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In article <XnsAC8C836E12A46soetoro@95.216.243.224>
ignorant emotional democrats <utter.fools@cnn.com> wrote:

Only believe CNN!

Let's get rid of Rashida Tlaib, AOC and Ilhan Omar at the same
time.

Let the Obama homosexuals ruin the country!

SAN FRANCISCO — Hours after winning election as San Francisco
district attorney in 2019, Chesa Boudin stood, beaming, inside a
packed dive bar in the Mission District.

“What comes next is critical,” said the then-39-year-old public
defender, part of the nationwide movement to elect district
attorneys who seek to reimagine public safety and redefine the
role of a prosecutor. “In many ways, getting here today was the
easy part.”

Those words may have proved grimly prophetic for the newly
minted D.A.

Boudin’s 2½-year tenure as San Francisco’s top prosecutor has
resembled the “knife fight in a phone booth” adage often used to
describe Bay Area politics. He has weathered attacks from across
the city’s political spectrum; both the historically
conservative police union and more moderate politicians such as
Mayor London Breed have often criticized the would-be reformer.

His relationship with the city’s police department has faltered,
and dozens of his own prosecutors have quit — some to help oust
Boudin from office.

That fight comes to a head Tuesday, when San Francisco’s 500,000
registered voters will decide whether Boudin should keep his job.

The bitter, expensive recall election has turned into a
referendum on some of San Francisco’s most painful and
protracted problems, including homelessness, drug addiction and
property crime. The election has also become a test for a
liberal city’s appetite for continuing to pursue criminal
justice reform.

Boudin described his 2019 victory as a sign of a “massive thirst
for change.” But polls suggest he may not survive the recall.
His supporters now fear a result that could have a chilling
effect on the nationwide effort to elect reform-minded district
attorneys.

Boudin’s predecessor, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George
Gascón, is also facing his second recall attempt in two years.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascon delivers remarks
after he took the oath of office on Dec. 7, 2020 at the Kenneth
Hahn Hall of Administration in Los Angeles, Calif. He became the
43rd district attorney for the county during a virtual ceremony.

Boudin has sought to reshape a criminal justice system that he
and his supporters see as profoundly unfair. He has refused to
seek the death penalty or try juveniles as adults, significantly
reduced the use of sentencing enhancements and sought to push
people accused of low-level crimes fueled by drug addiction into
treatment instead of a jail cell.

But his message has lost traction among an electorate that has
grown increasingly concerned about visible crime and
homelessness. Boudin’s background has made him an easy target
for opponents who paint him as a fringe leader disconnected from
his city.

Boudin is a Yale-educated Rhodes scholar who worked as a
translator for Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chávez. His
parents were members of the radical left-wing group the Weather
Underground. They went to prison when Boudin was a child for
their roles in a 1981 armed robbery in New York that left three
people dead, including two police officers. His mother, Kathy
Boudin, was paroled in 2003 and died of cancer last month.
Boudin’s father, David Gilbert, received parole last year.

Three polls funded by the recall campaign and its backers
earlier this year found a majority of San Francisco voters
favored removing Boudin. Polling paid for by the anti-recall
campaign last month painted a slightly rosier picture, with 48%
of voters described as pro-recall, 38% opposed and 14% undecided.

Criminal justice experts say a prosecutor’s policies are
unlikely to cause immediate shifts in crime. Property and
violent crimes fell in San Francisco during Boudin’s first two
years in office. Homicides have increased since 2019, when the
city had its fewest killings in 50 years.

But recall supporters have told a simple, yet effective, story
of a radical district attorney who has worsened many of the
city’s ills.

The campaign has highlighted shocking videos of smash-and-grab
robberies from high-end retailers in Union Square and drug
dealing in the city’s troubled Tenderloin neighborhood. Some
have been featured on Tucker Carlson‘s Fox News show and in
other conservative media.

“Never would I put all this on Chesa’s shoulders,” said Brooke
Jenkins, a former prosecutor in Boudin’s office who is now a
volunteer spokeswoman for the recall. “But citizens expect that
their D.A. is going to try to serve as a deterrent to these
criminals. ... He has never shown an interest in doing that —
not verbally, and not in his actions.”

The recall also has blamed Boudin for several high-profile
crimes, including a 2020 New Year’s Eve hit-and-run that killed
two women. The defendant, Troy McAlister, was on parole for
robbery and had been arrested several times in the months before
the crash.

Boudin has said he did not charge McAlister in the earlier
cases, instead referring them to parole officers in a move he
believed was more likely to “protect the public and break this
cycle of recidivism.”

Boudin’s supporters say he has taken meaningful steps to reduce
mass incarceration and hold police accountable. A San Francisco
police officer stood trial for excessive force this year for the
first time in the city’s history, though the officer, Terrance
Stangle, was ultimately acquitted.

Jim Ross, a consultant for Boudin’s anti-recall campaign, said
the recall process puts the D.A. at a disadvantage. Unlike the
recent attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, those challenging
Boudin do not have to run a replacement candidate. Breed will
appoint Boudin’s successor if the recall is successful.

“It’s an attempt to redo the 2019 election,” Ross said. “But
instead of making Chesa run against another candidate, where
people have a contrast and they can see their records, they can
see their policies, they’re making him run against himself.”

Reformers at the national level have pushed back on the idea
that a Boudin loss would ripple beyond the Bay Area.

“It would be a mistake to view this as a stop sign to reform,”
said Miriam Krinsky, the executive director of Fair and Just
Prosecution, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice
reform.

Compared to other cities, San Francisco is atypical, Krinsky
said: Fewer than 6% of city residents are Black, median home
sales have topped $1.5 million, and the city has one of the
world’s highest number of billionaires per capita.

Krinsky also pointed to the recent reelections of Philadelphia
Dist. Atty. Larry Krasner and Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx
in Chicago after they faced similar criticisms as Boudin and
Gascón.

The recall is one of the most expensive elections in San
Francisco history, according to filings with the city’s Ethics
Commission. Spending has passed $10 million, with more than two-
thirds of that — about $7.3 million — coming from recall
backers, including a political action committee partly funded by
billionaire hedge-fund manager William Oberndorf. Organizations
backing Boudin, including the American Civil Liberties Union of
Northern California, have spent about $3 million.

Oberndorf has given millions to Republican campaigns — including
to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s fund for Republican
Senate candidates — and to pro-charter school campaigns and
candidates of both political parties.

Boudin’s supporters have flooded neighborhoods with mailers that
encourage voters to reject the “Republican-funded recall,”
telling voters that “conservative billionaires” want to “impose
their radical conservative agenda in San Francisco.”

If Boudin is recalled, Jenkins said, “it will be Democrats that
vote him out.” Just 6.7% of San Francisco voters are registered
Republicans.

San Francisco is viewed nationally as a bastion of liberalism,
but the reality is more complicated, said John Hamasaki, a
defense attorney and former police commissioner who frequently
tangles with recall supporters.

“You could call it the bluest city, but I don’t know that it’s
the most progressive city,” Hamasaki said. “It’s a city that has
become really inundated with tech wealth, and within tech and
Silicon Valley there’s always been a connection to center-right
politics,” including billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon
Musk.

Janice Li, who lives in the city’s Inner Richmond neighborhood
and sits on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system board of
directors, said housing was the top issue for San Francisco
residents for years. But since the pandemic, she said, crime and
public safety have jumped to the top of the list.

The flurry of campaign messaging has made it hard for residents
to understand whether the city faces an actual crime wave, or a
few anecdotes have been weaponized to whip up fear, she said.

“What’s been really hard about this recall is that most people
don’t really know what’s happening,” said Li, who is voting
against the recall. “You can read articles, you can watch TV
news, you can look at data. But it’s really hard to understand
who’s at fault.”

That’s in part because both campaigns have been able to slice
the crime data to tell the stories they want.

Property and violent crime both dropped by double-digit
percentages from 2019 to 2021, city data show. But some types of
crime have exploded in the same time frame. Burglaries are up
47%. Motor vehicle theft increased by 36%. Homicides have also
increased since 2019 — a national trend — but the city
experienced its lowest number of killings in more than a half-
century that year.

The rate at which the district attorney’s office files charges
has also remained relatively stable under Boudin. In Gascón’s
final two years in office, prosecutors filed approximately 56%
of felonies presented by police and 36% of misdemeanors. Last
year, prosecutors filed 57% of felonies presented and the share
of misdemeanor cases prosecuted jumped to 46%.

Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said the
long-blighted neighborhood has gotten worse since Boudin took
office. If crime is declining, he said, it’s because people have
stopped reporting it.

The Tenderloin has become an “open-air drug supermarket,” said
Shaw, and the district attorney doesn’t seem to care. He cited
an interview Boudin gave to the Washington Post in February, in
which he said that Tenderloin residents “aren’t particularly
upset that there are drug sales happening.” The quote later
appeared on a billboard attacking Boudin.

Questions remain about police effectiveness during Boudin’s
tenure. The rate at which San Francisco police solve robberies,
thefts and assaults has fallen from 2019 to 2021, though arrest
and solve rates did dip for most police agencies during the
pandemic.

Andy Solomon, a 43-year-old high school teacher who lives in
Haight-Ashbury, said he decided to vote against the recall after
listening to a recent Boudin interview. Crime has become a more
tangible issue for the average San Franciscan, Solomon said — a
gun fight left bullet holes in his car in October — but he
questioned why those issues were not being blamed on the police.

Boudin’s “hands are sort of tied on some of that stuff,” Solomon
said.

As of Friday, about 17% of voters had returned ballots, a far
lower turnout rate than during the school board recall held in
February. The participation rate was highest among the city’s
small slice of Republican voters, more than 22% of whom have
cast ballots already, officials said.

“People are just fatigued,” said Tinisch Hollins, executive
director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a criminal
justice reform organization. “If it’s not about a tangible
solution, or a tangible resource, it’s not a priority for their
attention. That’s why this recall effort is hyperpoliticized.
It’s about people who have the money and have the time to make
an issue of something that the majority of them are not affected
by.”

The city has had three recall elections in the last nine months,
including the failed attempt to recall Newsom and the heated
February election that unseated three of the seven members of
San Francisco’s scandal-plagued school board.

San Francisco’s ranked-choice election system, in which voters
rank the candidates in order of preference, may also have left
Boudin vulnerable, said Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow
at UC Berkeley Law School’s California Constitution Center.

Boudin was the first choice for 35.6% of voters in 2019. He
eventually beat interim Dist. Atty. Suzy Loftus by 2,832 votes,
a difference of about 1.66%. That means plenty of people “are
opposed to you or not that interested in you and are susceptible
to having their mind changed,” Spivak said.

Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, Hamasaki said
the recall may already have changed how politicians seek to run
on criminal justice reform platforms in San Francisco.

“I think the impact locally has already happened,” he said.
“Democratic politicians in San Francisco are less vocal or are
silent on police reform, police misconduct and criminal justice
reform. ... The first school board recall really put progressive
politicians on notice that ‘Hey, we’re a target.’"

Wiley reported from San Francisco and Nelson and Queally from
Los Angeles.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-04/boudin-recall

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