Dems in civil war over crime
SAN FRANCISCO » As the former chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, Mary Jung has a long list of liberal bona fides, including her early days in politics volunteering in Ohio for the presidential campaign of George Mcgovern and her service on the board of the local Planned Parenthood branch. “In Cleveland, I was considered a communist,” she said in her San Francisco office.
But the squalor and petty crime that she sees as crescendoing on some city streets — her office has been broken into four times during the coronavirus pandemic — has tested her liberal outlook. Last year, on the same day her granddaughter was born, she watched a video of a mentally ill man punching an older Chinese woman in broad daylight on Market Street.
Jung, director of government affairs for the San Francisco Association of Realtors and head of a Realtors foundation that assists homeless people, wondered what kind of city her granddaughter would grow up in. “I thought, ‘Am I going to be able to take her out in the stroller?’ ”
Now she finds herself leading what has been called a Democratic civil war in one of America’s most liberal cities: an effort to recall San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, that has echoes of the party’s larger split over how to handle matters of crime and punishment. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, liberals and independents will decide a recall that is receiving major funding from conservative donors in addition to backing from moderate Democrats.
“What shade of blue are you — that’s really what it comes down to,” said Lilly Rapson, campaign manager of the recall and Jung’s partner in the endeavor. A lifelong Democrat, Rapson said she was motivated to lead the campaign after her home was broken into last year as she slept.
There is no compelling evidence that Boudin’s policies have made crime significantly worse in San Francisco. Overall crime in San Francisco has changed little since Boudin took office in early 2020.
But his message of leniency for perpetrators has rankled residents of the city, many of whom feel unsafe and violated by property crimes. Like a president facing election during a bad economy, Boudin finds himself a vessel for residents’ pandemic angst and their frustrations over a wave of burglaries and other property crimes in well-to-do areas. Some residents, especially the city’s sizable Asian American population, also feel that a spike in hate crimes has made it unsafe to walk the streets.
If successful, the recall would overturn one of the nation’s boldest efforts in criminal justice reform: an experiment to install a former public defender as the protector of public safety with promises to reduce mass incarceration, hold police accountable and tackle racial disparities in the justice system.
A vote to push Boudin from office would signal to Democrats that talking tough on crime could be a winning message in the midterm elections and deal a blow to a national movement that has elected progressive prosecutors in cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.
The election comes as San Francisco is being convulsed by debates over the disorder of its streets — car break-ins, tent encampments that dot the sidewalks in some neighborhoods and the open-air markets peddling illicit fentanyl that has killed more people in the city than COVID-19.
Boudin, 41, was an outsider to San Francisco politics who grew up while his parents, 1960s radicals with the Weather Underground, went to prison for their role in the notorious 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored car in New York that left two police officers and a bank guard dead.
He went on to become a Rhodes scholar who graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School before starting his legal career as a public defender. In 2019, Boudin sought to move across the courtroom and was elected as the city’s top prosecutor, assuming office just before the pandemic.
On the campaign trail, Boudin is facing stiff headwinds. Several polls showed him down at least 10 points. In fighting to keep his job, he has leaned on two main strategies: associate, at every turn, the recall effort with Republicans, and confront voters with data that shows overall crime has not increased meaningfully while he has been in office, even as some categories have risen during the pandemic.
He has referred to one of the biggest donors to the recall campaign, William Oberndorf, a conservative and wealthy businessman, as an “oligarch,” called his opponents “Trumpian,” and sought to place the recall in the national context of a Republican-led effort to attack liberal prosecutors as weak on crime.
“It’s really problematic that we are having a very Trumpian conversation in San Francisco,” Boudin said.
California Democrats have had success using that strategy of attaching opponents to former President Donald Trump.
Unlike in other parts of the country, homicides are not driving the anger and passions of recall advocates. The annual number of people killed in the city has stayed within a range of 41 to 56 over the past seven years.
Instead, recall advocates describe a pervasive feeling that quality of life in San Francisco has deteriorated. Burglaries, especially in wealthier neighborhoods, have soared during the pandemic. The city recorded 7,575 burglaries in 2020 and 7,217 last year, an increase of more than 45% from 2019.
Another problem is that Boudin and the police department, whose rate of arrests for reported crimes is among the lowest of major cities, have a toxic relationship. In the 2019 campaign, the San Francisco Police Officers Association attacked Boudin by calling him the “No. 1 choice of criminals and gang members.” Supporters of Boudin responded at his victory party with chants of epithets toward the union.