NEW POLL: Voters Say Prosecutors Should Reject Campaign Contributions From Police Unions, Return Donations

Earlier this week, Philadelphians re-elected Larry Krasner to a second term as District Attorney with a whopping 69% of the vote. With such a clear mandate, one might mistakenly believe that Krasner faces no real opposition, but that’s not the case. Police unions in Philadelphia and across the country spent over $300,000 dollars trying to oust him from office.

And Krasner isn’t an outlier. In Chicago, police unions spent # in their unsuccessful bid to oust State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. And police unions spent # in Los Angeles in a failed effort to re-elect Jackie Lacey District Attorney. 

Why do police unions spend so much money on these District Attorney races?

While most labor unions work to lift the wages and working conditions of their members, police unions have a less benign agenda. They frequently use their power to lobby against justice reform, support candidates for elected office who will not impose law enforcement accountability or transparency measures, and regularly defend individual officers who commit criminal wrongdoing.

That’s why the police unions spent big to oust Krasner. Since he took office, Krasner has charged over 50 police officers with various crimes. Earlier this year, for example, Krasner brought charges against three police officers for making false statements that led to a wrongful conviction of a man who spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

In 2020, nearly 50 elected prosecutors from across the country pledged to reject campaign contributions from police unions, in order to “ensure prosecutorial independence and avoid any actual or perceived conflicts of interest.”

To gauge where the public is on this issue, City Watch conducted a survey of 1,177 likely voters nationally using the Data For Progress infrastructure. The sample is weighted by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points.

• Two-thirds (66%) of likely voters believe that prosecutors should decline campaign donations from police unions.

• 60% of likely voters believe that prosecutors should return campaign donations from police unions back to the union.

• By a thirty point margin (56% to 27%), voters believe that campaign contributions do interfere with the ability of an elected prosecutor to exercise an independent oversight role in investigating and prosecuting police misconduct.

To recap: Most voters believe that campaign contributions interfere with a prosecutor’s ability to hold police officers accountable, that candidates for elected prosecutors should reject donations from police unions, and that candidates who accepted donations from police unions should refund those contributions.

This is going to be a live issue in 2022 District Attorney elections across the country. For example, take two relatively conservative California counties, where prosecutors who are up for re-election in populous jurisdictions have taken large donations from police unions:

Riverside County

In Riverside County, California, home to 2.5 million people, Mike Hestrin took at least $673,000 in campaign contributions from law enforcement unions. A University of North Carolina School of Law study of campaign donations over two recent election cycles found that Hestrin took more money from police unions than did any of the other 2,500 elected prosecutors in the country.

Law enforcement officers in Riverside County have killed at least 70 people since Hestrin took office. Hestrin sought charges in just one of these cases. Even in that case, Hestrin initially declined to prosecute, publicly concluding that the officer did not commit a crime. Hestrin reversed his own decision years later only after the county was forced to settle a civil case for $7 million to the family of the man that the officer killed. 

Here is just one example of a police killing that Mike Hestrin did not prosecute: 

Kenneth French, an unarmed, non-verbal intellectually disabled man diagnosed with schizophrenia, was shopping at Costco with his parents to prepare for a Father’s Day celebration. While waiting for a sausage sample, a minor altercation broke out between French and an off-duty police officer who was also standing in line. The officer reacted by taking out his gun and shooting at least eight rounds at the entire family--ultimately killing French, putting French’s mother in a coma, and causing French’s father to lose a Kidney. 

The Los Angeles Police Chief issued a report concluding that even the officer’s drawing of his weapon was “out of policy,” and further explained that the officer’s conduct was improper because while Kenneth was being “pushed away from the officer and was not armed,” the officer “made no attempts to communicate with Kenneth in an effort to deescalate the incident” and “did not take time to correctly assess the incident and analyze the threat.” 

Despite the fact that experts say a grand jury will “indict a ham sandwich” if a prosecutor asks it to, the grand jury failed to return an indictment in the case. Hestrin, who has the power to proceed with a prosecution notwithstanding the grand jury’s opinion, declined to prosecute. 

In August 2021, the California Attorney General stepped in to prosecute the case because Hestrin refused to do it.

Sacramento County

In Sacramento County, home to 1.5 million people, law enforcement unions and related interests have poured over $900,000 into District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s campaign, accounting for nearly half of the overall funds Schubert has raised since 2014.

Those dollars might help to explain why Schubert has repeatedly used her power to place police officers above the law. 

In one case, two police officers shot and killed Stephon Clark, a 22 year-old unarmed Black man, after mistaking his cell phone for a gun while he was in the backyard of his grandmother’s home. In what started as a police response to a vandalism complaint against another person, the two officers ultimately ran into Clark at his family’s home, and unloaded 20 rounds, striking Clark at least seven times. The city of Sacramento settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the Clark family for $2.4 million. In the wake of Clark’s death, the California legislature passed a law clarifying that police can only use deadly force when “necessary.” Sacramento city leaders rallied in support of the bill: the mayor of Sacramento vocally supported it and the city council even passed a resolution, but Anne Marie Schubert did not.

In the days following Stephon Clark’s murder,, Schubert accepted $13,000 from two separate police unions. For context, the head of the Sacramento Police Officers Association said that the officers who killed Mr. Clark “followed their training” and “were acting within the law.” 

In another case that Schubert refused to prosecute, the city of Sacramento paid out a  $7 million lawsuit after a sheriff’s deputy shot a man six times in the back, killing him. The man’s wife called 911 because he was suffering from a mental health crisis. Instead of helping the man, the sheriff’s deputy looked at the small Swiss army-style knife the man was holding and determined that he was trying to commit “suicide by cop.” Schubert credited this explanation and refused to prosecute the deputy.

Schubert’s record of turning a blind eye to accusations of police misconduct, including the killing of unarmed civilians, shows an over-reliance on law enforcement investigations for accountability measures. Essentially, Schubert has relegated her office’s role in police oversight , as the Sacramento News and Review put it, to “just checking other people’s homework”.