How the Soft-on-Crime Sausage Gets Made

In October 2022, the Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic wrote an impassioned defense of the left-wing progressive criminal justice reform movement, claiming there is no clear connection between rising crime rates and the polices of allegedly “soft-on-crime” district attorneys (DAs).
The article provides an … interesting … argument.
Brownstein concedes, among other things, that

National crime rates reversed their downward trend around 2014,
Left-wing progressive DAs first became popular in the “mid 2010s,”
20 percent of the country now lives in the jurisdiction of a left-wing progressive DA compared to “essentially none 10 years ago” when crime rates were at an all-time low, and
There is “no clear alternative explanation” for rising crime rates besides the proliferation of left-wing progressive DAs.

The very frame of the story seems to undermine its central argument, but Brownstein claims that the anecdotal evidence of correlation is not to be tru …