San Francisco voters fire “progressive prosecutor“

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San Francisco residents voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to recall progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin following a heated campaign that captivated the country and bitterly divided Democrats over crime, policing and public safety reform in the famously liberal city.

Recall proponents cheered the results at a victory party, with California state leaders of the hotel and retailers associations lauding Boudin’s removal as a sign that visitors, shoppers and workers will be prioritized again in a city that relies heavily on tourism. They rejected Boudin’s efforts to paint them as Republicans.

“This election does not mean that San Francisco has drifted to the far right on our approach to criminal justice,” said Mary Jung, a chair of the recall campaign, in a statement. “In fact, San Francisco has been a national beacon for progressive criminal justice reform for decades and will continue to do so with new leadership.”

Boudin, 41, was a first-time political candidate who narrowly won office in November 2019 as part of a national wave of progressive prosecutors who pledged to seek alternatives to incarceration, end the racist war on drugs and hold police officers to account.

But his time in office coincided with a frustrating and frightening pandemic in which viral footage of brazen shoplifting and attacks against Asian American people drove some residents to mount a recall campaign of the former public defender and son of left-wing activists.

Partial returns Tuesday night showed about 60% of voters supporting the recall, but Boudin remained defiant in a speech to supporters, saying he was outspent by “right-wing billionaires.” He said voters were understandably frustrated by the pandemic and a city government that has failed to deliver on safety, housing and equity.

It was unclear Tuesday what the resounding recall of Boudin could mean to the progressive prosecutor movement nationally and in California, where reform candidates were competing against more traditional law-and-order candidates in a handful of races, with mixed results.

California's progressive attorney general, Rob Bonta, who was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, was leading with 57% of the vote Tuesday night, easily advancing to the November general election. Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, a critic of Boudin who ran as an independent, did not advance.

In Los Angeles County, the campaign to recall progressive District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement the results showed that Gascón, the former prosecutor of San Francisco, could be next.

Mayor London Breed, who had backed a more moderate Democrat in the 2019 district attorney race, will name Boudin’s replacement after the results are certified by the elections office and approved by the Board of Supervisors.

Boudin could also run in November when the race is back on the ballot.

Boudin’s time in office was marked by a bruising battle with the San Francisco Police Department, which accused his office of withholding evidence in a case against an officer. Boudin shot back that he could not prosecute cases when police failed to bring evidence and made arrests in just 5% of cases.

He made headlines when he disclosed that police had used DNA collected from a rape to arrest the victim in an unrelated property crime.

San Francisco has long struggled with open drug dealing, vandalism, auto theft and home burglaries. Political experts say the political newcomer who narrowly won in 2019 was in the crosshairs of outside forces that made him an easy target for public frustration.

Boudin was a baby when his parents, left-wing Weather Underground radicals, served as drivers in a botched 1981 robbery in New York that left two police officers and a security guard dead. They were sentenced to decades in prison.

While campaigning, he spoke of the pain of stepping through metal detectors to hug his parents and vowed to reform a system that tears apart families. Kathy Boudin was released on parole in 2003 and died of cancer in May. David Gilbert was granted parole in October.

The recall campaign against Boudin was backed by many of the same people who successfully ousted three liberal members of the San Francisco school board in February. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, however, easily beat a Republican-led recall last year.

More people died in San Francisco last year from fentanyl overdoses than covid-19, yet District Attorney Chesa Boudin did not convict a single person in 2021 for dealing the lethal opioid.
This helps explain why one of the most liberal cities in America voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recall Boudin and repudiate the prosecutor’s soft-on-crime approach.

Boudin’s defeat is the latest wake-up call for Democrats, who have lost the public’s trust on criminal justice and play down voter anxieties about crime at their peril.

Court records obtained by the San Francisco Standard show Boudin’s office convicted just three people for the charge of “possession with intent to sell” in 2021 — for meth, heroin and cocaine. His predecessor secured more than 90 drug-dealing convictions in 2018.

Fentanyl is widely available at open-air drug markets in the city, and the proliferation of the synthetic opioid is inextricably linked to other crimes. Junkies break into cars and shoplift from stores to feed their addictions. Many become homeless. They squat in tent cities, defecate on streets, trade sex for drugs, shoot up in front of children and, if they’re not in some stupor, harass productive members of society who are trying to do honest work.

Burglaries are up more than 45 percent since Boudin took office in January 2020. Walk around, and it won’t take long to see smashed car windows — even in neighborhoods such as tony Pacific Heights that historically have been insulated from such hooliganism. Eleven Walgreens outlets have closed in the city since 2019.

Boudin insisted that he took the drug epidemic seriously but focused more on treatment than imprisonment. He said his office pursued diversion programs or agreed to lesser charges in many cases, such as “accessory after the fact,” because drug-dealing convictions are grounds for deportation.

Even for San Franciscans, this catch-and-release approach was far too radical — especially as overdose deaths snowballed. Boudin’s performance prompted the Justice Department to pursue drug-trafficking charges in cases it would typically leave to local authorities.
The event that really turned the city against Boudin happened on the final night of 2020, when an allegedly drunken man who was on parole for armed robbery fatally ran down two women in a stolen car. He had been arrested five times between June and December that year for crimes that included burglary, but Boudin didn’t file charges that would have sent him back to prison.

One of the most outspoken proponents for the recall was Brooke Jenkins, who resigned in protest as a homicide prosecutor after Boudin accepted an insanity plea from a man whom she had convicted of murdering his own mother and setting her corpse on fire. Jenkins is among 62 prosecutors who have either left or been fired in the district attorney’s office since Boudin took power.

Boudin pulled out all the stops as he clung to his job. He tried to gaslight residents by pretending crime wasn’t as bad as voters perceived. He blamed courts for shutting down during the pandemic. He blamed cops for not making enough arrests. Voters saw through the desperation.

Boudin was never beloved by local party officials. The Democratic establishment, including former senator (and district attorney before that) Kamala D. Harris, endorsed a more pragmatic candidate who had been a successful prosecutor in the office.

About six months ago, Boudin attacked San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D) when she deployed more officers to crack down on drugs in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood