Criminal Justice, Inequality, and Representation in Local Governments

The movement for racial justice and protest of police killings in 2020 put renewed focus on the local political offices that oversee law enforcement and criminal justice. These offices—district attorneys and sheriffs, for the most part—are elected in thousands of cities and counties across the United States. Yet little work has assessed how voters choose candidates for these offices, and especially how much voters draw on their own assessments of local police performance as well as on their attitudes about policies that would regulate police tactics and behavior. In this paper, we report initial results from surveys of Americans in 124 different cities and counties that held local elections in 2020-24. We focus here especially on the races for local prosecutors or sheriffs in 59 communities. We find limited evidence that citizens' policing and criminal justice policy preferences are associated with voting for prosecutor or sheriff. However, we find some evidence that vote choices in mayoral elections are related to policy views on criminal justice. Together, this suggests that local elections may provide a mechanism – albeit weak – for representation in local criminal justice systems.