Given the fact that homicides are up, however, progressive ideas for criminal justice reform — policies such as elimination of cash bail or the election of reform-minded prosecutors — are now under political pressure. That will intensify if Boudin is recalled. Already, signatures are being collected for a potential recall election against Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón. “One of the questions about the progressive prosecutors movement from the outset is what happens when crime goes back up, will they be defeated politically,” says David Alan Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford University.

“There’s broad support for a lot of what they’re championing,” says Sklansky, the Stanford law professor. “There’s broad support for greater scrutiny of police killings, to reverse wrongful convictions, for efforts to make the criminal justice system fairer and more just across lines of race.”