Progressive prosecutors are
proving it’s possible to win over suburban enclaves.
By ALEX YABLON
FEB 07, 20205:18 PM
The Willie Horton ad that
successfully tanked Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign worked because
it played on “every suburban mother’s greatest fear,” according to its creator.
The infamous ad handed politicians a reliable strategy for winning in swingable
suburbs: manipulate fear of violent crime.
For decades, the suburbs have
existed in the American political imagination as a centrist bulwark, where
voters concerned above all with property values and schools shy away from
systemic reform. But these voters are proving that the caricature of
small-minded, cautious suburbanites could be out of date, especially when it
comes to criminal justice and crime. In 2019, progressive prosecutors swept
Democratic primary and general elections in the prosperous suburbs of northern
Virginia: Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William counties as well as the city of
Arlington. Amid a blue wave in the state, promises to reduce cash bail, stop
seeking the death penalty, and decriminalize marijuana possession won easily. The
prosecutors’ elections in northern Virginia represent the most significant
electoral victory for the reform prosecutor movement outside of big cities like
Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, or New York.
“I really do think the next
frontier of criminal justice reform runs through the suburbs,” said Steve
Descano, newly inaugurated commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax County, who
hopes his success serves as a model to suburbs around the country: “The
response reformers get is, ‘Oh, well, X county isn’t like New York or Chicago.’
I want them to be able to say, ‘Well, we are like Fairfax County, and look what
they did.’ ”
Descano unseated Raymond Morrogh,
a 12-year incumbent with a more traditional approach to the job, in a heated
Democratic primary fight. Descano promised to do away with cash bail, the death
penalty, and marijuana possession charges. Jonathan Fahey, Descano’s
independent opponent in the general election, backed some mild reforms, like
offering alternatives to incarceration, but he made fighting MS-13 gangs a
central part of his platform. Fahey stressed his long career as a federal
prosecutor and argued Descano would not have a “constructive relationship” with
law enforcement. “Steve Descano’s programs, lack of experience and philosophy,”
Fahey said, “will all make Fairfax County less safe.” Fahey got nods from
Morrogh, retiring prosecutors in neighboring Arlington and Prince William
County, as well as the local Republican Party and police union. Descano
received endorsements from state Democratic heavyweights, including former Gov.
Terry McAuliffe, and a large donation from a George Soros–funded PAC that
supports progressive prosecutor candidates across the country.
Descano quickly put his platform
into action. He immediately stopped prosecuting personal marijuana possession,
launched a probe into the fatal shooting of an unarmed motorist by federal law
enforcement agents, and joined with local DAs to call for the Virginia
legislature to abolish the death penalty.
Descano’s victory amid the
northern Virginia wave came two years after a more bare-knuckled Willie Horton
strategy failed statewide: Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie lost
after running gruesome ads warning MS-13 would flood the state if Democrat
Ralph Northam won. Experts see the failure of tough-on-crime politics in the
Virginia suburbs as a national bellwether. “There are some who are fanning the
flames, but communities aren’t buying it,” said Miriam Krinsky, executive
director of the nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution, which advises left-leaning
candidates for district attorney around the country. “There’s a new normal
that’s starting to form among voters and elected prosecutors.” Indeed, a 2018
Gallup poll found Americans’ fear of crime is at its lowest in more than a
decade.
The electoral success of criminal
justice reform in northern Virginia is the result of decadeslong demographic
trends and social pressures that can be found in suburbs around the country,
experts and prosecutors said. Suburbs have seen explosive population growth and
economic expansion in recent decades, leading to denser, more diverse
electorates. Fairfax County, with its connections to cosmopolitan D.C. and the
federal bureaucracy, has experienced an influx of highly educated immigrants as
well. Descano believes he won because of these changes. “As an area gets more
diverse and densely populated, there is more interaction with neighbors who
don’t have the same life experience that you have,” he said.
Suburbs have also had to contend
with public health challenges that were once seen as “urban” problems. Over the
course of the past decade, CDC data shows suburbs went from experiencing lower
rates of overdose deaths than rural and urban communities to suffering from
higher rates of drug death than either cities or the country. “The opioid issue
in particular was an incredible eye-opener. Most people have a friend, a family
member, a neighbor, someone they know has had an addiction problem or lost
someone close to them,” said Descano. “People who live in the suburbs now start
to see that these aren’t issues they can just move away from.”
The rise of the mass shooting,
which frequently occurs in suburbs, as the quintessential American horror could
have also sapped the effectiveness of more traditional right-wing scare tactics
by displacing fears of a criminal underclass with the plague of poorly
regulated guns and hate-fueled ideologies. Descano acknowledged a certain
symbolic importance to the issue in his community, home to the headquarters of
the National Rifle Association. “The values of Fairfax County are not the value
of the NRA.”
While the politics of crime in
the suburbs have shifted, the practice of justice lags behind major cities. A
2019 Vera Institute report found that suburbs have the nation’s highest arrest
rates. According to a 2017 study, racial disparities in arrests for
quality-of-life violations surged to “extreme” levels as more poor, nonwhite
people moved into suburbs. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a number of the
incidents that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement—the deaths of Michael
Brown and Trayvon Martin, for instance—occurred in suburbs, not inner cities.
Descano says that’s due to the
fact that it’s harder to push through sweeping reform when suburban counties
are split between municipal governments that don’t necessarily coordinate on
policy and may not have the resources for initiatives like conviction integrity
units. “You can wrap your head around reforming a single big city’s DA office”
or police department, Descano said. Big cities may be better able to recruit
more progressive, sophisticated criminal justice professionals as well, said
Rebecca Neusteter, co-author of the Vera Institute report.
Recent history could also pose an
obstacle for progressives. “Suburbs have been used to segregate,” said Andrea
Boyles, professor of criminal justice at Lindenwood University outside St.
Louis and author of the book Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for
Comfort. Suburbs aren’t merely places with single-family homes and good public
schools: As products of midcentury white flight, they “represent safety as a
predominantly white, affluent space. Suburbs were created in the first place so
that white populations could live separately from poor, minority populations but
not out of reach of the amenities of the city.”
Descano and his cohort are
betting that suburbs have outgrown the segregationist impulse that birthed such
places. During the campaign, he found Fairfax County was just too big and
diverse to remain in stasis. “There were days I started on a horse farm, had
lunch at a strip mall, went to a mosque, went to a high-rise, went to a metro
station. There’s an incredible diversity of experiences,” he said, which the
voters themselves recognized, meaning that attempts to scare constituents away
from reform fell short. “People have seen the county grow up and change, and
they see that as a benefit. The old, broad, superficial message of fear doesn’t
work anymore.”
