San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Battle over crime centers on Boudin
In a city reeling from violence against Asian American elders, the attack this summer on Anh “Peng” Taylor, 94, was especially brutal. Out on a daily walk in Lower Nob Hill, she was approached by a stranger who stabbed her in the stomach and through the wrist. Camera footage helped police quickly arrest a man who had both a long criminal record and a GPS ankle bracelet.
The uproar that ensued after the mid-June knifing was directed not at Daniel Cauich, the 35-year-old man in custody, but at District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Why was Cauich on the streets, Boudin’s critics roared on social media. Why was he not punished more severely for his past
crimes?
“Because San Francisco DA screwed up!” one Twitter user wrote as anger coalesced around Boudin.
It didn’t matter that the truth, a review of Cauich’s court records shows, was more nuanced. While most of the city has been focused on the seemingly defeated COVID pandemic kicking back to life, an increasingly emotional and bitter debate has raged over the future of policing, with Boudin as its polarizing core.
The fight pits those who laud Boudin for delivering on his promises against critics who see the city’s most powerful law enforcement officer as intolerably lenient — particularly toward those responsible for rampant theft, drug abuse and street crimes, like Taylor’s stabbing, that are routinely video-recorded and spread virally.
Like the pandemic, the furor shows no sign of abating. One attempt to recall Boudin fell short this month when organizers failed to collect enough signatures, but the other attempt lives on with a deadline for signatures in October. If voters ultimately oust Boudin, Mayor London Breed, whose politics are more moderate, will choose a replacement.
An extensive review of the city’s criminal data by The Chronicle and wide-ranging interviews with Boudin and his supporters and detractors found a multipronged crime debate playing out during a once-in-a-lifetime societal event and two sides bitterly divided, unable to agree on much of anything.
What is clear is that a recall election would test San Francisco’s attitude toward policing. While city voters have elected mostly progressive district attorneys for decades, Boudin, a former public defender, was elected in November 2019 as part of a wave of prosecutors in cities such as St. Louis and Philadelphia who more explicitly pledged to unwind tough-on-crime policies they said had filled prisons — disproportionately with people of color — but failed to make cities safer.
In his 19 months as district attorney, Boudin became the first prosecutor in the nation to bar his staff from asking for cash bail, saying it discriminates against the poor. He has sharply limited the use of sentencing enhancements for alleged gang members and the controversial “three strikes” law for repeat offenders.
He’s prosecuting five police officers for charges of excessive force and created a program that he says has diverted more than 100 parents and caregivers out of criminal court. His bail policy, along with multiagency efforts during the pandemic, have served to thin the city’s jails, with the average daily population falling by nearly 40% since 2019.
“We recognize that we collectively are safer when parents are at home taking care of their kids than when they’re in jail and the kids are in foster care,” Boudin said.
But Boudin’s critics say his priorities are those of a public defender, not a prosecutor. Though he campaigned on reform, he’s been savaged by those who see his actions as San Francisco progressivism gone too far, and blame him for tragedies such as the New Year’s Eve deaths of two pedestrians struck by an alleged drunken driver who had avoided charges after earlier arrests.
A video promoting the continuing recall campaign features Mary Jung, a former city Democratic Party chair and real estate lobbyist, delivering a dire message about San Francisco: “We have infants being killed, we have our senior citizens being attacked and killed,” she says amid a montage of crime headlines. “We hear these stories on a weekly basis. This has to stop.”
In recent interviews, Boudin made the point that traditional, tough-on-crime prosecutors are rarely blamed in this way in the aftermath of crimes. His backers see appeals to fear as not only misguided but a stalking horse for a hard right turn back to the past — a “return to sort of tough-on-crime, Reagan-era policies that had really devastating impacts on a lot of communities,” said Julie Edwards, a spokesperson for Boudin’s anti-recall effort.
Boudin said he sees the recall effort as being “about a national fight that’s based on brand and identity, far more than on substance.” Though San Francisco remains a bastion of progressive innovation, he said, “It’s also the focus of reactionary Republican forces nationwide. And they are determined to hold San Francisco out as a failure.”
In the stabbing of Anh Taylor this summer, court records reveal a complex backstory. While the arrested man, Cauich, had once been charged with murder, the allegation was dismissed by a judge for lack of evidence in 2019, before Boudin took office. The next year, Boudin’s prosecutors filed four cases against Cauich, who was ultimately convicted of burglary and jailed for 178 days.
After his latest arrest, in May, the District Attorney’s Office alleged first-degree burglary and asked that Cauich be held until trial. A judge, though, said he should be released, provided he wore an ankle monitor and got drug treatment.
The debate over crime has drawn starker lines, and has found fertile ground on Twitter. Last month, a startup founder with a devoted online following, Michelle Tandler, tweeted that her friends’ husbands were “scared for their wives” because of out-of-control San Francisco crime. A top Boudin aide, Kate Chatfield, shot back that “the ‘crime surge’ crowd shares the same ideology as ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ ” the 1915 film notorious for its racist depiction of Black Americans.
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Provocative rhetoric aside, the data available to voters paints a less clear-cut picture of San Francisco crime. The numbers also suggest Boudin’s office may have become a bit more strict in its treatment of the accused, a trend Boudin attributed to the easing of pandemic guidelines.
The frequency and severity of charging decisions for alleged crimes has been a flash point in San Francisco for decades, involving both the quality of the police investigation and the approach of prosecutors.
According to figures obtained by The Chronicle through public records requests, Boudin’s office filed charges in about 46% of the cases brought by city police and other agencies during his first year in office. Prosecutors under Alameda County’s more moderate district attorney, Nancy O’Malley, filed charges in 54% of cases in 2020.
This year, in contrast, Boudin’s prosecutors had filed charges in 56% of cases as of mid-June — a rate slightly higher than predecessor George Gascón’s in his last three years in San Francisco — while O’Malley’s had filed charges in 45% of cases by late April, the most recent data available.
Sacramento County prosecutors under District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, a vocal critic of Boudin, charged about 66% of cases in 2020 and 59% by the end of July this year, records show.
In San Francisco, charging decisions vary widely depending on the type of crime. In 2020, prosecutors filed charges in residential burglary, homicide and drug cases more than 70% of the time, while the figures for felony assault and domestic violence were 29% and 23%, respectively. Boudin’s filing rate rose significantly from 2020 to 2021 in some crime categories — 59% to 79% in auto burglaries, 61% to 82% in commercial burglaries and 50% to 75% in sexual assaults.
In the first three months of 2021, San Francisco police made 131 arrests for felony domestic violence, while Boudin’s office declined to file charges in 113 of them. Boudin said domestic violence cases are among the most difficult to prove and that prosecutors making charging decisions have decades of experience.
“In every single case where police bring us sufficient admissible evidence, my office vigorously prosecutes,” he said.
Often, Boudin said, prosecutors will send cases back to police for more investigation. “That’s our way of saying to the police, ‘We want to prosecute this case but we need some additional piece of evidence to do it successfully’ — maybe DNA, maybe additional video footage,” he said. “And we have a system in place to regularly check in with the Police Department about all those cases.”
But Tony Montoya, president of the city police officers union and another vocal critic of Boudin, said the District Attorney’s Office practice of sending cases back for more legwork is “dishonest” and is often done without providing a reason — an assertion Boudin denied.
“It’s the ultimate buck-passing,” Montoya said. “It lets criminals go free, demoralizes the investigators, disrespects victims and dissuades witness participation.”
The criticism of Boudin’s effect on city crime statistics, meanwhile, has often been more heated than the stats themselves would seem to warrant.
In Boudin’s first year in office, overall reports of crime in San Francisco fell 23% compared with 2019, driven largely by a pandemic drop-off in opportunistic thefts such as auto break-ins. Reported robberies dropped 23%, assaults 14% and rape 45%. This year, overall crime reports are essentially flat — down an additional 1% through early August.
Boudin is quick to make clear that he doesn’t take credit for falling crime: “I wish I was so powerful that I could implement a new policy and overnight crime rates will drop,” he said at a recent public appearance. “But that’s not how crime rates work anywhere in the world.”
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