The Tuesday recall election of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin could start the death knell for a string of liberal prosecutors ushered in during the past few years.
High-ranking Democrats, police officers, prosecutors, and victims have banded together to push for Boudin’s ouster in the wake of high-profile crimes that critics say appeared to favor the accused rather than the victims. Both the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce ran polls that showed 56% and 67% of voters, respectively, want Boudin out.
“I am a California Democratic Party Executive Board member, and I support the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin,” wrote Nima Rahimi on SFGate. “I feel compelled to speak out because I’m sick of Boudin’s disingenuous campaign, and I believe recalling Boudin will save lives.”
The Recall Chesa Boudin Now campaign website is filled with video testimonials of San Franciscans who detail horrific crimes against loved ones wherein perpetrators seemingly escaped meaningful justice. These videos ran as television ads purchased with the campaign’s $6.5 million war chest.
For his part, former assistant public defender Boudin promised police reform when he was elected in 2020. He has kept up his part of the bargain by taking a hard-line approach against police misconduct, filing use-of-force cases that include a homicide that did not result in a conviction.
Yet other policies, such as not charging minors as adults or seeking the maximum punishment under California’s three-strikes law, appear to have backfired. The same recall scenario is also playing out in Los Angeles against freshman District Attorney George Gascon.
LOS ANGELES DA GASCON UNLAWFULLY TOLD PROSECUTORS TO ABANDON 3-STRIKES LAW, COURT RULES
“I’m so upset with Chesa and the things that have happened on his watch,” said Jason Young in a video, describing the 2020 murder of his child who was watching fireworks at the time of a shooting. “I never thought in a million years that my son, let alone any 6-year-old, would be gunned down in the streets of San Francisco and not get any justice. …[Boudin] has no idea what accountability looks like. I’m disgusted that I voted for him.”
Two suspects were arrested: an adult who faces a life sentence and a 17-year-old who was convicted in juvenile court and will receive eight years in prison.
Other people giving rise to the recall effort include Asians, who are facing a 567% increase in hate crimes this year, many of them beatings caught on video, including a murder.
Boudin did not respond to messages seeking comment. However, he did speak to SFGate and said he hasn’t seen hostility in the community.
“People are thanking us, asking good questions, telling us they’d already voted for us,” Boudin said. “There were one or two people who were hostile. Now, do I expect that it’s going to be a close race? Sure. The polls certainly suggest that.”
Boudin said his office manages tens of thousands of possible cases per year and that mistakes are bound to happen.
“Some significant percentage of people who are arrested in any jurisdiction in this country are going to be released and go on to commit very serious crimes. That’s a feature of America’s approach to criminal justice,” Boudin said. “It has nothing to do with our policies, and yet every time that happens in San Francisco, the recall folks and their allies will say this is a result of criminal justice reform. It’s dishonest.”
One Democrat disagrees. San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey was appointed last month by Mayor London Breed, who reversed her “defund the police” stance after a wave of officers quit and crime increased. Dorsey worked for the San Francisco Police Department in a civilian role.
Dorsey wrote an article for SFGate that describes how he was dismayed to see Boudin’s cavalier attitude toward drug dealers amid the 1,500 fatal overdoses in the past two years. Despite the best efforts of police, Boudin turned a blind eye toward prosecutions, he said.
“Two weeks ago, an analysis of San Francisco Superior Court case records by The San Francisco Standard found that DA Boudin did not secure a single conviction for possession with the intent to sell fentanyl among the cases he prosecuted in 2021,” Dorsey wrote. “Not one.”
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Dorsey said Gascon, who was the former district attorney before arriving in Los Angeles, secured 90 convictions in 2018.
“It’s bad enough for San Franciscans to feel our own concerns ignored or minimized,” Dorsey wrote. “It’s worse to consider how the words of San Francisco’s chief elected law enforcement official might be emboldening those who traffic deadly drugs and engage in dangerous criminal conduct on our neighborhoods’ streets.”
