my God!” Cachu’s mother continued, “She’s good. She’s the one I’ve been emailing back and forth. She looked at me like, I got you, girl.”Perez was also interviewed in the Fox segment. “My heart just aches knowing that the prosecution is not on our side anymore,” she said. On social media, Blair became the target of threats of “vigilante justice” and comments about her race and appearance. (She is Black.)In early November, the district attorney’s office prepared to return to court. Gascón said that making a rehabilitation plan for Cachu was critical. “It’s not like he’s going to be released tomorrow,” he told us the day before the final hearing. “Obviously that will give us an opportunity to take rehabilitative approaches, stabilized housing, all of that. I just want to make sure that was clear.”Gascón mentioned the Anti-Recidivism Coalition as a resource for Cachu. “The question is, how do we help this person right their moral compass and prepare to come home?” Sam Lewis, the group’s director, said in a separate interview. “Can we put him in a position to be part of organizations like ARC, get him on parole, help him succeed?”The next day in court, Blair seemed to follow the path Gascón had sketched. She had asked Judge Brian Yep to transfer Cachu to the State Division of Juvenile Justice so he could receive rehabilitation services at least until May, when he would turn 25.But Blair did not present evidence of how the services would benefit Cachu, despite the judge’s request that she do so at a previous hearing. In court, Yep seemed incredulous. He called the report that Blair gave him “defective.” Without proof that would justify placing Cachu with the Division of Juvenile Justice, Yep said he had no choice “but to have Mr. Cachu released today.”It was hard to understand. Why did Gascón’s staff do little to prevent immediate release after the district attorney said that wouldn’t happen? Blair blamed Yep. It was “frankly inappropriate” for the judge to “try to place responsibility not just on me, but on the prosecutor,” she said.Blair said she could not include the evidence the judge wanted because it didn’t exist. The Division of Juvenile Justice didn’t offer programs designed for someone Cachu’s age. “The reality is that the answer for Mr. Cachu is no, there’s really not services,” she said.But that raised questions about the request the district attorney’s office made in the first place. And the outcome — no rehabilitative services for Cachu, who declined to comment — doesn’t appear to serve the goal of equipping people who leave prison to lead productive lives on the outside. (After we asked about it, the district attorney’s office contacted the Anti-Recidivism Coalition about Cachu.)Gascón seemed unphased about gambling on a defendant like Cachu. “Look, I mean, everything that we do in my business is a risk, right?” he said. “If I take a 15-year-old, I send him to prison for 20 years, the risk is that when they come out at age 35, they’re going to be meaner than they were when they went in.” Gascón continued, “What we have been very good at in this profession is kicking the can down the road for somebody else to deal with it.”In September, the recall campaign against Gascón fizzled, with fewer than half of the 580,000 signatures needed to prompt an election. But a second effort is now in the works, with prominent co-chairs: Steve Cooley, a Republican and former Los Angeles County district attorney, and Desiree Andrade, a Democrat and the mother of a 20-year-old who was beaten and thrown off a cliff to his death in 2018. (Three defendants in that case face maximum punishments of 25 years to life, instead of life without parole, because of Gascón’s policies.)Nearing the one-year mark in office, Gascón has taken some steps in fulfilling the pledges that he made at the outset. His office has resentenced or is in the process of resentencing about 125 people. The county jail population has dropped about 7.5 percent (after falling more than that the previous year, mostly as a result of the pandemic). When asked how many fatal shootings by the police the office has reviewed, based on Gascón’s promise nearly a year ago, the office provided no answer.Killings and shootings have continued to rise throughout the county in 2021, as they have elsewhere (with more than 1,790 people shot in the city of Los Angeles and much of the rest of the county this year, compared with about 1,530 last year). In response to worried residents, Gascón counseled patience. “No.1, the process that we followed for years hasn’t necessarily created more safety,” he said. His focus was on “long-term sustainable solutions” through “the reduction of recidivism.” He promised that “the more that you keep people from reoffending, the more safety you’re going to create in the future.”It was an abstract response that didn’t fully address the moment or offer immediate reassurance. Gascón seemed OK with that. “I mean, people like me get paid to think a little further down the line,” he said.Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for the magazine and the Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School. Her 2019 book “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the current-interest category. More