Crime experts respond to Soros defending support for progressive DAs amid crime wave: ‘Disastrous’

Liberal megadonor George Soros defended his support of progressive district attorneys across the country in a Wall Street Journal entry that placed blame on Republicans for rising crime – an excuse that several experts told Fox News Digital doesn’t jibe with reality.

“Some politicians and pundits have tried to blame recent spikes in crime on the policies of reform-minded prosecutors,” the Hungarian-born billionaire wrote in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, defending the massive amount of cash he has poured into district attorney races across the country. 

Soros explained that the “research” he has seen says otherwise and that “violent crime in recent years has generally been increasing more quickly in jurisdictions without reform-minded prosecutors. Murder rates have been rising fastest in some Republican states led by tough-on-crime politicians.”

Hannah Meyers, director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital that studies that suggest Republican states are driving crime gloss over the fact that prosecuting crimes happens at the local level and not the state level. 

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“Soros is speaking in vagaries rather than data,” Meyers said. “The progressive local prosecutors he’s championing are not state-level officials; they operate largely in county-level jurisdictions. And contrary to his argument, counties with a higher proportion of Republican voters have both lower homicide rates and lower growth in homicide rates between 2019 and 2020.”

Meyers added that “murder is out of control” in several cities where Soros and his financial network have supported the campaigns of progressive prosecutors.

“Larry Krasner recently broke Philadelphia’s all-time annual homicide record; Kim Gardner broke St. Louis’s record per capita; and Kim Foxx oversaw a homicide rate that Chicago hasn’t experienced in a quarter-century,” Meyers said.

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Soros’ Open Society Foundation declined multiple requests for comment from Fox News Digital but did provide several studies to back up Soros’ claims in the article, including data from The Brennan Center, showing that murder rates are rising at similar levels in certain states “controlled” by Republican governors. 

Zack Smith, legal fellow and manager of the Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program in the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center, told Fox News Digital that many of the studies like the one provided by Open Society “don’t say what many of these prosecutors say they do” and there are “many real questions about the data and methodology used.”

Smith pointed to two studies in states led by Republican governors, Massachusetts and Texas, that are often used to support Soros-style “reform prosecutors” and concluded in an article posted at the Heritage Foundation that they “obfuscated the critical differences between diversion and non prosecution” and define the word “prosecution” in a “constrained manner.”

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Smith explained in the article that the study in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, used data from before the liberal prosecutor, backed by Soros’ financial network, took office, therefore preceding her “nullification of most misdemeanor crimes.” 

Additionally, Smith wrote that the data primarily applied to first-time offenders who are “most likely to change behavior if given a chance to make amends for their crime.”

Dennis Farris, president of the Austin Police Retired Officers Association and a 25-year veteran of the Austin Police Department, lives in Texas and told Fox News Digital that he also believes it is misleading to associate governors with rising crime and lenient prosecution policies that are happening at local levels. 

“This doesn’t go back to the state level, this goes back to the DA level and the people that are actually prosecuting cases,” he said. “In Texas, the majority of the large counties, the DAs are Democrats, and they’re progressive Democrats, and they’re Soros Democrats. So yes, you can go back and directly correlate the rising crime with the installation of these pro-reform DAs who are not prosecuting crimes like they should be.”

Austin District Attorney Jose Garza, who received significant support from Soros’ network of PACs, has been widely criticized for his attempt to “reimagine justice in Travis County,” which has involved controversial new bail and sentencing guidelines. 

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Garza took office in January 2021 after running on a platform of progressive policies, including ending cash bail and not prosecuting certain drug crimes.

“Garza has been in office for 20 months,” Farris explained. “We’ve had 135 homicides in the last 20 months in the city of Austin. That is almost 7 years of average [rates]. We have the same amount of murders in 20 months that we would normally have in six and a half years. How can you not tell me that having a district attorney that’s soft on crime hasn’t had an effect?”

Austin experienced 89 homicides, the most in its history, as the city faced a severe staffing shortage after the city council slashed the police budget in 2020 at the height of the progressive-inspired “defund the police movement.”

Soros wrote in his Wall Street Journal article that “judging by the results” of the funds he has sent to the campaigns of “sensible reform-minded candidates” the “public likes what it’s hearing.”

In addition, the Open Society Foundation provided Fox News Digital with polls showing the popularity of the phrase “criminal justice reform.”

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The experts who spoke to Fox News Digital pointed to several examples of the public not supporting Soros-style prosecutors and suggested there’s more to the story when it comes to public support for criminal justice reform efforts.

George Mason University Professor Emerita Joyce Lee Malcolm told Fox News Digital that it’s misleading for Soros to suggest that the broad American support for criminal justice reform means that voters support every specific reform policy, such as ending cash bail. 

“I think you can misuse the word reform,” Malcolm said. “Reform means changing something but it doesn’t always mean for the better. These changes are not for the better, they are leading to more crime.” 

Malcolm continued, “If you ask people if they are in favor of reform everybody says oh, yeah, assuming that reform is talking about a better outcome, but the outcome here is disastrous.”

In New York City, led by Soros-backed progressive DA Alvin Bragg, a poll earlier this year showed that a majority of voters oppose the 2019 move to end cash bail, for which Bragg and other progressive district attorneys across the country have pushed, while releasing suspected criminals back onto the streets as they await trial.

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In July, Fox News Digital reported that overall crime in New York City has risen 31% since the same time last year and NYPD leaders emphasized that they are frequently re-arresting known offenders who are then let back onto the streets to commit more crimes.

NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael Lipetri noted that 25% of burglary suspects and 20% of grand larceny suspects “go on to commit a new felony” within 60 days. Five years ago, that rate was 7% for burglary suspects and 6% for grand larceny suspects, he said. 

Farris pointed to the city of San Francisco where voters recently booted Soros-style District Attorney Chesa Boudin out of office amid rising crime that many linked to his progressive policies.

“If the policies are so popular, why did they recall the district attorney in San Francisco?” Farris said, adding that voters in Los Angeles were also attempting to recall Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascon, as well. 

More than half a million residents of Los Angeles County signed a petition to put recalling Gascon on the ballot, in addition to 37 cities voting no confidence in the district attorney, but county officials announced earlier this week that the recall effort fell short of the required signatures.

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Smith told Fox News Digital that progressive prosecutors use “feel good language” in order to blur the lines between broad support for criminal justice reform and support for their specific policies.

“They’re using kind of this poll-tested, feel good language,” Smith said. “They say, ‘We want an equal justice system’ and ‘We don’t want anyone incarcerated unnecessarily’ and ‘We want to make sure innocent people aren’t sent to prison.’ Those aren’t controversial statements. Everybody agrees with that.”

Smith continued, “What happens when many of these individuals get into office, it quickly becomes apparent what they meant by that is not something that you or I or the vast majority of people on the street are going to understand that to have meant.”

Malcolm echoed Smith’s assessment and said that while many reform-minded prosecutors may have good intentions, the results fall short.

“It’s a nice idea how you know, people who have a hard time growing up should be given a break here,” Malcolm said. “But basically they’re [district attorneys] supposed to be representing the public and also the law. They are supposed to be enforcing the law, not deciding which laws are a good idea.”

Smith went on to say that the mere fact Soros felt compelled to defend progressive prosecutors at this point in time “shows that they are facing some very strong headwinds right now.”

“I think people are starting to understand the radical nature of these policies and the dangerous consequences they have for their communities and for the safety of people and just the general promotion of lawlessness that happens when these policies are implemented,” Smith said.