The “Soft on Crime” Myth Is Bad Journalism and Worse Policy

A data point without context isn’t analysis. It’s a political talking point.

Last week, Willamette Week published an otherwise excellent piece by Anthony Effinger examining how Multnomah County spends its $4 billion budget. Buried in the section on the District Attorney’s office was a sentence that deserves scrutiny: former DA Mike Schmidt’s prosecution numbers dropped 36% over a decade, and Effinger noted — almost as an aside — that this statistic “might back up” the claim that Schmidt was soft on crime.

It might. Or it might not. And that distinction matters enormously.

The Comparison Doesn’t Hold Up

Let’s start with the numbers themselves, because they don’t survive basic methodological scrutiny — and I say that not to criticize Effinger, who I’ve met and regard as a serious journalist, but because this kind of error is exactly how misleading narratives get laundered into conventional wisdom.

Comparing 2015 prosecution totals to 2025 prosecution totals as if they are equivalent units of measurement ignores several foundational facts.

First, one of the most commonly prosecuted crimes in 2015 was drug possession. By 2025, that crime effectively no longer existed in the same form. Oregon voters decriminalized drug possession, first reducing it to a misdemeanor and then removing it from crime status entirely. That single policy change removed an enormous category of cases from the DA’s docket — cases that had nothing to do with my prosecutorial choices and everything to do with what the voters of Oregon decided. Comparing raw prosecution totals across that seismic shift without controlling for it isn’t analysis. It’s noise. Similar monumental changes occurred in the area of juvenile law with SB 1008 (2019) - again - none of that context was considered.

Second, and more fundamentally, Effinger never examines the most important variable in any evaluation of a DA’s prosecution numbers: how many cases did police actually submit for prosecution? A DA’s office does not generate its own cases. It receives cases from law enforcement. Arrest rates, referral rates, and the volume of cases submitted to the DA’s office in 2015 versus 2025 are the essential inputs for any honest comparison. If police made fewer arrests — due to staffing shortages, policy changes, or community relations — prosecution numbers will fall regardless of what the DA wants to do. Ignoring that variable isn’t just an oversight. It renders the entire comparison meaningless.

Third, Effinger makes no mention of the public defender crisis — a defining feature of Oregon’s criminal justice system in the 2020s that simply did not exist in 2015. Oregon’s public defense system has been in a state of sustained collapse, with chronic underfunding producing a shortage of attorneys so severe that courts have been forced to dismiss cases wholesale. Any experienced prosecutor — and I speak from that experience — would tell you that when there are not enough defense attorneys to handle a full docket, a DA who cares about actual outcomes has to prioritize. You focus your resources on the most serious cases: violent offenses, repeat offenders, the cases where prosecution genuinely protects the public. You do not indiscriminately file everything you can and hope the system holds together, because it won’t.

And here is where the “tough on crime” argument collapses entirely under the weight of its own evidence: the current DA, Nathan Vasquez — the one who ran on toughness and won — just had 900 cases dismissed for lack of public defenders. Nine hundred cases. Gone. Not diverted. Not resolved. Dismissed. Is that tough on crime? Is that good for public safety? Filing as many cases as possible, overwhelming a broken system, and then watching nearly a thousand of them vanish — that is not a prosecution strategy. That is performance. And the victims and communities in those 900 cases paid the price for it.

The Deeper Problem

The phrase “soft on crime” isn’t neutral language. It’s a rhetorical weapon. For more than half a century, American politicians have deployed it to justify policies rooted in punishment over prevention, incarceration over intervention, and retribution over rehabilitation. The results are not ambiguous: the United States incarcerates more people per capita than virtually any nation on earth — more than Russia, more than China, more than any Western democracy by a staggering margin. This is the legacy of “tough on crime.” Not safer communities (we are not the safest country on earth - not even close). But we have achieved the most expensive, expansive carceral system in human history.

And what does the research show? Consistently, across decades and jurisdictions, there is no reliable causal relationship between prosecutorial aggressiveness — measured by prosecution rates, conviction rates, or sentence lengths — and public safety outcomes. Crime is driven by poverty, housing instability, addiction, mental illness, and the presence or absence of economic opportunity. Not by whether a DA charges every case that crosses the desk. Consider for example the national crime spike felt in every jurisdiction across the country when our society was massively disrupted by the COVID pandemic. If tough on crime strategies prevented crime - you would have expected communities with tough DA’s to have been inoculated from the pandemic’s criminogenic effects….they weren’t.

The political genius of “tough on crime” is that it’s infallible. If crime goes down, toughness gets the credit. If crime goes up, we simply weren’t tough enough. It is a closed loop, immune to evidence, endlessly useful to politicians who need a simple message in a complex world. And it works — right up until 900 cases get dismissed and nobody calls that soft on anything.

Multnomah County deserves an honest budget conversation in a brutal fiscal environment. Journalists covering that conversation — even good ones — have an obligation to interrogate the numbers they cite rather than hand them to politicians as ammunition. “Soft on crime” is a phrase designed to end thinking, not start it. We have paid dearly, as a society, for every time we let it do exactly that.