Anne Marie Schubert — the veteran district attorney for Sacramento County, covering California’s capital city — doesn’t quite fit the profile of the perfect guest for the right-wing Fox News Channel, after she ditched the GOP to become an independent during the presidency of Donald Trump. Yet she’s been on the network recently to make a point that’s music to its conservative audience: A spike in America’s murder rate is the fault of the growing number of Democratic so-called “progressive prosecutors” pushing criminal justice reform.
“They want to dismantle the system,” Schubert said on "Fox & Friends" this January, citing the frequent complaints against reform-minded DAs such as San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, Los Angeles’ George Gascon and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. “You’ve got murderers in prison that are toasting Gascon, celebrating that they’re going to get out of prison early. So these are the types of things that these policies, these prosecutors are doing. We are emboldening criminals to really commit even more crime.”
Yet there was one thing the Fox News hosts failed to ask Schubert during her national TV hit: How well have the “law-and-order” policies of the third-term DA deterred crime in Sacramento? The answer, it turns out, is not much better than in the rest of a nation that’s seen killings rise in tandem with both gun sales and anti-social behavior. Homicides have risen in Sacramento County since the start of the pandemic but especially in the city of Sacramento, which in 2021 saw its highest murder rate in 15 years.
