Criminal justice reform on trial in San Francisco recall vote

It’s been a mixed day for Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s embattled district attorney. One of the nation’s most progressive prosecutors, he’s fighting an unprecedented recall election – a test of criminal justice reform in America’s most liberal city, and, Mr. Boudin argues, an unfair test. 

On one of his recent “merchant walks” in the ethnically diverse Excelsior neighborhood, many shopkeepers happily take a campaign sign for their window. They appreciate his personal attention, fluent Spanish, and efforts to speak Chinese, Russian, and even Farsi. Pedestrians stop him for a photo or to offer encouragement. A passing driver shouts support.

But he also hears from critics. More than one business on his sidewalk tour of taquerias, auto shops, and small retailers has been burgled – a hardware store just the day before. People have witnessed unchecked retail theft at two nearby Walgreens. One of them closed last year. Mr. Boudin backtracks to talk with a man who is hosing down a bright blue Yamaha motorcycle in the driveway at Pro Image Auto Collision on Mission Street. “I understand you support the recall. What’s your concern?” he asks.

The worker says the district attorney has had “all these years” to change the city – and Mr. Boudin interrupts, talking over him. “How many years have I had?” he quizzes. The shop worker keeps speaking, driving to the point that people who commit crimes need to be held accountable. “I agree,” says Mr. Boudin, pointing out that he’s been in office less than 2 1/2 years, and was almost immediately shut down by the pandemic. Despite that, he tells the man he has been able to increase the rates that charges have been brought in cases of homicides, sexual assaults, and drug sales, compared with his predecessor.

The employee continues hosing down the bike, unconvinced. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  

This “seeing is believing” is Mr. Boudin’s challenge, and to some extent, a challenge for Democrats in a midterm year when crime and violence have edged up to rank third among the list of Americans’ top concerns – behind inflation and the economy, according to a March survey by Gallup. Political and criminal justice experts warn not to extrapolate a national trend from a single locale. And yet, Mr. Boudin is not the only progressive prosecutor under attack, with George Gascon in Los Angeles and Alvin Bragg in Manhattan having to backpedal on some reforms. Mr. Gascon is also being hounded by a second attempt at a recall. Even when reformist prosecutors have voter support, some state legislatures are trying to clip their wings. That’s the case in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner won reelection last year.  

“Voters fundamentally understand that the reason they elect DAs is to put the bad guys behind bars,” says veteran Democratic strategist Garry South, in Los Angeles. If Mr. Boudin is recalled – and several polls point to that likelihood – “it sends a message to Democrats that even in a very liberal bastion like San Francisco, prosecutors have to do their job, and they have to be perceived as doing their job. If they just come off as reformers of the criminal justice system, that’s not what they’re hired to do.”

A reformer whose parents were incarcerated

When Mr. Boudin ran for district attorney in 2019, he emphasized his upbringing as a child of incarcerated parents. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were members of the militant, leftist Weather Underground. After a 1981 botched armored truck heist, they were convicted of felony murder for their supporting roles. His mother was released in 2003. She died in May. His father was released late last year.

The toddler was raised by adoptive parents in Chicago, who had also been members of the radical group. He grew up to graduate from Yale Law School and eventually became a public defender in San Francisco – driven by his personal experiences with the criminal justice system. But he switched roles to pursue the top prosecutor job, running on a reform platform to end racist, mass incarceration. 

Mr. Boudin is part of a wave of similarly minded district attorneys in Seattle, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere who were elected over the past five years or so. Their movement seeks to prevent certain offenders from repeatedly churning through the system by, for example, diverting them to mental health, drug misuse, or education programs. They seek accountability of rogue police officers and greater post-conviction justice. They support better victims’ services and treating juvenile suspects as juveniles – not as adults. 

A lightning rod for the city’s ills

In a city with a history of progressive prosecutors, Mr. Boudin barely won his race, besting his opponent by 1.6 percentage points.

Now it’s not his background, but his performance that’s up for discussion. The debate boils down to a charge that he’s too lenient with criminals, but the reality is more complex. In a city where two-thirds of voters recently polled say they feel less safe than in 2019, and 57% want to recall Mr. Boudin, the DA has become a lightning rod for everything that ails San Francisco, from homelessness and rampant open-air drug use and overdoses, to auto burglaries, hate crimes, and spectacular smash-and-grab retail theft. 

Homicides in the city were up during the pandemic, from a half-century low. In the first five months of 2022, they’re slightly down, while assaults and rape are up, and larceny and theft up substantially.

“There are so many moving parts” behind crime trends and the recall, says Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. The pandemic interrupted lives and included a period of “wild fluctuations” in crime that affected people’s feelings about public safety, he says. 

Nationally in 2020, residential burglaries plunged by more than half but homicides rose by nearly 30%, and hate crimes against Asians surged by 76%, according to the FBI. Gun sales flourished and so did gun deaths. To control contagion, homeless shelters reduced their populations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encouraged encampments; jails and prisons released certain inmates early, and courts operated at far below capacity.  

Given the many factors influencing crime, Mr. Loftstrom says that “there’s a limitation [to the effect] a district attorney can have on crime rates.”

“We cannot do it alone”

When Mr. Boudin is campaigning, he works the personal angle – if a shopkeeper is Taiwanese, he mentions a glorious trip surfing on the Taiwanese coast. He expresses empathy for a difficult last two years, and hands out his business card for people to email him directly. But many people want to know what he’s doing about crime, about cleaning up the city. That’s when he delves into the workings of government: He’s not the sanitation department, the mayor, the board of supervisors, or the police. That he can only prosecute the cases that police send him.

“We cannot do it alone,” he told the Monitor about lessons learned in his brief tenure. “We have to work with other agencies.” When asked what he’s most proud of, he says, “I’m most proud of how we handled the pandemic.”

Since taking office in 2020, he as well as his supporters say, the DA ended cash bail, reduced the jail population, added Chinese speakers to victims services, charged police officers for abuse of force, went after ghost guns, and set up an Innocence Commission to review wrongful convictions. Joaquin Ciria – in prison for 32 years for a murder he did not commit – was the first person exonerated after a review by the commission. He was released in April.  

Mr. Boudin and his campaign point to misinformation and fearmongering from the recall side, which they describe as an aggressive drive by Republicans and the police union. They are pushing “a false narrative of rising crime and an ineffectual DA. That’s not true,” says John Avalos, former representative for the Excelsior neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors – which overwhelmingly supports Mr. Boudin. “We know he’s done what he’s promised.” 

The initial recall effort was started by Richie Greenburg, who ran as a Republican for mayor in 2019. It’s since been taken on by some high-profile Democrats, including a former San Francisco Democratic Party chair, Mary Jung. Republicans are contributing to the recall, but its organizers say 83% of donors are Democrats or people not identified with a party.  

“Balance. That’s my word.”

Democratic leaders who support the recall say they still advocate criminal justice reform. Just not Boudin-style.

“One of the main issues is that Chesa has taken a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Brooke Jenkins, a former homicide prosecutor who quit last year to join the recall campaign. She says she is among 40 colleagues who have left the office under Mr. Boudin. “Balance. That’s my word.”

In an interview before setting off with volunteers for a literature drop, she says Mr. Boudin started off with several blanket policies: never charge juveniles as adults, never use gang charges, never use prior serious and violent felonies as a punishment enhancement, never use cash bail. While she supports “the spirit” of such changes, the problem is that “you never leave yourself the room for exceptional circumstances.”

Ms. Jenkins mentions a homicide case in which there was video evidence, but the exact identity of the shooters was indiscernible. Prosecutors could have persisted with gang conspiracy charges used specifically for these kinds of cases, but didn’t because of the policy, she says. Over the next 11 months, two of them shot people. “Chesa’s alternative [to incarceration] is release, release, release.”

If Mr. Boudin is recalled, Ms. Jenkins and others hope the mayor will appoint someone with experience as a prosecutor. Mr. Boudin still has his public defender’s hat on, she says.  

Mr. South, the Democratic strategist, reaches back in history, to the failed campaign of President George H.W. Bush in 1992. A recession had not yet officially started, but people felt economic pain. “People felt it, but he kept saying, ‘Look at the statistics.’” Whether it’s a district attorney like Mr. Boudin or LA’s Mr. Gascon, if the perception is that crime is out of control, homelessness is taking over the sidewalks, and people are stealing catalytic converters, “it doesn’t matter what the statistics are.”