Opinion | The People Who Undermine Progressive Prosecutors

Rachael Rollins in Boston is a perfect example of how a focused opposition campaign can undermine reform by focusing on undermining the reformer.

Before she took office, a police organization filed an ethical complaint against her for pledging to handle certain low-level crimes less harshly and more in line with national trends, which the association claimed essentially violated rules of professional conduct for lawyers. Given the frivolous nature of the complaint, the state agency in charge of disciplining lawyers never opened an investigation.

She has even been undermined by judges. For example, a local judge challenged her discretion to dismiss disorderly conduct charges against a protester, the kind of discretion which district attorneys have exercised for more than a century. Ms. Rollins filed an emergency petition with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled in her favor.

What motivates this resistance? In some cases, judges do not want their legacy questioned, the police do not want their overtime reduced and towns dependent on a prison economy do not want mass incarceration to end. Just as much, police unions do not want someone highlighting their efforts to pressure a city to treat domestic violence cases involving officers with more lenience. Or to expose how often officers fired for misconduct will often wind up back on the job as a result of a rigged arbitration system their union helped establish, which is what Larry Krasner has done.

In many cases, however, the struggle is clearly political, not only in terms of corporate political contributions or police and corrections union patronage, but also in terms of racial politics and struggles over who deserves power. Police associations, in particular, take the position that prosecutors should serve the police, rather than both prosecutors and the police serving justice.

Whatever the reason for such reprehensible attacks on reform and reformers, it is not about public safety. The likely cumulative effect of this harassment of progressive prosecutors will be to impede the most important reforms and push these prosecutors out of office. That happened to Aramis Ayala, Florida’s first black state attorney, who declined to run for another term.

All this should be a spur for those who care about reform to vote for progressive prosecutors, sheriffs and judges in November.