Big blue cities are embracing conservative anti-crime measures. Here’s why.

San Francisco’s liberal voters just endorsed drug screenings for welfare recipients. Washington’s progressive City Council passed a crime package Tuesday that will keep more people in jail while awaiting trial. And New York’s governor on Wednesday ordered hundreds of National Guard troops to deploy inside the city’s troubled subway system.

The country’s biggest, bluest cities are embracing tough-on-crime policies that would have been politically heretical just a few years ago — ratcheting up criminal penalties and expanding police power amid fear and anger over a rash of brazen crimes like carjackings and retail theft.

These Democrat-led policy changes mark a stark reversal from 2020, when the growing influence of progressives fueled a national effort to curb police powers and scale back law enforcement budgets following the murder of George Floyd.

Now the left is in retreat on criminal justice.

“I don’t believe it’s progressive to allow people to get assaulted on the streets at night. I don’t believe it’s progressive to allow people to sleep in tents,” Mark Farrell, a moderate Democrat challenging San Francisco Mayor London Breed, said on Tuesday. “This is not the city I grew up in. It’s not a city I recognize right now.”

Blue cities are pushing these harsher policies even as crime has ticked down significantly nationwide, following big spikes during the pandemic — although that trendline has been slower to emerge in some major cities like Washington and San Francisco. It’s the perception of increased crime that is driving many of these changes as Republicans continue to pillory Democrats as weak on law enforcement in the run-up to the presidential election.

“What we're seeing now is a recognition that we have to lean in and do more as government to provide for the safety and well-being of our residents,” said Democrat Brooke Pinto, the Washington councilmember who championed the crime package. “We didn’t do a complete 180 from where we were, but instead we looked at the practical realities on the ground and sought to right-size many of those reforms.”

California has epitomized the ebb and flow of criminal justice politics. After championing stringent penalties for decades that filled prisons to capacity, the state has spent the last several years swinging in the other direction as its politics and urban centers became ever-more Democratic.

This week’s election results mark a shift back to the center.

In San Francisco, voters passed Breed’s ballot initiatives to lift restrictions on police operations and screen welfare recipients for drug use — two traditionally conservative proposals that nevertheless resonated with an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, illustrating voters’ frustration with public drug use.

“You’re saving the Democratic Party from itself,” San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, a moderate Breed ally, told activists at the mayor’s election-night party on Tuesday.

Breed and Democratic San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan have also endorsed a statewide referendum, intended for the November ballot and backed by prosecutors, that would increase penalties for drug and property crimes. That would roll back a 2014 sentencing-slashing ballot initiative that passed thanks in part to broad support from Democratic officials.

“You get these kinds of corrective or over-corrective acts. Some of it’s political,” said Tori Verber Salazar, a progressive former San Joaquin County District Attorney. “You’ve got a mayor that’s in big trouble, likely not going to be mayor again, so she’s throwing some hail marys out there.”

In Los Angeles, progressive District Attorney George Gascón is limping into his reelection bid. Four years ago, Gascón channeled a racial justice upsurge to topple an incumbent on a platform of reducing incarceration and prosecuting more police officers. His win was a signal victory for a national movement to elect liberal prosecutors.

But his standing has eroded badly since then, and in a Tuesday primary packed with challengers Gascón won around a fifth of the votes counted so far — a dismal showing for an incumbent. He will match up with former prosecutor Nathan Hochman in a replay-in-miniature of the state’s 2022 attorney general race, when Hochman challenged progressive incumbent Rob Bonta.

And in Alameda County, where Oakland’s crime woes have prompted a state intervention, embattled progressive District Attorney Pamela Price is likely to face a recall election before her first term is up — an echo of the 2022 ouster of then-San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

Democrats on the East Coast are also distancing themselves from progressive policies viewed as soft-on-crime.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday she is deploying the national guard to New York City's subway system after a violent string of transit attacks, including one instance where a subway conductor was slashed in the neck while on the job.

Hochul’s announcement, which also includes increasing the numbers of state and Metropolitan Transportation Authority police in the subways, comes two days after she doubled down on her commitment to fighting crime.

On Monday, the governor lauded state officers for increasing gun seizures and driving down violent crimes and carjackings upstate.

“This is not just a one off; this is the type of aggressive policing that our state police has been engaged in every single day,” Hochul said.

During that announcement, she firmly separated herself from changes to bail laws passed by former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, which were used by Republicans to cast Hochul as soft-on-crime during her 2022 gubernatorial election.

That race proved to be surprisingly — and, for Democrats, embarrassingly — competitive. Hochul beat former Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin by the smallest margin of victory in three decades of any New York governor’s race.

As she looks toward her 2026 reelection, Hochul’s campaign told POLITICO they are keen to continue promoting her work to strengthen bail laws and drive down crime.

“I cannot have people that committed a crime being turned out again because we don't have the standards in place,” Hochul said Monday.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams — a former NYPD captain who ran a tough-on-crime campaign for office — is making similar moves to crack down on crime in the country’s largest transit system, which saw a 45 percent spike in serious incidents in January, largely driven by theft.

In response, the Democratic mayor flooded stations with more officers who have focused on boosting arrest numbers to historic levels. Over the course of February, transit crime subsequently fell 15 percent compared to the year before.A heavier police presence, Adams argued, is also key to changing perceptions about crime that do not always align with the statistics.

“Nothing encourages the feeling of safety more than having a uniformed officer present from the bag checks when you first come into the system to watching them walk through the subway cars to the platforms,” he said during a Wednesday interview on FOX 5.

The aggressive moves by New York officials to address subway crime quickly sparked denouncements from progressives.

“These heavy-handed approaches will, like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers, ripping a page straight out of the Giuliani playbook,” New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement responding to Hochul’s announcement.

The nation’s capital has also been beset by angst over crime, including the highest number of murders in more than two decades last year. A series of high-profile crimes in recent months have further heightened anxiety.

In October, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) was carjacked at gunpoint just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Then last month, Mike Gill, a former city election official who served in both the Obama and Trump administrations, was shot and killed while picking up his wife in downtown Washington.

The headline-grabbing incidents have led to Republican denunciations of the city’s purportedly lax criminal justice policies.

“No section of this city can be considered safe anymore,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) said during an October congressional hearing. “The Washington, D.C., City Council has passed laws that emboldened criminals and hamstrung the police.”

While city officials dismiss such characterizations as baseless fear mongering, they’ve nonetheless dramatically changed their approach in recent months. Most significantly, that included passing a major criminal justice package on Tuesday — with all but one member of the City Council backing the bill — that toughens penalties and expands police powers.

They’re responding to constituents who are fed up with the city’s crime problems. Two members of the City Council — Charles Allen and Brianne Nadeau — are facing recall campaigns, spurred by anger over their support for liberal crime policies. Both backed the crime package on Tuesday.

“A collective sigh of relief I think is the sense that I’m feeling from people who are reaching out,” City Council member Pinto, the chief sponsor of the “Secure D.C.” package, said of the response. “I have heard from so many residents in the last 24 hours who feel like finally their calls for action and change have been heard and we will start to have a safer and more secure city.”

Joe Anuta and Dustin Gardiner contributed to this report.