“Getting here was the easy part,” Chesa Boudin said in a victory speech after his 2019 election to the position of San Francisco district attorney. Three years later, despite presiding over a steep descent into lawlessness in the city on the bay, the progressive prosecutor might be about to prove himself right — though not in the way he had hoped.
Voters in what is perhaps America’s most liberal city will today vote on whether or not to recall Boudin. The polls suggest he will lose. Boudin’s 2019 victory was heralded as part of a national moment: a major milestone for a movement of progressive prosecutors promising a radical new approach to law and order. Now, his possible downfall is also part of a bigger story: the Left-wing poster boy who boasted about emptying jails, not prosecuting “quality-of-life” crimes, and “reimagining” criminal justice has become the face of the backlash against a lax approach in the midst of a crime wave.
It’s not hard to understand why the recall race has attracted outsized attention. Whether it’s the open air drug markets of the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood or the brazen shoplifting that has caused many retail chains to simply shut up shop in the city, anarchic scenes from San Francisco have captured the popular imagination of a public increasingly concerned about crime. From the mass resignations in his DA office to the tragic cases of former offenders committing violent, sometimes lethal, crimes after being released on his watch, there’s no shortage of evidence for the case against Boudin.
If the recall race has been an opportunity for the radical prosecutor to restate his progressive principles, he hasn’t exactly seized it. Instead, he has attempted a half-hearted and unconvincing pivot to a tougher (or at least slightly less lawless) approach and resorted to partisan name-calling, attempting to smear the recall campaign as a Republican plot. Not something that you want to be in a city where just 7% of voters are registered Republican. “It’s really problematic that we are having a very Trumpian conversation in San Francisco,” Boudin said recently.
But this is a blue-on-blue fight, with liberal San Franciscans exasperated with the incompetence and extremism of a prosecutor for whom their safety doesn’t always seem like the top priority. As recall campaigner Andrea Shorter told me last year: “The inconvenient truth for Boudin is that it’s not just a small group of conservatives that are out to recall Democratic politicians… We are interested in and support criminal justice reform. We understand its implications in terms of racial justice. I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ. I have supported criminal justice reform for nearly three decades, but not at the expense of public safety.”
Boudin would certainly be a major scalp for those worried about safety in American cities — and his ousting would send a powerful national message about the politics of crime in an election year. But if it is possible to underplay the significance of the recall race, it’s also possible to let the parable of San Francisco obscure the bigger picture.
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Subscribe“I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ.”
There’s your answer. Why is this relevant at all? Focus on irrelevancies and you miss the real story. Until Progs understand that lionizing race and sexual proclivities is irrelevant to competence, they will continue to do a serious disservice to the public.
I’m a white Anglo-Saxon and heterosexual, resident of The City long ago, when it was sane. I agree with almost everything you said. Perhaps just saying it will be enough without the markers.
The speaker knew she would be accused of being white and straight on account of the views she expressed.
Immature voters will get what they voted for. And deserve it.
The absurdity of electing a prosecutor who campaigns on not prosecuting people who break the law, and actually delivers on the promise, is the very definition of absurdity and dystopia.
“In [Philadelphia] a city of just 1.5 million, 559 people were murdered last year.”
For the sake of comparison, in England and Wales, with an ONS-estimated population of 56.1m in 2018, 594 homicides were recorded in the year ending March 2021.
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/national-and-regional-populations/population-of-england-and-wales/latest
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2021
If London had a similar murder rate we would have over 3000 murders a year.
Yes indeed, and we would be approaching 21,000 if England & Wales had a similar rate.
If London had the same demographics as Philly you probably would have a much more similar murder rate.
And similar levels of fatherlessness
A demographic breakdown of those murder cases might come in handy when judging why England and Wales have much lower rates.
Indeed. Look up “world homicide rates” on wikipedia and you’ll definitely see a pattern
The Absurdity of Socialism Episode 453
The idiocy on crime is what has turned me from a Democrat to an Independent voter.
Going easy on violent criminals is the same as going viciously hard on the most vulnerable members of society, especially women and kids.
There is no one more oppressive than a violent predator, and to go soft on predators is to enable the oppression of those who live in the poorest neighborhoods.
The Dems are out of touch hypocrites, and I can no longer support their party.
Daniel Goleman’s “Leadership That Gets Results,” published in Harvard Business Review, argues that no leadership style works all the time. Instead, choose the style that maximizes your effectiveness in a given situation.
The “people come first” affiliative style has its place and can be alternated with other styles to get balanced results.
Where progressives cross the line is the celebration of victims as a path to power. If you want to be all-powerful in this world, you must represent the victims, then your opponents speak against victims – they have no right to speak.
Why is prosecuting illegal possession of a gun racist.
Because you can’t prosecute those with legal guns, just do the numbers.
These prosecutors aren’t stupid. They only appear stupid because normal people believe their policies are mistaken and that they should know better.
But what if they do know better but have other goals? What if they already know “reimagining” is fantasy, where “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” leads?
What if the Bolivarian Militia is their model and they are knowingly taking measures to create one? The raw material, criminals, is already there. All it needs is to be made legal when the conditions are right. The Progressives’ approach to prosecution might be better understood in this light than simply as wrong.