There’s a new sheriff in town in NOLA—literally. A former Independent Police Supervisor, Susan Hutson, recently edged out a 17-year-old incumbent in a stunning upset for the sheriff’s office, and Hutson will be New Orleans’ first black woman and first sheriff when she assumes her position. May 2nd.

Hutson is a self-proclaimed reformer in ideological alignment with progressive DAs who have taken office across the country, including in major cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco. But while San Francisco and Chicago may survive incremental police reform, New Orleans will not.

In Chicago, Kim Foxx leads the second largest district attorney’s office in the country. She was first elected in 2016 after running on a criminal justice reform platform, then re-elected in 2020. But Foxx has been criticized for her soft on crime approach in the face of rising crime. city ​​crime rate. In Philadelphia, progressive prosecutor Larry Krasner has come under fire for his office’s handling of gun crimes in a city that, as of 2021, has the highest murder rate in the nation. And in San Francisco, DA Chesa Boudin is facing a recall amid a dramatic rise in crime after campaigning on defiance of police and pledging to stop prosecuting ‘victimless crimes’ like the prostitution and drug trafficking in the open air.

And as I watch a sheriff cast in the same mold prepare to take office in New Orleans, I can’t help but freak out a bit. Because we will not survive such an assault on the police.

I am a fifth generation Northern Californian who moved to New Orleans after college and have now spent half my life here. The city has changed drastically over the years I have lived here. It was a really dangerous place in 2000. After its murder rate peaked in 1994, it remained among the highest murder rates in the country for the next decade. But after Hurricane Katrina, large investments of federal reconstruction money and an infusion of young, educated national migrants determined to improve the city changed things; the crime rate dropped drastically.

But this positive trend has reversed in the past two years. While overall crime has dropped 7% during the pandemic, violent crime has increased 7%, with murders increasing 8%.

Bywater, the historic neighborhood where I lived most of my years here, has also changed over the past 20 years. What began as a working-class neighborhood populated by Irish and German immigrants and free people of color, Bywater was predominantly black when I moved here. After desegregation, the neighborhood experienced “white flight” and disinvestment. In the 1990s and 2000s, a tough breed of young bohemians began to colonize the neighborhood, many of them gays and lesbians fleeing the rural south. These people, many of them artists, worked in the hospitality industry fueled by the nearby French Quarter. I was one of them.

And over the past twenty years, the neighborhood has gentrified at a staggering rate. White, educated transplants from other states (like me) slowly moved the old population out of the area. When I first moved to the neighborhood, the dilapidated shotgun houses cost $50,000. Now, refurbished high-end shotguns cost $750,000.

And it is the people in the market for these houses who vote to decriminalize the reformers.

The city’s gentrified neighborhoods voted overwhelmingly for Susan Hutson, while solidly middle-class black neighborhoods voted for the incumbent, along with older white neighborhoods.

With their long history in the violent city, people here tended to vote for Marlin Gusman. Newcomers, less familiar with the bloody days of decades past, voted for Susan Hutson.

And the new transplants are trying to bring San Francisco to New Orleans.

By now everyone knows San Fransisco’s roving gangs of criminals robbing stores with impunity, the way Union Square was boarded up, the sidewalks covered in feces as the city’s homeless population is installed almost anywhere.

I’ve seen longtime residents of SF clamoring to get out. I listened to former die-hard progressives start calling to oust Boudin. Things are not looking good for the reformer, whose recall election takes place on June 7.

I suspect the pendulum will swing and San Francisco, along with many other cities led by progressive reformers, will recall them or elect prosecutors and sheriffs with law enforcement as a priority, rather than utopian, unrealistic reforms. .

But Susan Hutson inherits a city in the midst of a shocking rise in violent crime at the start of 2022. In the first nine weeks of this year, homicides are up 37% from 2021 totals. who I’m talking to seem to have a story about an acquaintance who was the victim of a carjacking. These incidents have increased by 60% since last year. Shootings and armed robberies increased by 18% and 32% respectively. New Orleans is also hemorrhaging police officers.

In these grim realities, a DA who refuses to prosecute non-fatal crimes and a sheriff who opposes modernizing and expanding our ability to incarcerate violent criminals and serve the mentally ill who roam our streets s will prove disastrous.

The West Coast bastion of ultra-liberal politics, with its huge economy and rich tax base, will be able to recover from its fumbling in progressive police reform. But I fear that if implemented here, it will be several decades before New Orleans has a chance to heal from this ill-conceived experiment, which is coming at precisely the worst possible time.

In New Orleans, middle-class residents are beginning to move to the suburbs. I see “for sale” signs going up every day. I just placed one in front of my house after getting tired of motorists driving down my street at dangerously high speeds, endless robberies and falling asleep to the nightly sound of gunfire erupting a few blocks away. Fleeing the New Orleans metro is as difficult a decision as leaving my home country 22 years ago. But I’ve lived through New Orleans at its worst before. And now, entering my fifties and parenting, I don’t want to go through that again.

Meghann McCracken is a screenwriter, essayist, and graduate student at Louisiana State University School of Social Work.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.