San Francisco could vote out progressive DA in heated recall
SAN FRANCISCO >> San Francisco's progressive district attorney, elected on a platform of reducing incarceration, faces a recall election driven by a pandemic in which brutal attacks against Asian seniors and viral footage of smash-and-grab robberies tested residents' famously liberal political bent.
Recall proponents say Chesa Boudin is inexperienced and ideologically inflexible, often seeking to avoid charging criminals and siding with offenders over victims. His prosecutors are not permitted to seek cash bail, try juveniles as adults or seek longer sentences for perpetrators with gang affiliations.
The June 7 recall has pitted Democrat against Democrat in this city of not quite 900,000 people where reports of burglary and motor theft are up from 2017, but overall reported crime is down. Recall proponents have raised more than $7 million — double what his supporters have collected — with funding from the real estate industry and a conservative billionaire.
Boudin's supporters say his platform is in line with voters who approved measures to reduce sentences. They say conservative interests have exploited highprofile tragedies to make everything Boudin's fault when crime rates are much higher in districts with traditional law-and-order prosecutors.
Political experts, and Boudin himself, say he's bearing the brunt of general angst.
San Francisco residents have long accepted a middling public school system, homeless encampments and open drug dealing as part of city life. But the pandemic amped up dissatisfaction as schools remained closed to in-person instruction while city and police officials appeared indifferent to graffiti and vandalism.
“Part of it is a tremendous amount of understandable frustration and anxiety that people have felt in the context of COVID, uncertainty about the direction our country's headed, anger at the Trump administration and misinformation that administration fueled on everything from public safety to vaccines,” Boudin told The Associated Press.
The vote also comes at a time when recalls are increasingly being used in California, said Joshua Spivak, a recall expert who is with the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College in New York City.
Gov. Gavin Newsom easily survived a recall in September, but three members of the San Francisco school board were ousted in February.
“Boudin was elected in a very, very close race,” Spivak said. “He's somebody who was kind of a perfect target for a recall challenge.”
Boudin's office has been locked in open battle with San Francisco police, which accused his office of withholding evidence in a case against an officer. Boudin says police often fail to bring thorough cases to the DA's office for prosecution, making arrests in just 5% of cases. He made headlines when he disclosed that police had used DNA collected from a rape to arrest the victim in an unrelated property crime.