I hope you’re using this juxtaposition ironically.
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Yet she’s still painted (by conservatrolls) as a bleeding heart who refuses to prosecute violent criminals, with the unspoken subtext that a black DA/AG is secretly on “their” side. She probably believes/knows that anyone from a San Francisco establishment background has to go the extra mile in proving their bona fides. Hell, Gavin Newsom would probably be considered an outright communist in much of the country, and he’s as business-friendly as they come.
I can see the logic to making these positions elected, but that only works if people are paying attention, which they don’t. The flip side danger is that a civil servant who is below anyone running for election is simply being moved further away from accountability to the people, and there aren’t enough single issue voters for any top elected official to care what they think.
It’s a tough problem, but whether elected or not, certainly the solution will have to involve rolling back immunity for misconduct, and erecting better (well, any) separation between prosecutors, judges, and the police. As well as having an electorate that gives a damn about civil liberties.
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Same here (after checking to make sure that they aren’t some reactionary dinosaur)
Anyone who believes municipal employees are unaccountable and un-fire-able probably doesn’t know any municipal employees. AFSCME isn’t as powerful as Republicans want you to believe. The other half-ish municipal employees aren’t union and have no employment protections if they run afoul of local political winds.
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I suspect that better information is the big factor in those cases where a prosecutor loses: regardless of whether you find the notion horrifying; or really want to be sure that your prosecutor is locking up as many blacks as possible; you have to be a fairly serious local politics and criminal justice wonk to have any idea what the prosecutor is actually up to.
If, say, I read an article about how a prosecutor I was in a position to vote against was a big fan of ‘bite mark analysis’; then I’d be moved to run screaming toward his opponent. But in absence of somebody doing something egregious and high profile; I don’t know where I would even begin when trying to determine how problematic a prosecutor is or isn’t. That would likely require cross-referencing DoJ data against a flurry of state and local public records requests; and then some nontrivial statistics chops to figure out what to make of the results and how to compare them with alternatives.
We do have a modest stream of reports of prosecutorial behavior so egregious that it should be a matter of disbarment and criminal sanctions, not possible electoral challenge; but unless you have something fairly egregious on someone; it is quite possible for serious systemic problems to be largely invisible without some serious data crunching.
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That’s the kind of thing journalists and public interest nonprofits are supposed to do. Where I live we have 17 state and 25 local ballot measures this election, many of which involve complex governmental finance issues that I’m unqualified to judge — and I do my homework more than most people. There’s no way I can do adequate independent research on 42 different ballot measures. Fortunately, there are news and advocacy organizations that devote resources to crunching the numbers on a bond issue or doing in-depth analysis of a candidate’s record.
(I can see how smaller towns might not have that though, especially with the newspaper industry being gutted in recent decades.)
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Well, municipal employees in general aren’t really who I’m talking about; my point would be, considering how often officers misbehave, police chiefs/sheriffs very rarely lose their jobs over it, no matter how much money it’s costing or how destructive the behavior.
Just as an aside, Allgood had run as a Democrat since 1989, and only recently switched to Independent. A good portion of this racist, tough on crime stuff comes from the 90’s Clinton effort to “bring them to heel”, her racist words, not mine.
After people get finished with this Trump situation, I truly hope Democrats stop getting a pass.
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