One expert agreed that people feel uncomfortable about crime, but was unwilling to blame Gascón for the crime rate. “I think that district attorneys, who have a lot of power over individual outcomes, have a much smaller influence on the overall crime rate relative to police,” said Emily Owens, who chairs the criminology department at U.C. Irvine. She noted the crime rate is relatively low, compared to previous decades, and argued that some of the fear is “based on one or two news stories that whip people up.”

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