The progressive DA movement is a wave of reform-minded elected prosecutors who, starting around 2015, have used the discretion of the district attorney’s office to reduce incarceration, decline charges for low-level offenses, limit cash bail, pursue police accountability, and review past convictions for wrongful outcomes. By 2025, prosecutors in this mold led jurisdictions housing nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population, though a counter-movement of recalls, gubernatorial removals, state preemption laws, and federal investigations has unseated several of its most visible figures while others continue to win decisively at the polls.
Prosecutors hold enormous leverage over the criminal system because plea bargaining resolves an estimated 95 percent of criminal cases. For decades, most district attorneys ran unopposed and measured success by convictions and sentence length. Progressive prosecutors replaced that framework with metrics tied to public safety outcomes, equity, and community wellness, and they built campaigns around the premise that the office could be used to shrink the system rather than expand it. National attention to mass incarceration, racial disparities, and police killings of Black Americans gave the movement its political opening.
What Progressive Prosecutors Actually Do
The policies vary by jurisdiction, but a recognizable core runs through the movement:
- Treating incarceration as a last resort and seeking lighter sentencing recommendations.
- Routing people charged with drug offenses, mental health crises, or low-level crimes into diversion and treatment programs.
- Declining to prosecute offenses such as marijuana possession, turnstile jumping, or driving on a license suspended for unpaid fines.
- Limiting money bail, which advocates argue criminalizes poverty.
- Investigating officer misconduct, maintaining exclusion lists of officers deemed unreliable, and refusing to build cases around them.
- Establishing conviction integrity units to reopen past cases where innocence or misconduct is alleged.
Institutional support has come from the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge and from Fair and Just Prosecution, a national network of reform prosecutors. The movement’s most politically significant financial backer has been George Soros, who channeled tens of millions of dollars through a network of state-level super PACs with names like “Safety and Justice.” His strategy worked because district attorney races are typically low-turnout, low-spending affairs: modest investments carried unusual weight. Soros-backed candidates won in Chicago, Los Angeles, Manhattan, San Francisco, St. Louis, Orlando, and elsewhere. In Philadelphia, roughly $1.7 million in Soros money helped Larry Krasner win a primary with 38 percent in an election with just 17 percent turnout. Opponents turned the “Soros DA” label into a staple of Republican messaging; supporters pointed out that conservative donors fund law enforcement campaigns with far less scrutiny.
Key Figures
Larry Krasner, Philadelphia
A career civil rights and defense lawyer elected in 2017, Krasner is the movement’s most durable figure. His office’s policies contributed to a 30 percent decrease in the city’s jail population and a 46 percent drop in average sentence lengths. He reduced cash bail use, shortened probation terms, and sought lighter sentencing recommendations.
Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers voted to impeach him in 2022, alleging dereliction of duty; the state Supreme Court dismissed the proceedings. The legislature also handed the state attorney general jurisdiction over criminal cases inside SEPTA transit stations, a move widely read as a rebuke of Krasner. He won a third term in November 2025 with 75.5 percent of the vote. Philadelphia’s homicide rate was projected to end 2025 at less than half its 2021 peak of 562.
Kim Foxx, Cook County, Illinois
Foxx unseated a tough-on-crime incumbent in 2016 to become the first Black woman elected Cook County State’s Attorney. She raised the felony retail theft threshold to $1,000, increased diversion program use by 25 percent, vacated 250 past convictions through conviction integrity review, and oversaw expungement of records for minor marijuana offenses. Critics pointed to rising crime and high staff turnover. Her handling of the Jussie Smollett case became a persistent liability; she later called the media attention around it her biggest regret. She did not seek a third term and was succeeded by Eileen O’Neill Burke, a retired judge who ran on a tougher approach.
Chesa Boudin, San Francisco
Elected in November 2019, Boudin barred his staff from using California’s three-strikes law to enhance sentences and pledged not to prosecute quality-of-life offenses such as public camping. On June 7, 2022, 55 percent of San Francisco voters recalled him. Roughly 122,600 voters supported the recall, compared with the 68,575 who had elected him. Voters cited frustration with property crime, organized retail theft, and a sense of impunity. Boudin attributed part of the result to conservative donor spending. Mayor London Breed appointed his replacement under local rules. The recall was a significant symbolic blow: even in one of the country’s most liberal cities, voters rejected a progressive prosecutor when they felt unsafe.
George Gascón, Los Angeles
Elected in 2020, Gascón ended his office’s pursuit of the death penalty, barred sentencing enhancements, limited cash bail for nonviolent offenses, and stopped prosecuting juveniles as adults. He survived two recall attempts but lost his 2024 reelection bid to Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor running as an independent, who took about 60 percent of the vote amid public safety anxiety and high-profile smash-and-grab incidents. Hochman took office in December 2024 and moved quickly to reverse Gascón’s policies: he restored death penalty pursuit, reinstated gang and sentencing enhancements, filed thousands of charges under Proposition 36 (approved by California voters in November 2024), hired nearly 200 new employees, and reduced a case backlog from over 10,000 to roughly 4,000 in seven months. Civil liberties groups criticized the sentencing enhancement reinstatement in particular, arguing it worsens racial disparities in incarceration.
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan
Manhattan’s 37th district attorney restructured his office around violent crime and created a Post-Conviction Justice Unit to reinvestigate innocence claims, a Survivor Services Bureau offering free therapy to crime victims, and an expanded Police Accountability Unit. His office reported a 40 percent drop in shootings in his first two years. In 2023, Bragg’s office obtained the first criminal conviction of a sitting or former U.S. president, indicting Donald Trump on 34 felony counts tied to hush-money payments. Bragg has consistently declined to discuss that case in his political campaigns, saying the decision rested on “the facts and the law.”
Others Who Shaped the Movement
Rachael Rollins, as Suffolk County, Massachusetts DA, instituted a policy of declining to prosecute many nonviolent misdemeanors. She was narrowly confirmed as U.S. Attorney in 2021 on a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris, and resigned in May 2023 after federal investigators found she had improperly engaged in political activity, leaked confidential Justice Department information, and lied about it under oath. The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers issued a public reprimand in October 2025.
Marilyn Mosby, the former Baltimore State’s Attorney known for charging officers in the Freddie Gray case, lost a primary and was later convicted on two counts of federal perjury in November 2023 and one count of mortgage fraud in February 2024. She received a year of home detention and three years of supervised release. An appeals court vacated the mortgage fraud conviction over improper jury instructions but upheld the perjury convictions.
Kim Gardner, St. Louis’s chief prosecutor, created a police exclusion list and worked to overturn convictions tainted by misconduct. She resigned in May 2023 after the state attorney general sued to remove her and the legislature moved to let the governor appoint a special prosecutor in her place.
José Garza, the Travis County (Austin) DA, won reelection in November 2024 with more than twice the votes of his Republican challenger. He created a Major Crimes and Homicides Unit, expanded diversion, and expunged records for over 1,000 people arrested but never convicted. His office indicted 21 Austin police officers for aggravated assault tied to injuries during 2020 protests, though 17 of those cases were later dismissed. In 2026, the House Judiciary Committee opened an inquiry into his handling of cases involving immigrant defendants.
The Backlash
Recalls and Electoral Defeats
Boudin’s 2022 recall was the first major loss. In November 2024, Gascón lost his general election on the same night that Alameda County voters recalled DA Pamela Price with more than 63 percent, the first successful DA recall in that county’s history. Earlier in 2024, Portland’s progressive DA Mike Schmidt lost to Nathan Vasquez, a prosecutor and former Republican. Price announced in December 2025 that she would run again in a June 2026 special election.
Gubernatorial Removals in Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis used his constitutional authority to suspend two progressive prosecutors. In August 2022, he removed Andrew Warren, the Hillsborough County State Attorney, citing “neglect of duty” after Warren signed pledges not to enforce state laws on abortion and gender-affirming care. A federal district judge found the suspension likely unconstitutional but said he lacked authority to reinstate Warren. In January 2024, the Eleventh Circuit vacated that ruling and sent the case back, finding Warren’s advocacy was protected speech. Warren ran for his old seat in November 2024 and lost to DeSantis appointee Suzy Lopez, 47 to 53 percent.
In August 2023, DeSantis suspended Monique Worrell, the State Attorney for Orlando, alleging neglect of duty and incompetence. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the suspension in June 2024 and declined to reinstate her. Worrell then ran for reelection in November 2024 and won with 57 percent, defeating the governor’s appointee. She took office again in January 2025.
State Legislative Preemption
Republican-controlled legislatures have moved to curb prosecutorial discretion, generally by letting state attorneys general step in when a local DA declines to prosecute certain offenses.
- Texas House Bill 17, enacted in 2023, allows removal of a district attorney for “official misconduct” if they refuse to prosecute certain categories of crime. Governor Greg Abbott has also proposed making DAs eligible for impeachment and creating a statewide prosecutor role.
- A 2019 Pennsylvania budget amendment gave the state attorney general concurrent jurisdiction over firearm crimes in Philadelphia for two years.
- Georgia created a Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission with discipline and removal authority. The state Supreme Court initially refused to approve its operating rules; the House voted to revive the commission in January 2024. Democrats warned it was designed to interfere with Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s prosecution of Donald Trump.
- Indiana and Missouri introduced bills authorizing their attorneys general to appoint special prosecutors or take over cases that local DAs decline as policy.
Because local prosecutor offices are creatures of state government, legal scholars have observed that they have limited recourse to challenge these laws. A 2022 law review analysis noted that these measures frequently target progressive prosecutors in majority-Black cities within Republican-controlled states.
Federal Investigations
In May 2026, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into Fairfax County, Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, examining whether his office gave preferential treatment to noncitizen defendants in charging, plea bargaining, and sentencing. The probe followed years of conservative complaints about perceived leniency. Descano’s office had not been formally charged with any violation as of the announcement.
Do Progressive Prosecutors Cause Crime to Rise?
The central empirical claim against the movement is that its policies drive crime up. Multiple studies have reached a different conclusion.
A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Toronto, Rutgers, Temple, Loyola University of Chicago, and the University of Missouri–St. Louis examined 65 cities with populations over 250,000. Between 2015 and 2019, cities with progressive prosecutors saw a 43 percent increase in homicides, compared with 55 percent in cities with traditional prosecutors and 53 percent in middle-of-the-road jurisdictions. After controlling for external variables, the type of prosecutor had no statistically significant effect on homicide or larceny rates.
A follow-up by the same team through 2023, published with the Center for American Progress, found crime trends “remarkably alike” across jurisdictions regardless of prosecutorial philosophy, and concluded that patterns are driven mainly by local social, environmental, and economic conditions. The Brennan Center for Justice, using Council on Criminal Justice data from 2018 to 2024, found no meaningful difference in trends for aggravated assault, larceny, or homicide between reform and traditional jurisdictions.
Critics in law enforcement and Republican politics dispute these findings, arguing that declination policies and bail reform foster a sense of lawlessness. Proponents respond that the offenses typically declined, such as marijuana possession, turnstile jumping, and driving on a financially suspended license, are not plausible drivers of violent crime.
Where Things Stand
By 2024, more than a dozen Soros-backed prosecutors had left office through recalls, primary losses, resignations, or removals, though Krasner, Bragg, and others held their seats. Progressive prosecutors continue to win in Philadelphia, Travis County, Norfolk, and Ramsey County, Minnesota, where John Choi has been described as a model progressive prosecutor. Research published in Criminology and Public Policy in 2026 found that while these offices have reduced the severity of punishment across racial groups, they have struggled to eliminate racial disparities in outcomes, in part because the cases police bring them are themselves shaped by structural inequalities. The real-world effect of any DA’s policies also depends on office size, internal culture, and whether line supervisors carry out announced changes.
The political environment has grown more hostile. State legislatures continue to pursue laws overriding local prosecutorial discretion, federal oversight has expanded, and voters in several high-profile jurisdictions have replaced progressive DAs with candidates promising tougher approaches. Fair and Just Prosecution has shifted much of its focus toward defending prosecutorial independence from state interference. Whether the movement is a durable structural change or a political moment that peaked around 2020 is a question elections, courts, and legislatures are still answering.