Los Angeles's new district attorney, George Gascón, who ran his campaign with a healthy heaping of George Soros funding, has announced that henceforth he will no longer prosecute quality of life offenses or ask for cash bail.  Like leftists all over 2020 America, he's reimagining criminal justice as a world without police, without laws, and without jails.  While he tries to sell a Garden of Eden, I'm imagining Mad Max rules, while being grateful, very grateful, that my friends in L.A. are legally armed.

I'm probably among the last generation that remembers old-style Los Angeles policing in keeping with Jack Webb's Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet.  Friday believed in law and order because he believed that ordinary people deserve a break.  He was happy to bring in the punks and the lowlifes, the grifters and assaulters.  Being tough on them ultimately made life better for everyone.

As a little girl, I found it intensely satisfying, week after week, to hear the official voice at the end of the episode announce the criminal sentence imposed on the criminal unlucky enough that week to have a run-in with Sergeant Friday.  This was especially true because, at the time, my own city of San Francisco was filling up with dirty, drugged out hippies.  (I was a judgmental child.)

The LAPD took a serious hit in 1994 with the O.J. Simpson trial.  We also learned that, during Hollywood's heyday, the cops were often fixers for the studios.  Still, the general sense was that most L.A. police officers were trying hard to ensure that ordinary people across one of America's largest urban landscapes were able to live with a respectable degree of law and order.

That's about to change.

George Gascón is yet another in a long line of city and state-level political figures whom George Soros is funding.  Soros, who is morally corrupt but not stupid, understands that the best way to impose fundamental change in America is to change it at the local level.  As we've seen over the past month, Soros's investments in the people who count the votes have already borne fruit.

During his swearing-in ceremony on Monday, Gascón spelled out for Angelinos what they can expect from his approach to crime in that city of almost 4 million people.  During his race against Jackie Lacey, a black woman (showing that he's not only a leftist, but also a racist, toxic, and entitled white male), Gascón promised to stop death penalty requests and to end trying juveniles as adults.

While voters may have been ready for those changes, they might have been less excited about the details he introduced at his swearing-in.  He tried to make it sound exciting.  "I ask you to join me on this journey.  We can break the multigenerational cycles of violence, trauma and arrest and recidivism that has led America to incarcerate more people than any other nation."

The facts on the ground, though, will excite few L.A. residents.  Gascón will end prosecutorial requests for cash bail.  Instead, prosecutors will ask judges to release all arrestees unless they're charged with homicide or another violent felony.  Also, he has a plan that will have a seismic effect on the quality of life for people in Los Angeles:

Gascón also ordered L.A. County prosecutors to stop prosecuting first-time offenders accused of a wide array of nonviolent crimes, including criminal trespass, disturbing the peace, public intoxication and loitering.

Defense attorneys contend such low-level nuisance crimes disproportionately affect homeless and mentally ill defendants, and can have long-term implications when those people try to find work and housing later in life. Instead of seeking plea deals or convictions, prosecutors will be expected to steer such defendants into pre-trial diversion programs that resolve cases through counseling or other forms of rehabilitation.

If Los Angeles residents want to see their future, they just have to look to San Francisco, where Gascón implemented the same policies before the even more radical Chesa Boudin took over.  The hippies I disliked as a child were model citizens compared to what Gascón and Boudin have done to that lovely place.  In 2018, under Gascón, the city's decay became a worldwide scandal.  San Francisco got a poop map once defecating on the street became de facto legal.  Now, two years later, San Francisco is officially a lawless city.

Los Angeles already has the second largest homeless population in America.  Once lifestyle policing goes out the window, there'll be nothing separating Los Angeles from Mad Max's dystopia.

There's going to be a lot of suffering come down the pipeline, as criminals inevitably prey on vulnerable street people and the working and middle classes.  Expect the exodus from California to increase, with huge numbers of leftists, having despoiled the Golden State but still not learning their lesson, spreading the same disastrous policies across America.

Image: George Gascón on the San Francisco Police Department by Shawn Calhoun.  This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic, and 1.0 Generic license.