DISTRICT ATTORNEY BOUDIN REMOVED
Recall vote comes after backlash to his efforts to reform criminal justice
Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday put an end to one of the country’s most pioneering experiments in criminal justice reform, ousting a district attorney who eliminated cash bail, vowed to hold police accountable and worked to reduce the number of people sent to prison.
Chesa Boudin, the progressive district attorney, was removed after about two years in office, according to The Associated Press, in a vote that is set to reverberate through Democratic politics nationwide as the party fine-tunes its messaging on crime.
The election was a contest between progressive Democrats who saw Boudin as a leader of a national movement to address mass incarceration and a backlash by more politically moderate San Franciscans — a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans — who grew agitated by persistent property crimes and open drug use during the pandemic. The backlash won.
Locally, the recall suggested that many in San Francisco’s Democratic hierarchy are out of step — and further left — than the city’s voters, one of the most liberal electorates in the country.
In February, the Democratic County Central Committee voted 20-2 to oppose the recall of Boudin, with the two contrary votes coming from candidates who had run against him for the job. In addition, only two members of the 11-member Board of Supervisors, the city’s top legislative body, publicly supported removing Boudin; one of them was a former spokesperson for the Police Department, and the other is rumored to want Boudin’s job.
In a legal system that cherishes the adversarial tension of prosecutors battling defense lawyers, Boudin is one of very few district attorneys in the country who crossed the courtroom. A former public defender, Boudin aggressively expanded diversion programs as an alternative to prison. He said public safety was his first priority but that along the way he would work to make the system more equitable and reverse the legacy of mass incarceration.
Boudin’s replacement will be chosen by Mayor London Breed, who has made public safety a cornerstone of her tenure, including her unusual move in December to declare a state of emergency in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, the center of the city’s illicit drug trade.
The city has been facing persistent property crimes, especially car break-ins and burglaries, but data from the Police Department showed that many other types of crime, including homicides, have been stable or declined during the pandemic. Both sides of the recall campaign traded barbs over the accuracy of the statistics, especially when many crimes go unreported.
During the campaign, Boudin himself acknowledged that he did not report his own car being broken into three years before he took office. Judging Boudin’s tenure is also made difficult by the fact that it occurred during the pandemic, when a near total shutdown of the city influenced criminal behavior much more than the policies of a district attorney.
The vote was seen by many as an accumulation of frustration by city residents over squalid street conditions, including the illicit drug sales, homeless encampments and untreated mental illness.