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June 5, 2022
Updated 1:14 p.m. ET
SAN FRANCISCO — As the former chair of the San Francisco
Democratic Party, Mary Jung has a long list of liberal bona
fides, including her early days in politics volunteering in Ohio
for the presidential campaign of George McGovern and her service
on the board of the local Planned Parenthood branch. “In
Cleveland, I was considered a communist,” she said in her San
Francisco office.

But the squalor and petty crime that she sees as crescendoing on
some city streets — her office has been broken into four times
during the coronavirus pandemic — has tested her liberal
outlook. Last year, on the same day her granddaughter was born,
she watched a video of a mentally ill man punching an older
Chinese woman in broad daylight on Market Street.

Ms. Jung, director of government affairs for the San Francisco
Association of Realtors and head of a Realtors foundation that
assists homeless people, wondered what kind of city her
granddaughter would grow up in. “I thought, ‘Am I going to be
able to take her out in the stroller?’”

Now she finds herself leading what has been called a Democratic
civil war in one of America’s most liberal cities: an effort to
recall San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, that has
echoes of the party’s larger split over how to handle matters of
crime and punishment. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city,
liberals and independents will decide a recall that is receiving
major funding from conservative donors in addition to backing
from moderate Democrats.

“What shade of blue are you — that’s really what it comes down
to,” said Lilly Rapson, the campaign manager of the recall and
Ms. Jung’s partner in the endeavor. A lifelong Democrat, Ms.
Rapson said she was motivated to lead the campaign after her
home was broken into last year as she slept.

There is no compelling evidence that Mr. Boudin’s policies have
made crime significantly worse in San Francisco. Overall crime
in San Francisco has changed little since Mr. Boudin took office
in early 2020.

But his message of leniency for perpetrators has rankled
residents of the city, many of whom feel unsafe and violated by
property crimes. Like a president facing election during a bad
economy, Mr. Boudin finds himself a vessel for residents’
pandemic angst and their frustrations over a wave of burglaries
and other property crimes in well-to-do areas. Some residents,
especially the city’s sizable Asian American population, also
feel that a spike in hate crimes has made it unsafe to walk the
streets.

If successful, the recall would overturn one of the nation’s
boldest efforts in criminal justice reform: an experiment to
install a former public defender as the protector of public
safety with promises to reduce mass incarceration, hold the
police accountable and tackle racial disparities in the justice
system.

A vote to push Mr. Boudin from office would signal to Democrats
that talking tough on crime could be a winning message in the
midterm elections, and deal a blow to a national movement that
has elected progressive prosecutors in cities such as
Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Image
Mr. Boudin faced long odds in his race to become San Francisco’s
district attorney two years ago.
Mr. Boudin faced long odds in his race to become San Francisco’s
district attorney two years ago.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York
Times

The election comes as San Francisco is being convulsed by
debates over the disorder of its streets — car break-ins, tent
encampments that dot the sidewalks in some neighborhoods and the
open-air markets peddling illicit fentanyl that has killed more
people in the city than Covid-19.

Read More About the Homelessness Crisis in America
‘Invisible Child’: In 2013, a five-part Times series told the
story of Dasani, an 11-year-old Black girl who lived in a
Brooklyn homeless shelter. Today, she’s still struggling.
A Rising Death Toll: More than ever it has become deadly to be
homeless in America, especially for men in their 50s and 60s.
Housing Discrimination: A voucher program aimed at reducing
homelessness in New York City has been hamstrung by the
discriminatory practices of landlords and real estate agents.
Los Angeles Goes to War With Itself: The pandemic has
intensified a bitter fight over homelessness in the city — with
no end in sight.
Mr. Boudin, 41, was an outsider to San Francisco politics who
grew up while his parents, 1960s radicals with the Weather
Underground, went to prison for their role in the notorious 1981
robbery of a Brink’s armored car in New York that left two
police officers and a bank guard dead.

He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar who graduated from Yale
College and Yale Law School before starting his legal career as
a public defender. In 2019, Mr. Boudin sought to move across the
courtroom and was elected as the city’s top prosecutor, assuming
office just before the pandemic.

He promised to end cash bail, stop prosecuting children as
adults and expand diversion programs that offer defendants a
chance at rehabilitation instead of prison — all steps he has
taken while in office. Almost immediately, his opponents began
collecting signatures toward a recall.

“It’s not been an easy time to start a career in public life,”
he said recently at a community forum in the North Beach
neighborhood, which was interrupted by protesters outside
chanting, “Recall Chesa!”

On the campaign trail, Mr. Boudin is facing stiff headwinds.
Several polls showed him down at least 10 points. In fighting to
keep his job, he has leaned on two main strategies: associate,
at every turn, the recall effort with Republicans, and confront
voters with data that shows overall crime has not increased
meaningfully while he has been in office, even as some
categories have risen during the pandemic.

He has referred to one of the biggest donors to the recall
campaign, William Oberndorf, a conservative and wealthy
businessman, as an “oligarch,” called his opponents “Trumpian,”
and sought to place the recall in the national context of a
Republican-led effort to attack liberal prosecutors as weak on
crime.

“It’s really problematic that we are having a very Trumpian
conversation in San Francisco,” Mr. Boudin said.

California Democrats have had success using that strategy of
attaching opponents to former President Donald J. Trump — most
notably in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s triumph over a recall drive. But
some wonder if the approach has staying power the longer Mr.
Trump is out of office.

Mr. Boudin added that the recall campaign had exploited
individual tragedies like the story of a Thai grandfather who
was fatally attacked last year while taking his morning walk. He
also pointed to an increase in media coverage of crime, and
especially high-profile videos on social media of shoplifting
cases — like one showing a man on a bike stealing from a
Walgreens.

“And then people read the story, they see the video, and they
perceive crime as being out of control,” Mr. Boudin said. “When
in fact things like shoplifting are down dramatically. It
doesn’t mean we don’t have a real problem with auto burglaries,
but the notion that it’s out of control today and it wasn’t in
2019 is just demonstrably false.”

Image
Auto burglaries have been especially common in San Francisco’s
tourist hot spots.
Auto burglaries have been especially common in San Francisco’s
tourist hot spots.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

But more than anything, it was the case of Troy McAlister, a man
with a long criminal history who mowed down two people with a
stolen car on New Year’s Eve in 2020, that has fueled the recall
effort. Mr. McAlister was free because Mr. Boudin’s office had
previously negotiated a plea deal on an armed robbery charge.
And Mr. Boudin says it is a case that keeps him up at night.

“The nature of this job is we are always looking backwards and
hindsight is 20-20,” Mr. Boudin said. “We know as a matter of
material fact that some people will be released and commit bad
crimes. There’s always going to be cases where if we look back
we would make different decisions.”

Unlike in other parts of the country, homicides are not driving
the anger and passions of recall advocates. The annual number of
people killed in the city has stayed within a range of 41 to 56
over the past seven years.

Instead, recall advocates describe a pervasive feeling that
quality of life in San Francisco has deteriorated. Burglaries,
especially in wealthier neighborhoods, have soared during the
pandemic. The city recorded 7,575 burglaries in 2020 and 7,217
last year, a sharp increase of more than 45 percent from 2019.
Car break-ins, long a festering problem, were less frequent
during the pandemic, but thieves shifted their targets from
tourist areas to more residential neighborhoods, a change that
gave the issue more immediacy and urgency among voters.

Another problem is that Mr. Boudin and the Police Department,
whose rate of arrests for reported crimes is among the lowest of
major cities, have a toxic relationship. In the 2019 campaign,
the San Francisco Police Officers Association attacked Mr.
Boudin by calling him the “#1 choice of criminals and gang
members.” Supporters of Mr. Boudin responded at his victory
party with chants of epithets toward the union.

Officers have been heard on body camera footage telling
residents that the district attorney is unwilling to prosecute
crimes. And while Mr. Boudin has been criticized for not more
aggressively prosecuting drug dealing, he said the police make,
on average, only two drug-dealing arrests a day.

“The perception is right,” Mr. Boudin said. “Low-level drug
dealers can reasonably expect in San Francisco that nothing will
happen to them. Because they’re not getting arrested.
Incidentally, the same thing is true with auto burglaries, where
1 percent of reported auto burglaries result in an arrest. So
the focus on my office or on me or my policies is really
misplaced.”

The chief of police, Bill Scott, declined to answer questions on
the department’s rate of solving crimes. A spokesman said in a
statement that it was “not appropriate for him to get into the
type of political discussion that could influence the will of
the voters of San Francisco.”

“While Chief Scott admits that he and District Attorney Boudin
have their disagreements, he maintains that they have a candid
and very professional relationship,” the spokesman said.

San Francisco has had a long line of liberal prosecutors,
including Vice President Kamala Harris. But if Mr. Boudin loses
the recall, Mayor London Breed is likely to appoint a more
moderate Democrat, political analysts say. The replacement would
serve through the end of the year and then might be eligible for
re-election.

Some of the recall campaign’s most visible supporters have come
from within the district attorney’s office, which has seen a
high rate of turnover — dozens of lawyers have left since Mr.
Boudin took over, after resigning or being fired.

Brooke Jenkins, a former prosecutor, left the office to join the
recall effort in part, she says, because she clashed with Mr.
Boudin about how to prosecute a murder case.

“I don’t believe Chesa is living up to his obligation as the
district attorney,” Ms. Jenkins said. “He of course ran on a
platform of reform, and reform is necessary in the criminal
justice system. But you have to be able to balance that with
your primary obligation of maintaining public safety.”

Among the most frustrated residents in San Francisco are those
who live and work in the Tenderloin, the compact neighborhood
near City Hall that was once the city’s red-light district
filled with bars and boxing gyms. Today, it is a gritty tableau
of the city’s most persistent ills — the illicit drug markets,
the desperation of those who are chronically homeless and the
consequences of untreated mental illness.

Image
A homeless encampment in the Tenderloin.
A homeless encampment in the Tenderloin.Credit...Jim Wilson/The
New York Times

As the manager of Threads for Therapy, a nonprofit thrift shop
in the Tenderloin run by a Christian charity, Angel Fernandez
watched warily on a recent afternoon as customers perused the
women’s coats. The shop has a full-time security guard because
so many people try to shoplift.

Mr. Fernandez does not hesitate when asked how he will vote on
the recall. He compares Mr. Boudin to Robin Hood, someone who
views criminals as “the downtrodden forced into crime.” But like
the concerns of many recall supporters, some of Mr. Fernandez’s
complaints do not relate directly to the district attorney’s
performance — they are more general feelings of a need for order
and responsiveness from the city, including the police. When Mr.
Fernandez calls the Tenderloin police station one block away to
report fights on the sidewalk, drug sales, threatening behavior
or shoplifting, he is frequently disappointed with the slow
response. “Sometimes they don’t come at all,” he said of the
police.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/us/chesa-boudin-recall-san-
francisco.html

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