It is an honor to stand with you—the men and women of the International Union of Police Associations. You don’t just discuss public safety; you shoulder it. Police officers, deputies, corrections officers, dispatchers, firefighters, EMTs, and first responders know that civilization is not self-executing; it must be defended.

The rule of law is not a slogan. It is a shield for the innocent, a warning to the violent, and a compact between citizen and state. Yet in too many cities, that compact has been frayed by a rogue prosecutor movement—funded and celebrated by George Soros and his allies—that substitutes ideology for justice, coddles criminals, silences victims, handcuffs police, and then feigns surprise when lawlessness follows.

Today, I will speak plainly about that movement, why it endangers communities, and how we can restore accountability and back those who enforce the law. Let me start with two true stories that epitomize the Soros rogue prosecutor movement and its tragic consequences.

First Story: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2020

Before dawn on March 13, 2020, Corporal James O’Connor and his fellow officers move toward a white, two-story rowhouse on Bridge Street in Philadelphia’s Frankford neighborhood. They are there to do the hard, dangerous, necessary work that keeps civilized life possible: execute an arrest warrant for 21-year-old Hassan Elliott, wanted in a March 2019 robbery and murder just around the corner. It is the work you guys do while most of the city sleeps—unromantic, unforgiving, and indispensable.

Inside, the officers find Elliott. Before they can reach him, more than a dozen rounds tear through the door. One round finds O’Connor. Thirty minutes later, doctors pronounce him dead.

That is the immediate horror. The larger scandal is that Elliott is free to be there at all.

In 2017, before Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner takes office, thanks to over $1.7 million from Soros groups, Elliott is arrested for threatening a neighborhood resident with a gun. After Krasner becomes District Attorney, his office offers Elliott a below-guidelines deal: nine to 23 months followed by probation. Elliott accepts. The next day, after serving only seven months and 16 days, he walks out.

The warnings come at once. Probation classifies him “high risk.” He fails drug tests. He misses reports. Then he is arrested again—this time with 15 packets of cocaine. The arrest violates parole. Yet Larry Krasner’s office does not seek a detainer, does not ask that he be held, and does not seek bail.

On March 1, 2019, Elliott appears in court on the cocaine case. Later that day, he allegedly helps murder Tyrone Tyree on Duffield Street, firing at close range as Tyree sits in his car. Video shows Elliott fleeing. His fingerprints are found on an alleged murder weapon.

The day before Elliott’s cocaine trial, prosecutors finally secure a warrant in the Tyree murder. On March 27, Elliott fails to appear for the cocaine case—so Krasner’s office withdraws the charges!

The next time law enforcement sees Hassan Elliott, he is behind a door in Frankford, shooting through it. Corporal James O’Connor is on the other side. A dangerous man is spared custody again and again, and a good cop and his family pay the price.

Second Story: Baltimore, Maryland, 2022

In June 2022, word moves fast through Maryland’s Eastern Shore: A dangerous stranger is in town. His name is Austin Jacob Allen Davidson, 20 years old, a fugitive, and a convicted felon. His criminal record begins in childhood: 20 juvenile arrests beginning in 2016, followed by 10 adult arrests.

In 2019, at 17, he masks up, drives to a McDonald’s in northeast Baltimore where he once worked, points a semiautomatic handgun at the drive-through employee, and takes the cash drawer containing more than $1,100. Two weeks later, he returns to the same restaurant. The employee recognizes him and asks why he pointed a gun at her. Davidson gives the sociopath’s answer: “Because I can.”

Armed robbery with a handgun is serious. It is a violent crime. Maryland law provides serious punishment, including a mandatory five-year prison term for using a handgun in such a robbery. Yet Baltimore’s Soros rogue prosecutor Marilyn Mosby lets Davidson plead to armed robbery, drops the other charges, avoids the mandatory minimum, and makes sure he gets probation before judgment (PBJ). A PBJ, in practice, is just an easy way to dispose of a case and pretend mercy is policy.

Davidson repays that mercy the way most career criminals do: He keeps committing crimes. While on probation, he is arrested and charged again and again in several Maryland counties: drugs, forged currency, driving violations, assault, malicious destruction, theft, burglary, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. His probation officer repeatedly alerts Mosby’s office to violate his probation. The office does nothing—until the paper trail becomes impossible to ignore. By June 2022, Davidson has warrants from Baltimore City and Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset Counties.

On June 13, a tip puts Davidson at an apartment complex in Pittsville. Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis sends deputies, including Deputy First Class Glenn Hilliard, 41, a husband to Tashica and father of three.

Hilliard spots Davidson under a stairwell. Davidson runs. Hilliard gives chase and warns that he will deploy his taser. Davidson stops, reaches into his backpack, pulls a 9mm handgun with a fully loaded 30-round magazine, takes a two-handed grip, and fires. One round strikes Hilliard in the shoulder; another hits his forehead. The body camera captures it all. Hilliard dies that day.

As if that’s not bad enough, there’s another crappy aspect to this tragedy. Maryland’s new police “accountability” law, passed over Governor Larry Hogan’s veto and celebrated by Mosby, forces officers to hesitate, to parse proportionality in the split second when criminals act without hesitation at all. Ironically, three weeks before he was murdered, Hilliard receives the taser he carries when Davidson kills him.

So once again, a violent repeat offender receives leniency, violates it repeatedly, remains free, and finally murders a deputy sheriff. On June 21, Maryland law enforcement buries Glenn Hilliard.

In 2023, Davidson was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole plus 66 consecutive years. But the damage was done, and Tashica is a widow, and her kids don’t have a father.

A Pattern of Betrayal

As a former local, state, federal, and military prosecutor, I felt compelled to expose this cancerous radical movement. That’s why my colleague Zack Smith and I have been exposing this movement for what it is: an assault on the rule of law. That’s why we wrote our book, Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities.[REF]

For our criminal justice systems across this country to work as they are designed to work, they rely on people in each branch of government, federal or state, to do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes. But what happens when elected district attorneys—members of their state’s executive branch—refuse to faithfully execute the law or, worse, usurp the power of the legislature to themselves? They become rogue prosecutors.

And when they become rogue prosecutors, they do not merely betray a legal theory. They betray you. They betray the officer who makes the arrest, the deputy who serves the warrant, the sheriff who runs the jail, the dispatcher who stays on the line, the paramedic who treats the victim, and the family that thought government would at least do the first duty of government: Protect the innocent.

In our republic, approximately 90 percent of criminal cases are handled by the roughly 2,300 elected district attorneys spread across America’s counties. The remaining 10 percent are prosecuted by the Department of Justice through the 93 United States Attorneys’ Offices. That means the local prosecutor is not a peripheral actor. He is the hinge on which justice turns.

Until recently, most elected prosecutors—Republican and Democrat alike—understood the job. They enforced the laws firmly and fairly. They protected victims. They prosecuted violent criminals. They worked with law enforcement, not against it. They also helped create drug courts, veterans’ courts, mental health courts, domestic violence courts, and other alternatives to incarceration where mercy was prudent and accountability remained real.

Then came 2015 and the birth of the George Soros–funded so-called progressive prosecutor movement. Its adherents claim they are reformers. They are not. They are radicals with law degrees, backed by immense ideological money, running for obscure local offices because they learned something the average voter had not: If you capture the prosecutor’s office, you can turn the courthouse into the place where arrests go to die.

This movement is animated by two poisonous ideas:

• First, that the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist.
• Second, that the way to cure that alleged sickness is to reverse-engineer and dismantle the system by replacing law-and-order prosecutors with pro-criminal, anti-victim, cop-hating zealots.

They are inspired, believe it or not, by the prison abolition movement. Here’s their playbook: Don’t send folks to prison, and, presto, prisons go away. So now you know where these nutty Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates are coming from—the exact same place.

The sick irony of the rogue prosecutor movement is this: The very communities these activists claim to champion—minority neighborhoods, working-class neighborhoods, inner-city neighborhoods—have paid the highest price. When violent repeat offenders are released; when retail theft becomes a business model; when carjacking becomes routine; when gun cases are pled down, dismissed, or ignored, the victims are not the elites at cocktail parties. The victims are mothers walking children to school, small-business owners trying to keep the doors open, elderly residents waiting at bus stops, and young men in neighborhoods where the sound of gunfire is too familiar.

Devaluing Law Enforcement

And make no mistake: Police are victims of this movement too. Not because you lack courage—you prove your courage every day—but because rogue prosecutors deliberately devalue your work. They tell criminals that your arrest reports are merely suggestions. They tell victims that their suffering is an inconvenience. They tell officers that probable cause, body cameras, witnesses, evidence, confessions, and courage may all be tossed aside because the elected prosecutor has a theory, a donor network, and contempt for the badge.

Their playbook is familiar now.

• They refuse to prosecute whole categories of crimes while hiding behind the fig leaf of prosecutorial discretion.
• They downgrade felonies to misdemeanors.
• They don’t prosecute misdemeanors.
• They decline sentencing enhancements.
• They refuse cash bail even for dangerous repeat offenders.
• They treat juveniles who commit adult violence as if the problem were paperwork rather than predation.
• They fire experienced career prosecutors and replace them with ideologues who see defendants as clients, victims as abstractions, and police officers as adversaries.

That is not discretion; it is prosecutorial nullification. It is not reform; it is abdication. It is not justice; it is government malpractice with a press release.

Valid prosecutorial discretion has always existed. Real prosecutors decline weak cases, honor constitutional limits, evaluate evidence, weigh witness credibility, negotiate just pleas, and reserve prison beds for those who truly merit them. But real discretion is case-by-case.

Rogue prosecution is categorical nullification. It announces to criminals in advance that statutes will not be enforced. It sends a dispatch over the criminal grapevine: Come one, come all—the courthouse door is open, and accountability is optional.

Every officer here knows what happens when consequences disappear. Calls increase. Repeat offenders become emboldened. Traffic stops become more dangerous. Domestic violence calls become more volatile. Retail theft crews become more organized. Gangs recruit younger children because they know the system will blink. The line between disorder and violence gets thinner, and the people asked to stand on that line are you.

When prosecutors refuse to seek meaningful bail, the same offender you arrested on Monday will be back on the street by Tuesday and confronting another officer usually by Friday. When prosecutors refuse enhancements for guns, gangs, prior convictions, or special circumstances, they erase the very facts that explain the danger to the public and to law enforcement. When they decline to prosecute resisting arrest, threats, stolen property, drug distribution, and repeat theft, they tell offenders to test the system, to test the officer, and to test the limits of civil order. It’s a green light to criminality.

This is why the rogue prosecutor movement is not only a threat to victims and communities. It is a threat to every police officer, sheriff, deputy, corrections officer, firefighter, medic, and dispatcher who depends on a functioning justice system after the emergency call ends.

Cruelty Masked as Reform: A Legacy of Failure

In Philadelphia, before Larry Krasner took office, the city averaged 271 homicides per year. In his first five years, the average rose to 457; non-fatal shootings jumped from 1,047 per year to 1,488; aggravated assaults while armed jumped from 2,209 per year to 3,116; retail thefts exploded from 7,412 per year to 9,084; and auto thefts went from 5,691 per year to 8,665 thanks to Uncle Larry’s hands-off policies.

In Chicago, in the six years before Kim Foxx took office, there was an average of 445 homicides per year from 2010–2015. But in 2016, when Kim Foxx took office, homicides spiked to 778 in her first year and through 2021 averaged 680 per year. Seventy-five percent of homicide victims were black, and 87 percent of them were males.

The crime numbers are similarly bad in most rogue prosecutors’ cities.

Of the 2,300 elected DAs across the country, 70 or so are Soros bought-and-paid-for radicals representing about 65 percent of the U.S. population. Soros and his allies have spent over $50 million in direct campaign spending and an estimated $1 billion in indirect spending to help elect these folks.

Those crime numbers are not abstractions. Each one is a body, a family, a crime scene, a homicide detective’s file, a patrol officer’s memory, a mother’s grief, a neighborhood’s trauma. Each one is also a warning: When the prosecutor’s office stops enforcing the law, lawlessness does not remain theoretical. It arrives in blood, broken glass, boarded windows, and blue lights.

And let’s tell the truth: The people most harmed by this experiment are often victims of color in inner-city neighborhoods. They are the people who cannot retreat behind gates, hire private security, or decamp to safer ZIP codes when the ideology fails. They are told that prosecution is oppression while they bury their sons. They are told that safety is a privilege while they live under siege. That is not compassion. That is cruelty wearing the mask of reform.

Fighting Back

The good news is that the American people are waking up. Voters have seen what happens when slogans replace statutes and ideology replaces judgment. San Francisco recalled Chesa Boudin. Voters rejected Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore and George Gascón in Los Angeles. Others have resigned, stumbled, or faced serious electoral resistance like Kim Gardner in St. Louis, Rachael Rollins in Boston, or Kim Foxx in Chicago. Citizens are learning that the district attorney’s race has a direct impact on your public safety and are waking up to that reality.

So here is my charge to you: Tell the truth. Tell it without apology. Expose this movement for what it is and what it has done. Explain to your neighbors that policing without prosecution is a revolving door with a badge standing outside it. Explain that victims deserve more than hashtags. Explain that officer safety depends on prosecutors who will hold offenders accountable. Explain that law and order is not a partisan slogan—it is the moral architecture of a free society.

Arm yourself with the facts about this movement. Read our book. Go to our website and watch the videos.[REF] Follow the dirty Soros money in your state or county and expose the frauds and fake prosecutors.

Holding the Line

I wore a Navy uniform for 30 years. I know what it means to serve. I honor your service. Your badge represents restraint, courage, duty, and lawful authority.

The rogue prosecutor movement represents the opposite: a calculated refusal to enforce the law, a contempt for victims, and a dangerous hostility to those who keep the peace. We must defeat it—at the ballot box, in public debate, in state legislatures, and in every forum where citizens still understand that liberty cannot survive without order.

To the officers and first responders in this room: You have held the line while too many politicians have cut the line behind you. You have honored your oath while too many prosecutors have ignored theirs. You have answered the call while others have excused the criminal. And for that, America owes you not empty praise, but real prosecutors, honest judges, patriotic legislators, and citizens worthy of your honorable service.

Telling the truth helps to restore the rule of law, defends the innocent, honors the badge, and makes clear—once again—that in America, rogue prosecutors are un-American and criminals do not get a veto over law and order.

Charles D. “Cully” Stimson is Acting Director of the Legal Policy Center and Senior Legal Fellow, National Security, at The Heritage Foundation. This Heritage Lecture is slightly adapted from an address delivered before a convention of the International Union of Police Associations in Las Vegas, Nevada, on August 27, 2026.