Chesa Boudin

San Francisco residents voted overwhelmingly to recall progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in a heated campaign that divided Democrats over crime, ...

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. Boudin shot back that he could not prosecute cases when police failed to bring evidence and made arrests in just 5 percent of cases. “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.” They were sentenced to decades in prison. Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, a critic of Boudin who ran as an independent, did not advance. They rejected Boudin’s efforts to paint them as Republicans.

San Francisco was conquered by the United States in 1846, and two years later, the Americans discovered gold. That's about when my ancestors came—my German ...

NIMBYism and fentanyl are as much a part of the San Francisco landscape now as the bridge and the fog. A landslide 76 percent voted to recall Collins, and the other two were recalled by about 70 percent each. In July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco, she wrote, “I’m like, then leave.” A parent on Twitter accused López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the words “I mean this sincerely” followed by a middle-finger emoji. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice. I don’t want to end up surrounded by a bunch of super-rich people and a farm.” They’re not the only people who live here, and they’re not the only ones who got angry. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. But it’s maddening because the beauty and the mythology—the preciousness, the self-regard—are part of what has almost killed it.

The Democrat-led Campaign to Recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced success in "Holding Boudin Accountable" last evening. This is.

It will be interesting to watch changes to the office in San Francisco.” She noted that under Gascón as San Francisco DA, “the filing rate of cases presented by the police for prosecution dropped. Los Angeles Assistant District Attorney in Los Angeles Michele Hanisee said Boudin, in flipping from Public Defender to District Attorney is taking over from the inside.

SF voters who were convinced that recalling progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin would solve the city's crime troubles may not all appreciate being ...

"But Mr. Brown said too many Democrats do not want to talk about 'what cops do' for fear of crossing the party’s activist class and offending 'A.O.S. or A.O.C. or whatever that woman’s name is.'" "But I was here, and under both of them, bad crimes happened, some by people who had been let out of jail. And whether or not a successor is going to be able to quickly solve all the city's ills to anyone's satisfaction, it probably doesn't matter. tweets conservative blowhard Dinesh D'Souza. "The good news for Chesa Boudin is that he will still be prosecuting the same number of criminals," joked Ann Coulter in her zinger of a tweet Tuesday night. In yesterday’s recall election, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was voted out of office. And Tuesday's recall also was decisive, though less of a landslide, with Boudin recalled by 60% of the vote.

Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted by voters Tuesday in a special recall election, after facing well-funded tough-on-crime ...

I mean, we just talked about the $7 million that was dumped into the recall in San Francisco. Mr. Caruso — and as you say, he was a Republican until about five minutes ago — dumped $40 million of his own money into trying to win the mayoral race. And then, at the end of that, we transmit our findings to the DA. And obviously, of course, at the end, it’s the DA’s decision. One thing I think they did that was smart was that they stayed behind the scenes, because they are detested in the city of San Francisco. And that is what I continued to hear in the weeks leading up to the recall, is friends and neighbors and the pediatrician, whoever, telling me, “I’ve been a victim of a crime,” or “I know somebody who had their car broken into, and I don’t feel safe.” And that, I think, was the message and the — that, really, the recall supporters were able to capitalize on. But, yes, to go back to the dysfunctionality in the police department, that has been a long-term problem. One of the things that Chesa Boudin did was he instituted prosecutions against wage theft to get to the misclassification of workers. And it’s at about 1% for auto burglaries, which perhaps is the most triggering issue for San Franciscans. So, of course, what that means is that if I were to go out and commit one of these crimes — and I don’t intend to — I have somewhere between a 91 and a 99% chance of not even being arrested. Weren’t they essentially sworn enemies of Chesa Boudin? And to what degree did the police unions play a role in these elections? And also, my understanding is that there’s been a sharp drop in the number of arrests that the police have been conducting in recent years. And I feel like if we were going to have an honest conversation about crime, the conversation would stop right there, and the buck would stop with the mayor, who of course appointed the police chief. I think what happened was a perfect storm, because you had, as Chesa said in his concession speech, millions of dollars — I think over $7 million — being poured into the effort to recall him. And the reason I knew and I know today that she was right is because this was never about one vote count.

Does the district attorney's recall reveal the limitations of progressive criminal-justice reform?

Boudin began his tenure as the protagonist of a story about the criminal-justice system. He ended it as a character in a story about cities. To the end, Boudin argued that the recall campaign had asked voters to blame him for things that weren’t really within his ability to control as district attorney: homelessness, addiction, the state of the city. It was talking about car windows, and cell phones, and whatever seemed so enticing to the thieves. (“If people saw offenders getting off with a slap on the wrist, would that really act as a deterrent?” he tweeted.) The real lesson of San Francisco may be narrower: given that enthusiasm for progressive policies is still untested, and that public resistance to them is reflexive and stiff, it will take a pretty savvy politician to successfully implement them. When Chesa Boudin campaigned for San Francisco district attorney, in 2019, the story he told was one of experience: he’d grown up visiting his imprisoned parents—former members of the Weather Underground convicted for their roles in a Brink’s-truck robbery that turned deadly—and had worked as a public defender in San Francisco. He had been studying the criminal-justice system for a lifetime. It was talking about needles and fecal smear. The paradox was that, in many ways, the city was still as safe as it had been. Public safety in the city was caught in a paradox. Notably, the most high-profile progressive prosecutor in the country, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner—a somewhat grouchy longtime public defender now in his sixties—was reëlected last year, despite a surge in homicides in that city. To support these claims, the prosecutor had maps, statistics, charging documents—receipts. Even so, it seemed as if the news kept inviting him to do an ordinary political thing—to evolve, in order to meet voters’ concerns—and he kept refusing. But if not that—what? Was Boudin’s academic approach—to see crime as a product of structural contingency, rather than as bad guys acting with malice—all wrong?

San Francisco recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin after he couldn't deliver on his promise to decrease crime with progressive, lenient policies.

If you want to smoke K2 and mutter to yourself in your own backyard, it doesn’t matter since it doesn’t bother anyone. Now that the old see-no-evil line — crime is lower than it was in 1990! You still don’t want your kids terrified to go to the park — so, absent public order, you’ll move. “The annual number of people killed in the city has stayed within a range of 41 to 56 over the past seven years.” Preventative policing and prosecution would have averted some of San Francisco’s “extra” murders, relative to New York’s. In December 2020, for example, two pedestrians were randomly murdered by a drunk driver in a stolen car. The open-air drug user who scares your children in the public park probably won’t kill you.

The former public defender, who instituted many criminal justice reform policies, was recalled after less than three years in office.

“They wanted Boudin out because he was trying to help them and give them a second chance and rehabilitate them.” “I’m going to mourn him all over again.” She feared the mayor would “appoint someone who is police-connected, who loves ‘law and order’,” adding, “I have no doubt that officer is going to walk away with murder.” “He brought my family hope,” April Green, O’Neil’s aunt, said on Wednesday. “He gave us the possibility that there could be a change, that something good could come out of my nephew’s death, that finally, finally, an officer could be held accountable, that accountability could stretch across that blue line. My folks go to jail for a ticket, for being stopped, for being profiled. The former public defender and criminal justice reform advocate won the top prosecutor job in November 2019 after campaigning to tackle mass incarceration and police misconduct. San Francisco, like cities across the US, saw an increase in homicides, but overall violent crime has decreased during his tenure.

Voters in perhaps the nation's most liberal city recalled a progressive district attorney. What does it mean for L.A. politics?

San Franciscans are not about to start electing Republicans. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that Karen Bass is going to lose in November.” “It doesn’t mean that Democrats around the state are ready to throw out liberals,” he says. Sragow, who publishes the California Target Book, which monitors congressional and legislative races, says he conducted a series of focus groups around L.A. in winter and found that “most voters are fearful, petrified, for their own safety. He finished slightly ahead of U.S. Rep. Karen Bass in the race for the two November runoff spots. “Voters have given up hope,” he says. It’s not going to change anything.” So many recidivists and dangerous people have been let out on the street. They’re not elected to make excuses for some murderer because potty training was hard, or he was bullied in school. And if they don’t see that, and are perceived as making excuses for bad guys, they’re going to pay a price.” They are not elected to be criminal justice reformers. But they’re elected to put bad guys behind bars. Yes, it happens even in San Francisco.

The ousting of the progressive San Francisco district attorney suggests that Democrats have failed to win the public with their messaging on criminal ...

It wasn’t that long ago that many of America’s largest cities, including New York and Los Angeles, had Republican mayors. In large part, he reached that position by building a coalition based on promises to hire more police officers in the face of soaring crime, and to clean up the encampments dotting so many parts of the city. His answer, repeated on the stump, that he needed more time, ran up against a perception that the city was spiraling out of control. At least in part, what finally convinced Californians to embrace change was the inane cost of the status quo: by 2020, despite nearly a decade in which overall prison numbers had declined, the the CDCR budget had mushroomed to north of $13 billion. But, especially on issues such as crime—which people experience viscerally and emotionally, rather than in a detached, intellectual manner—the public tends to be notoriously impatient and fickle. They also argued that Boudin’s strategy of moving resources into treatment for the addicted and the mentally ill, rather than simply convicting them and hauling them off to jail or prison, needed more time to take effect.