You’d be forgiven for assuming that this was an ad for a Los Angeles-based candidate. In fact, it was made by Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer; the ad goes on to compare Spitzer’s reform-minded opponent, Pete Hardin, to the progressive Los Angeles DA, calling him a “[George] Gascón clone.” This focus has been central to Spitzer’s reelection strategy. From his rhetoric down to his campaign hashtag, #NoLAinOC, Spitzer’s narrative is consistent: he’s the only person who can stop Orange County from transforming into its neighbor to the north.

These references to LA are explicitly about crime and criminal justice policy, but they carry deep racial and economic undertones. Orange County politicians have long juxtaposed OC and LA, says LA Times columnist and former OC Weekly editor-in-chief Gustavo Arellano.“It’s always happened for decades,” he told Bolts, “ever since Orange County got its sense of being ‘Orange County,’ which is to say not urban, not Black, and not poor—and also not liberal.” But demographic changes over the last few decades have made OC more like LA, both racially and politically: the county, once reliably Republican, is moving to the left. 

Spitzer has made his campaign a proxy for the culture wars over Black Lives Matter and the national struggle over criminal justice, betting that this will galvanize rightwing stalwarts while seizing on more moderate voters’ fears of crime. Hardin, meanwhile, has focused outreach efforts on immigrant communities and communities of color in Orange County, going door-to-door with allies like the progressive Latinx organization Chispa. To critics like Hardin, Spitzer’s focus on the specter of Los Angeles—and everything that it invokes—is an attempt to distract from the economic and racial injustices and rising crime that undercut Orange County’s image as a pristine coastal paradise. Jodi Balma, a professor of political science at Fullerton College, calls his invocations “dog whistles.” 

Spitzer’s rhetoric comes in the wake of a scandal over racist comments the DA made last year. In February, the Voice of OC reported that Spitzer had brought up Black men’s dating practices, and what he described as their tendency to date white women to advance their social standing, in an October meeting where prosecutors were deciding whether to seek the death penalty against a Black male defendant.

Spitzer lost endorsements from a number of fellow California prosecutors, and the Orange County NAACP chapter called for his resignation, tying these statements to a broader pattern of racially disparate treatment documented by a recent study of the DA’s office. 

Undeterred, Spitzer is seeking a second term next month against three opponents. Although the election is technically nonpartisan, Spitzer is endorsed by the county Republican Party and the county Democratic Party has endorsed Hardin. Also running are Bryan Chehock, an attorney at the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Mike Jacobs, a retired prosecutor. If no one gets over 50 percent in the June 7 primary, the top two candidates will advance to a November general election. 

Spitzer is asking voters to indulge in seductive binaries: OC vs. LA, “woke” vs. law and order, us vs. them. But the election is also testing which vision of Orange County will win out: the old ‘Orange County’ that defines itself in opposition to liberal, diverse urbanity or the new Orange County, an increasingly multicultural place of shifting identities and affiliations where old-school dog whistles may no longer resonate.

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Spitzer cultivates a bombastic public presence, frequently appearing on Fox News, where he excoriates “woke” DAs like Gascón and San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. “Todd Spitzer will slice you open if you try to home in on his camera time,” said Balma. 

Behind the camera, Spitzer’s tenure as DA has been marked by internal discord—and, occasionally, scandal. In addition to the death penalty hearing comments, he promoted a prosecutor he allegedly knew to be a “pervert,” who was later accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment towards female subordinates—and who happened to be the best man at Spitzer’s wedding.

His office is rife with retaliatory internal investigations, inappropriate remarks about race, and poor treatment of crime victims, according to a recent BuzzFeed News investigation that interviewed 11 of his current and former employees. These improprieties have, at times, affected who the office chooses to prosecute—as in the case of Grant Robicheaux, a Newport Beach surgeon and reality TV star accused of conspiring with his girlfriend to drug and sexually assault local women; Spitzer dropped all charges after inheriting the case from his predecessor.

Spitzer’s time as DA is fairly consistent with his public face as a tough-on-crime prosecutor. He continues to consider the death penalty despite California’s moratorium on capital punishment, and charges minors as adults despite indicating when he took office that he wished to end the practice. The ACLU of Northern California recently released a report finding that the Orange County DA’s office charges Black people at a much higher rate, and is less likely to offer Black defendants diversion; the report used data from Spitzer’s predecessor’s time in office because Spitzer refused to turn over data from his own tenure, but the report remarks that “all available evidence suggests that the office’s policies and practices have not shifted substantially” under Spitzer.

Spitzer responded to the report with his signature deflection, calling it “the ACLU’s playbook for the failed policies of Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

Spitzer’s communications director initially indicated that Spitzer would answer questions for this article, then said the DA didn’t have time after Bolts sent a list of queries. When Bolts followed up about the campaign’s reliance on contrasts with Los Angeles, the spokesperson said in an email that Spitzer “is specifically talking about pro criminal policies in Los Angeles and nothing else.” 

To Spitzer’s critics, his constant denigration of criminal justice reformers is undercut by the fact his district is experiencing rising crime despite being helmed by  a DA who styles himself as tough-on-crime. Homicides and aggravated assaults have increased in Orange County, as they have elsewhere in the state, and hate crimes and property crime are also on the rise locally; and a recent attempted mass shooting at a Taiwanese American church has crystallized fears about gun violence and racist attacks. 

“I think conservative voters and liberal voters alike are ready to have a conversation about how we address the underlying drivers of crime instead of just playing whack-a-mole,” Hardin said, which “creates an endless cycle of crime and homelessness and violence.”

Spitzer is “sending young adults to prison, he’s done nothing about police violence and excessive force,” said Santa Ana council member Johnathan Hernandez, who supports Hardin. “He has not made Orange County safer. His punitive approach to justice isn’t working.”

Hernandez suggested that Spitzer’s demonization of LA is consistent with his dismissive attitude towards communities that don’t live up to the white, wealthy, suburban promise of ‘Orange County’—which extends even to communities within OC. “If he were so concerned about what’s happening in our community, he’d come to our neighborhood,’ he said. “He’d talk to the people, he’d knock on their doors.”

“These moms are impacted by those types of policies,” Hernandez added. “You see it through their heartbreak and anguish when their kids are torn apart from them, and they’re thrown to the prison system for not going to school or for driving with a broken taillight… Nobody here is born a criminal, but it is a narrative that we are struggling to move away from when we’re constantly hyper policed and not properly resourced.”

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Hardin, a former federal prosecutor who worked for a brief time as a deputy DA in Orange County, is running on a platform of “modernization”: if elected, he pledges to forswear the death penalty, stop charging minors as adults in most cases, and expand eligibility for diversion in cases that involve addiction, homelessness, and mental illness. But he is also focused on ending corruption and bringing “integrity and accountability and transparency” to the DA’s office, which he stressed are nonpartisan values. His own shot across the bow was the release of a 244-page document of opposition research on Spitzer that starts with an explicit content warning. And he has tried to reach conservative voters as well, touting his background as a Marine and prosecutor, though he conceded that endorsements in this race have fallen pretty cleanly along party lines. 

Leery of Spitzer’s relentless comparisons, Hardin has tried to distance himself from Gascón: in conversation, he avoided associations with the ‘progressive prosecutor’ movement. “Spitzer conflates me with Gascón even though we are significantly different, and then argues against Gascón instead of arguing against my policies,” Hardin told Bolts. He noted that he diverges with the Los Angeles DA on sentencing enhancements and the presence of deputy DAs at parole hearings, both of which Gascón forbade in his department; and a blanket ban on charging minors as adults, a policy that Gascón has only just reversed after criticism. “Philosophically, I’m opposed to blanket policies in the criminal justice system,” Hardin said.

Hardin’s moderation is carefully calibrated to the county he’s running in. Orange County, once a bastion of Reagan-era conservatism, has become more and more liberal over the years as its immigrant communities have grown, and longtime Republican voters find themselves ill-fitting in Donald Trump’s GOP, Balma told Bolts. In 2016, with Trump leading the Republican ticket, Hillary Clinton became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Orange County since FDR did in 1936; two years later, Gavin Newsom flipped the county in a governor’s race. These days, many groups like VietRISE, Resilience Orange County, and Chispa are working to organize communities of color across Orange County around progressive policies.

Hernandez grew up in Santa Ana in the 1990s, in the Chicano and Latino neighborhood Artesia Pilar. Back then, his family and friends never had the sense that the political system cared about them. “We have gotten so used to not having a seat at the table,” Hernandez told Bolts. Today, he said, that’s finally starting to change—but there’s a long way to go. 

“Cities like Santa Ana,” Hernandez added, “we’re just being asked to be treated equally. And to see us for the hope that people see every day in our city—not through the lens of despair and danger that our current DA sees our city.”

The post Ducking Racism Scandal, Orange County DA Turns to Dog Whistles appeared first on Bolts.

Nextdoor, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department has a similar history and faces an impeding investigation into a secret unit accused of targeting his political enemies. Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose deputies have been accused of harassment and organized violence against the community, faces an avalanche of challengers—eight in total—in what is arguably the nation’s most important law enforcement election this year.

The filing deadline for candidates passed earlier this month in California, filtering out dozens of counties where voters won’t get to weigh in on criminal justice policy this year. As happens nearly everywhere in the country, district attorneys and sheriffs like Barnes across the state are now certain to stay in office until 2026 because no one else is running. 

Still, millions of voters will see competitive elections for these powerful offices, which enjoy vast discretion on the rules and conditions of the local criminal legal systems. At stake are issues like whether the state continues to send people to death row—with a competitive DA race in Riverside County, one of the most aggressive jurisdictions in the entire country when it comes to seeking the death penalty—or whether minors should be prosecuted as though they are adults, a major fault line in Santa Clara County’s heated DA election.

California offers no centralized database of county-level candidates after the filing deadline, so Bolts created a cheatsheet to paint a clearer picture of what will unfold in coming months. Candidates will appear on the state’s June 7 ballot without party affiliation listed; if no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff will be held in November between the top two candidates. 

Out of 57 counties with sheriffs’ offices on the ballot, 30 drew multiple candidates. On the prosecutor front, San Francisco will hold a recall election against DA Chesa Boudin, organized by opponents of his reforms in office. Of the 56 other counties with regular DA races, 18 counties drew multiple candidates this year—seven of which are bigger than San Francisco, including Orange County, where DA Todd Spitzer faces a new fallout from racist comments. 

In fact Orange County is the most populous in the entire nation to hold a contested DA election this year. All in all, more than 16 million Californians live in counties with contested DA races, and more than 30 million in counties with contested sheriff elections. Of course, plenty of other elections matter greatly to criminal justice and law enforcement this year, notably the statewide attorney general election that has become a major proxy battle over criminal justice reform, and plenty of local elections for mayor, city attorney, and council.

See: The full list of candidates running for sheriff and DA in California.

These elections occur against the backdrop of heated debates about the future for criminal justice reform in California. The state has taken major steps away from the “tough-on-crime” consensus that sent its prisons and jails ballooning over the past decades, often through changes that voters have directly approved. In 2014, for instance, voters adopted Prop 47, which lowered the severity of some property crimes, and they rejected rollback efforts in 2020. In recent years, progressive candidates Boudin and George Gascón also won competitive DA races in San Francisco and Los Angeles on promises to lower incarceration. Both DAs went on to champion major changes to their offices like restrictions on sentencing enhancements and cash bail, efforts to reduce long prison sentences, and a ban on seeking the death penalty. 

Boudin and Gascón have since become lightning rods for critics of decarceration, who connect their policies to the rise in homicides and to broader concerns about public safety—including fears over highly-publicized burglaries, which have become a dominant issue in San Francisco. Boudin’s recall is among the highest-profile tests of the electoral resonance of this argument in the 2022 midterms, as he is arguably the most emblematic member of the nation’s “progressive progrecutor” movement alongside Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, who easily won re-election last year after facing similar attacks. (Gascón is not on the ballot this year. One recall drive against him has already failed, though his opponents are now trying again.)

But reform proponents are pointing out that similar concerns over public safety are playing out in counties run by vocal foes of criminal justice reform. Orange County’s Spitzer paints neighboring Los Angeles in apocalyptic terms to bolster his own standing, a familiar strategy for public officials in more suburban areas that border major cities. But Spitzer’s more progressive opponent is pointing out that murders and other crimes have also risen during the DA’s tenure.

The same dynamic holds in Riverside County, another jurisdiction on Los Angeles’s doorstep that has sentenced more people to death over the past five years than any other in the nation. 

Elsewhere, candidates are running to push criminal justice reforms much further in their counties. In Santa Clara County, public defender Sajid Khan accuses incumbent DA Jeffrey Rosen of being too punitive, promising a major overhaul if he is elected. Khan and Rosen have a long personal history, including Rosen threatening Khan with an ethics complaint during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as Bolts reported in February. 

Orange, Riverside, and Santa Clara are California’s three most populous counties with contested DA elections this year. Six other counties with at least half-a-million-residents also host contested DA elections this year. San Francisco’s recall election has dominated national attention. In Alameda (Oakland) and Sacramento counties, incumbents who have been critical of reform are not seeking re-election (Sacramento’s DA is running for attorney general); the field to replace them offers markedly different choices, with both reform-minded candidates and others more in line with the incumbents’ politics. In Contra Costa County, reform-minded DA Diana Becton, who in 2020 joined a progressive association with Boudin and Gascón, faces one challenger. A similar dynamic is playing out in San Joaquin County. And in Ventura County, an incumbent faces a deputy DA running on his experience as a prosecutor.

Missing from the list are plenty of populous counties like San Diego, where DA Summer Stephan will face no opponent; during her last term, Stephan tried to blunt the impact of hypothetical future reforms by pushing plea deals that required defendants to waive any rights they may have to to seek re-sentencing if the legislature passes new laws. Also missing from the list of contested elections is Kern County, where the DA has sought to go further than most in deploying carceral tactics against Calfornians experiencing homelessness.

Elections for sheriff are unfolding in a similar statewide context, since sheriffs have long been prominent foes of the state’s criminal justice reforms. By and large, there is little indication that this will change after 2022. In fact, one of the more influential Democratic critics of reform is trying to switch from the legislature to the sheriff’s office: Jim Cooper, an assemblymember who is also a former sheriff’s deputy, is one of the two candidates running for sheriff in Sacramento.

But these elections may also offer rare windows into the often disastrous conditions in the local jails that sheriffs supervise. San Diego’s jail has long been the subject of investigations into a string of deaths and other major concerns, and the county has responded by targeting a chief local journalist who was holding them to account. Sheriff Bill Gore is retiring this year, and a crowded field of seven candidates is running to replace him and inherit this system. 

In Alameda County, JoAnn Walker is running on an unusual progressive ticket against Sheriff Gregory Ahern, who has also faced scrutiny for the high number of jail deaths under his watch. Walker has tied Ahern’s use of solitary confinement to a series of suicides at the jail. “How can they come out and be normal?” she asked about people held in the local lockup at a recent forum.

California has restrictive rules on who can run for sheriff, which boxes out anyone who is an outsider to law enforcement. Some reformers have sought to eliminate this barrier to more candidates, but in the meantime there remain limits on who can even try to change these offices. In 2018, Villanueva was a veteran of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department when he ran on promises to clean it up from the inside. Instead, one of his earliest decisions once he became sheriff was to rehire deputies who were fired for misconduct.

Catch up with our other primers on prosecutor and sheriff elections in 2022 on Arkansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, as well as our national primer.

The post California’s Midterms Bring Plenty of Forks in the Road for Criminal Justice Reforms appeared first on Bolts.