After running on a promise of being tough on crime, a moderate candidate for Oregon district attorney beat out the current progressive opponent.
Nathan Vasquez was a junior prosecutor for Mike Schmidt, the district attorney for Multnomah County, in the past. The neutral primary election on Tuesday went to Vasquez, who won with more than 50% of the vote.
Several police groups backed Vasquez, and he said Schmidt admitted defeat in a phone call on Wednesday. He worked as a lawyer for more than 20 years in the DA’s office.
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Vasquez wrote on his campaign’s Facebook page, “I want to thank him for his professionalism and service to our community.” “I look forward to working with my colleagues in the DA’s office, with community partners, and with the public to help build a safer Multnomah County for all of us.”
Before Schmidt took office, there were racial justice protests in Portland and other places across the country and the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. There were also calls for changes to the criminal justice system. Around the same time, other DAs who were sworn in in liberal strongholds like San Francisco and Seattle have since had losses because of public anger over crime.
In order to lower the number of people in jail and fix problems with how the criminal justice system treats different racial groups, these district attorneys have mostly pushed for alternatives to jail time and not trying minor crimes.
Criminals and public safety risks have been said to be made easier by these kinds of laws.
Soon after taking office, racial justice protests emerged in Portland, and the streets were a mess almost every night for months. Schmidt said that protesters would not be prosecuted unless they were caught for deliberate damage to property, theft, or the use of force or the threat of force against another person. People said that his office would turn down cases of interfering with a police officer, disorderly behavior, and criminal trespass.
Vasquez revealed the policy and Schmidt’s support for a 2020 ballot measure that would make it less illegal to have small amounts of drugs. In the middle of one of the biggest increases in overdose deaths in the country this year, lawmakers in the state rolled back the law and brought back criminal fines for so-called “personal use” possession.
Vasquez said he was “committed to ending open-air drug dealing and drug use while helping connect individuals to treatment, to rebuilding the broken relationships between the DA’s office and the community, and to ensuring that victims are the number one priority of my office.”
