San Francisco’s progressive district attorney will face recall election
Elections officials in San Francisco announced a recall election against the city’s progressive district attorney made it on the ballot.
The vote on the tenure of Chesa Boudin is scheduled for June 2022, giving residents a chance to keep or oust the former public defender who has been a prosecutor for less than two years.
The son of two leftwing Weather Underground radicals who served as the getaway drivers in a 1981 armored car heist that left two police officers and a guard dead, Boudin was elected district attorney in 2019 as part of a national wave of progressive prosecutors determined to reform the criminal justice system.
Boudin won despite vigorous opposition from the San Francisco police union. He held bold positions that veeredradically left of the usual lawand-order script: he vowed to stop prosecuting minor quality of life crimes, create a unit to look at past wrongful convictions and eliminate cash bail. One of his most contested campaign goals was to stop the use of gang enhancements, which can add up to 10 years to someone’s sentence and is disproportionately used on Black and Latino people.
Boudin supporters say those progressive policies of ending mass incarceration and promoting restorative justice are what San Francisco wants, that he’s been blamed unfairly for problems that have vexed the city for years and has been thwarted by a pandemic-related slowdown in the courts.
Critics charge he has failed to prosecute repeat offenders, allowing them to commit more crimes that have contributed to the deterioration of the city’s quality of life. They have pointed at videos of brazen shoplifting and auto break-ins during the pandemic, reinforcing the idea of the city as a lawless place.
The recall effort was widely expected to make the ballot after backers submitted about 80,000 signatures in October, more than the 51,325 required. The 7 June election will be consolidated with the California statewide primary election.
“We have tremendous momentum on our side that is growing daily in every corner of San Francisco,” said the recall campaign chair, Mary Jung, in a statement. She promised to “help ensure San Francisco has a DA that makes public safety their number one
priority”.
Julie Edwards, a spokesperson for the anti-recall campaign, said in a statement: “The recall is an attempt to reverse the reforms DA Boudin has enacted to keep us safe and make the criminal justice system fairer. But this will not stop him from continuing to work for all San Franciscans.”
Boudin’s recall election is the latest effort to oust officials part of the electorate argues have failed.
Earlier this year, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, defeated a recall effort organized by critics of his pandemic and criminal justice policies.
San Francisco voters will also get the chance to recall three members of the city’s board of education. The board drew national attention last year when it moved ahead with a plan to rename nearly four dozen schools as part of a racial reckoning while classrooms stayed shuttered, even as other districts opened to in-class instruction. The renaming plan was scrapped.
Mayor London Breed, a Democrat who did not support Boudin in the DA’s race, has not expressed an opinion on his recall. She would name his replacement should the recall succeed.
Breed, however, said on Tuesday in a statement that she supports the recall of all three school board members, saying the board’s priorities were misplaced. She would also get to name their replacements should they lose.