The limp progressive response to rising crime and disorder has benefited Texas and Florida.

Remember Billy Joel’s old friend, the one he sang about in the late-1970s? The guy who “closed the shop, sold the house, bought a ticket to the West Coast”? Well, chances are he’s not living there anymore.
 

The Census Bureau announced last month that California has gone the way of New York and Illinois in terms of lackluster population growth and thus will lose a congressional seat in decennial apportionments for the first time ever. Meanwhile, states like Texas and Florida have experienced strong population gains and will increase the size of their delegations in Washington.
 

These population trends predate Covid-19. The Texases and Floridas have long sported lower taxes and better job growth than the Californias and New Yorks, as well as more-welcoming business climates. The pandemic could accelerate these demographic shifts from blue to red states, or from urban to rural locales, as more people work remotely, but don’t underestimate the degree to which social factors could also play an important role in where Americans choose to live.
 

Big blue states aren’t only fiscal train wrecks but often lead the country in faddish thinking about crime and safety. Levels of vagrancy in progressive redoubts like New York City and San Francisco have reached levels that are too high to ignore. In Frisco, which is run by liberals who like to lecture the country about the treatment of low-income minorities, the homeless population numbers 18,000, more than a third of whom are black.
 

In New York City, shootings and homicides rose by 97% and 44%, respectively, in 2020, and felony assaults are up by 25% this year. Yet seven of the eight candidates running in the Democratic primary for Manhattan district attorney have pledged to cut the police budget or prosecute fewer suspects—or some combination of the two. On Sunday, the New York Times endorsed Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation department commissioner, for mayor. According to the paper, Ms. Garcia will address the city’s crime wave by “reforming the New York Police Department,” which “begins with speeding up and strengthening the disciplinary process” for officers.
 

The idea that crime is ultimately the fault of law enforcement (and not criminals) may be head-scratching to most people, but it’s become an article of faith among liberals who believe that fewer cops and prosecutions are the key to safer communities. Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney, Larry Krasner, has been in office since 2017. According to an analysis of crime data in City Journal by Thomas Hogan, a former federal prosecutor, Philadelphia is currently “on track to set two city records: the lowest number of felony prosecutions in modern history and the highest number of homicides.”
 

Baltimore began defunding law enforcement and turning a blind eye to criminal behavior a decade ago, and since then nearly 3,000 of its residents have been murdered. No matter. In March, the city’s top prosecutor announced that “the era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over” and that her office would no longer pursue so-called minor offenses. This year Baltimore’s homicide rate, which is 10 times the national average, has risen by more than 17%.

Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón has gone so far as to claim social science supports lighter sentencing as a means for reducing recidivism. According to Mr. Gascón, longer sentences increase the rate at which felons commit more crimes after being released. His office has pursued shorter sentences for offenders in the name of public safety. “We are doing all of this because the science and data tell us so,” he said in March.
 

Yet a new working paper by the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation calls into question whether progressives are in fact “following the science.” Written by criminologist Elizabeth Berger and legal scholar Kent Scheidegger, the paper surveys a wide body of published research on the connection between harsher sentencing and recidivism and concludes that most studies find either no effect at all or a small reduction in recidivism.
 

“Even as evidence-based policy has gained some acceptance in the field, policies such as Gascón’s . . . are too often based on selectively cited research rather than the full breadth of research as a whole,” the authors explain. “The U.S. criminal justice system has a lengthy history of rapidly implementing sweeping policy change without comprehensively considering the potential effects, often resulting in damaging consequences that are difficult if not impossible to reverse.”
 

We are watching this history repeat itself as progressives try to persuade us that police officers and prosecutors are a bigger problem than criminality and that deterrence doesn’t work. Average Americans are too smart to buy into that, or to allow themselves and their families to be used as guinea pigs in these criminal justice “reform” experiments. And they’re voting with their feet.

Appeared in the May 19, 2021, print edition.