“This was never about one vote count, it was never about one election night party, it was never about specifically which person gets to be in the office of the district attorney,” he added. “This is a movement, not a moment, in history.”

Brooke Jenkins, a former assistant district attorney in Boudin’s office, and a lead organizer in the campaign to remove him, voiced gratitude at an election night party at the Del Mar lounge in the Marina District.

“I feel relieved. I feel hopeful for San Francisco,” she told KQED. “We knew all along this was not a Republican billionaire effort, that this was not a pushback against reform, that we were trying to protect reform. That we knew a DA can balance implementing reform with prioritizing public safety.”

The recall was largely driven by San Francisco’s more conservative neighborhoods — including the Sunset District, Marina District, Park Merced, and St. Francis Wood — where overall turnout was higher than in progressive-leaning districts that generally stood by Boudin.

While Boudin’s loss is decisive, he won’t be required to leave office until 10 days after the election is declared official by the Board of Supervisors, which may take place at its June 25 meeting. Mayor London Breed is expected to announce Boudin’s replacement soon thereafter.

A number of names have been floated to replace Boudin, including Jenkins, prosecutor Nancy Tung (who said she would run in a future election), and San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani (one of the few elected officials to endorse the recall).

Breed on Wednesday insisted the city is not backing away from progressive criminal justice reforms, and pledged to meet with community groups and police officials before appointing the next DA.

“This does not mean that criminal justice reform in San Francisco is going anywhere. It does not mean that there will be, all of a sudden, a significant setback,” she said. “We want justice. But we also want to make sure that people have a second chance.”

A group of recall supporters — including Brooke Jenkins, center — take a selfie during an election night party at Del Mar in San Francisco on June 7, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

And, Boudin may also choose to run in a future district attorney’s race. But newly appointed Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former San Francisco police spokesperson who became one of the few elected officials to endorse Boudin’s recall, said he doesn’t think another election would bode well for Boudin, based on Tuesday’s vote.

“It could happen, yeah. But I think the numbers say something,” Dorsey said.

In the meantime, Dorsey noted, the debate over Boudin’s record has fractured the community, pitting neighbor against neighbor.

“The most important thing is, we’ve got to put the hurt feelings behind us and move the city forward,” he said.

The historic recall garnered national attention, bitterly dividing Democrats in the city on issues of crime, policing and public safety reform. The effort was fueled by a tsunami of contributions — more than $7 million, according to filings at the San Francisco Ethics Commission — from well-heeled donors, including real estate interests and Republican billionaire William Oberndorf, who individually gave north of $650,000.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin addresses a crowd at The Ramp restaurant after the effort to recall him succeeded. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

In contrast, recall opponents raised less than half as much — about $3 million — with the largest donations from the American Civil Liberties Union, a criminal justice reform PAC and tech billionaire Chris Larsen.

For months, the Yes on H campaign has saturated San Francisco media with online, television and radio ads, while also investing heavily in a field operation and a texting campaign.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he was not at all surprised that San Francisco voters recalled progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin last week, and he decried the national attention it drew.

“That was so predictable, predictable, particularly after the school board recall,” Newsom said Friday in an interview with Fox 11 Los Angeles. “Nothing about that was surprising.”

What was unexpected was the scrutiny it attracted, Newsom said, particularly the view that it was an “arbiter of something farther reaching.”

“I thought the punditry was a little overwhelming on it,” he said.

But the governor, who served as San Francisco’s mayor from 2004 to 2011, said he understood why Boudin was decisively voted out of office in Tuesday’s recall election.

“I think the issue in San Francisco, in particular, is people wanting the streets cleaned up — period. Full stop. Enough,” Newsom told Elex Michaelson, the host of the political podcast and television show “The Issue Is.” “They want the streets cleaned up. They want a sense of order from the disorder they’re feeling on the streets.”

He said while many factors contributed to the state of the city, including mental health problems and open air drug use, crime was one of the most visible components.

“And tag, the DA was it, meaning there was some attachment of accountability and responsibility,” said Newsom, who was in Los Angeles to attend climate-related events at the Summit of the Americas hemispheric conference.

Boudin, a former public defender, was narrowly elected in 2019, pleading to hold police officers and corporations accountable. But supporters of the recall said Boudin failed to protect the city’s broader population due to inexperience and fixed ideology, and that in moving to charge fewer arrestees and emphasize diversion more he was siding with offenders over victims.

Under Boudin, prosecutors were not allowed to seek cash bail, charge juveniles as adults, or request longer sentences due to gang affiliations.

While Newsom acknowledged such some of those policies contributed to the problems San Francisco is facing, he underscored that many Republican-led regions face similar issues.

“It’s right to focus on where we need to improve — not necessarily unique and distinctive,” he said.

Newsom, who handily beat back his own recall challenge last year, sailed through last week’s primary election and now will face Republican State Sen. Brian Dahle on the November ballot. He said he didn’t have an election night party as he knows how quickly political tides can turn.

“November is a lifetime away,” he said.

Newsom added that he is frustrated with “what is going on with the Democratic Party” on a national level, with pressing issues such as gun control and reproductive rights hanging in the balance. He stopped short of blaming President Biden.

“It’s not his job to organize at all levels the Democratic Party,” Newsom said, “That’s the Democratic Party’s responsibility.”

He also declined to criticize House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

“I don’t want to take a cheap shot,” Newsom said.

Repeating his reaction after recent news that the Supreme Court was poised to overturn abortion rights, he said, “Where the hell are we as a party to capture the narrative, to capture the imagination of the American people?”

Aidin Vaziri (he/him) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com

The post Newsom says recall of San Francisco D.A. Boudin was ‘so predictable’ appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Richie Greenbergchairman of the Yes on Recall Chesa Boudin Committee explains:

“Chesa Boudin has a dismal track record leading the District Attorney’s office; it’s a farce, with no improvement on the horizon. He’s had no previous experience of prosecuting crime, and it clearly shows. While crime continues its grip on san francisco hitting residents, businesses and tourists, Boudin books TV and radio interviews and personal appearances; he’s bought television and social media ads to counter the recall message with his mass disinformation campaign.”

“Boudin feebly attempts to refute allegations of misconduct, his lack of fitness for the job and his giving cover to drug dealers. He’s facing heavy criticism from his former colleagues. He fabricates and manipulates statistics, cites recent, trite accomplishments as if a major breakthrough As expected, he labels those critical of him “liars” and “racists”, smears and slanders the recall effort’s proponents and major donors San Francisco’s farthest left-wing organizations and public officials. The deep chasm between Chesa Boudin’s leadership and the vast majority of radical voters has been exposed.”

The recall of Chesa Boudin has been designated as “Proposition H” on this June 7th ballot. The committee’s website is RecallChesaBoudin.org

Press Contact: Richie Greenberg
Twitter: @richieSF2016
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: RecallChesaBoudin.org

SOURCE Stop the Injustice

The post RECALL VOTING IN SAN FRANCISCO BEGINS appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO — The recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is sparking conversation across the country, and there is a lot to talk about.

What does this mean for criminal justice reform? What’s next for Chesa Boudin? Another question being asked is what the recall says about the current state of San Francisco politics.

Recalled SF DA Chesa Boudin.

CBS

“From experience, and talking to people in the community, they were really frustrated about a lack of accountability for crimes that get committed in San Francisco.” said Mayor London Breed Wednesday morning in her first comments since the vote.

Some have described Boudin’s removal as a political earthquake; a sign that the tectonic plates of city politics are shifting.

“It definitely reflects the fact that a number of people have found each other,” said political analyst Melissa Caen. “To some degree, we can take the school board recall for that. It brought a number of parents together. It brought people in the Asian community together. And that’s a big part of what was behind this recall as well.”

That coalition can be seen in the map showing how different San Francisco neighborhoods voted. Chinatown looks like the Sunset, just as the Excelsior looks a bit like Nob Hill, and Pac Heights like Visitacion Valley. Very different parts of the city reached a kind of consensus.

“People in San Francisco regard themselves as progressive or liberal, within reason,” Caen said. “They’re not interested in total dysfunction.”

“I think, broadly, liberals, moderates, progressives, everybody wants a government that works for the city of San Francisco,” said SFSU Political Science Professor Jason McDaniel. “Right now, things are not going very well and I think that upsets a lot of people. So anybody that’s on the ballot right now would be in trouble.”

That’s another theory: that voters aren’t necessarily moving right, they’re just simply tired of dysfunction. If that’s the case, more incumbents may have things to worry about.

“I think the mayor, if things continue the way they are now for another year or so, that’s going to bode ill for the mayor’s chances of getting reelected,” McDaniel said.

Now that the voters of San Francisco have decided to remove district attorney Chesa Boudin, the next move is up to the mayor. London Breed will appoint someone until a special election to fill the seat is held this November.

Wilson Walker

Wilson Walker joined KPIX 5 in July of 2007. His television career started at WSOC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1999. There, he covered the departure of the Charlotte Hornets, The Rae Carruth case, and the devastating East Coast Ice Storm of 2002. He also spent three years in Sacramento with KCRA, covering California politics, the Hamid & Umer Hyat terrorism trial, and the Sacramento arena debate.

The post Debate surrounds what Boudin recall means for historically liberal San Francisco appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — 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 high-profile 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.

He is backed by the San Francisco Democratic Party and most of the 11-member Board of Supervisors. Mayor London Breed, however, has declined to take a position on the recall, highlighting political divisions in a democratic city where leaders embrace immigrant and gay rights but have fought over police accountability and cracking down on drug dealing.

Boudin, 41, had never worked as a prosecutor when in November 2019, he eked out a 51% win over the more moderate candidate backed by the mayor.

Many were captivated by his personal story. Boudin was a baby when his parents, left-wing Weather Underground radicals, served as drivers in a botched 1981 robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead. They were sentenced to decades in prison.

On the campaign trail, he spoke of the pain of stepping through metal detectors to hug his parents and vowed to reform a system that tears apart families. Kathy Boudin was released on parole in 2003 and died of cancer in May. David Gilbert was granted parole in October.

The honeymoon period in office was short-lived.

An allegedly intoxicated parolee driving a stolen car hit and killed two pedestrians on the final day of 2020. Critics say the driver had been arrested multiple times that year and should have been in jail, but Boudin’s office had declined to press charges for burglary, drug possession and car theft. Instead they referred him to state agents who didn’t revoke his parole.

Boudin spokesperson Rachel Marshall said the case prompted the DA’s office “to begin charging parole violations ourselves rather than relying on parole to do it.”

Former prosecutor and recall supporter Brooke Jenkins said the office under the previous district attorney was progressive. But unlike Boudin, she said, George Gascón gave prosecutors discretion and allowed them to insist on onerous treatment programs as conditions of avoiding jail time.

“We are conditioning people to believe they can do whatever they want in San Francisco with no consequences,” Jenkins said. “I think San Francisco sees the need for a little bit more balance to social justice and criminal justice issues.”

Leanna Louie, a Democrat campaigning for the recall, said she was outraged at Boudin’s office released to home treat a young man who viciously kicked an elderly Chinese man sitting on a walker, severely injuring him.

“I think everybody could do better. But this, this is the worst,” Louie said. “Chesa is probably the least helpful person in this whole process.”

Marshall said the defendant was jailed for about seven months at the request of the DA’s office. His attorney then requested he be transferred to mental health diversion, which the judge granted, she said.

It’s unfair to single out Boudin in a complicated system that relies on judges, police and social services to do their parts, his supporters say.

Rico Hamilton, a longtime advocate for ending street violence who was shot last year, was among Black, Asian American and Latino leaders at a recent news conference against the recall.

“We are the leaders of change,” Hamilton said. “And us saying that we don’t want Chesa is saying that we don’t want to change the system.”

At a former tanning salon in the city’s gay-friendly Castro neighborhood that is Boudin’s campaign headquarters, the district attorney expressed pride in what his office has achieved while in a pandemic that drastically cut access to treatment, counseling and courtrooms.

His office filed charges in 62% of arrests brought by San Francisco police in 2021, up from a low of 45% his first year and on par with years dating back to 2016, according to the office’s annual report. Reported crimes include burglary, robbery, vandalism and theft but not homicides, sexual assaults and domestic violence.

At the same time, his office expanded the percentage of defendants who successfully completed diversion programs, some of which are mandated by the state, to avoid incarceration. In May, he announced a new Asian American Pacific Islander victim services unit.

Last year, Boudin south manufacturers and shippers of ghost guns, weapons popular with criminals made from parts bought online. His office pursued assault and battery charges against an on-duty San Francisco police officer, although a jury acquitted him. While opponents have cited high turnover in his office, Boudin said he has no problem filling vacancies.

“There’s a playbook that Republicans and police unions across the country are using to attack criminal justice reform. They exploit tragedies to suggest that those tragedies are a result of reforms,” Boudin said. “They don’t do that in tough-on-crime jurisdictions where the exact same tragedies occur, with more frequency.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — 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 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 high-profile 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.

He is backed by the San Francisco Democratic Party and most of the 11-member Board of Supervisors. Mayor London Breed, however, has declined to take a position on the recall, highlighting political divisions in a democratic city where leaders embrace immigrant and gay rights but have fought over police accountability and cracking down on drug dealing.

Boudin, 41, had never worked as a prosecutor when in November 2019, he eked out a 51% win over the more moderate candidate backed by the mayor.

Many were captivated by his personal story. Boudin was a baby when his parents, left-wing Weather Underground radicals, served as drivers in a botched 1981 robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead. They were sentenced to decades in prison.

On the campaign trail, he spoke of the pain of stepping through metal detectors to hug his parents and vowed to reform a system that tears apart families. Kathy Boudin was released on parole in 2003 and died of cancer in May. David Gilbert was granted parole in October.

The honeymoon period in office was short-lived.

An allegedly intoxicated parolee driving a stolen car hit and killed two pedestrians on the final day of 2020. Critics say the driver had been arrested multiple times that year and should have been in jail, but Boudin’s office had declined to press charges for burglary, drug possession and car theft. Instead they referred him to state agents who didn’t revoke his parole.

Boudin spokesperson Rachel Marshall said the case prompted the DA’s office “to begin charging parole violations ourselves rather than relying on parole to do it.”

Former prosecutor and recall supporter Brooke Jenkins said the office under the previous district attorney was progressive. But unlike Boudin, she said, George Gascón gave prosecutors discretion and allowed them to insist on onerous treatment programs as conditions of avoiding jail time.

“We are conditioning people to believe they can do whatever they want in San Francisco with no consequences,” Jenkins said. “I think San Francisco sees the need for a little bit more balance to social justice and criminal justice issues.”

Leanna Louie, a Democrat campaigning for the recall, said she was outraged at Boudin’s office released to home treat a young man who viciously kicked an elderly Chinese man sitting on a walker, severely injuring him.

“I think everybody could do better. But this, this is the worst,” Louie said. “Chesa is probably the least helpful person in this whole process.”

Marshall said the defendant was jailed for about seven months at the request of the DA’s office. His attorney then requested he be transferred to mental health diversion, which the judge granted, she said.

It’s unfair to single out Boudin in a complicated system that relies on judges, police and social services to do their parts, his supporters say.

Rico Hamilton, a longtime advocate for ending street violence who was shot last year, was among Black, Asian American and Latino leaders at a recent news conference against the recall.

“We are the leaders of change,” Hamilton said. “And us saying that we don’t want Chesa is saying that we don’t want to change the system.”

At a former tanning salon in the city’s gay-friendly Castro neighborhood that is Boudin’s campaign headquarters, the district attorney expressed pride in what his office has achieved while in a pandemic that drastically cut access to treatment, counseling and courtrooms.

His office filed charges in 62% of arrests brought by San Francisco police in 2021, up from a low of 45% his first year and on par with years dating back to 2016, according to the office’s annual report. Reported crimes include burglary, robbery, vandalism and theft but not homicides, sexual assaults and domestic violence.

At the same time, his office expanded the percentage of defendants who successfully completed diversion programs, some of which are mandated by the state, to avoid incarceration. In May, he announced a new Asian American Pacific Islander victim services unit.

Last year, Boudin south manufacturers and shippers of ghost guns, weapons popular with criminals made from parts bought online. His office pursued assault and battery charges against an on-duty San Francisco police officer, although a jury acquitted him. While opponents have cited high turnover in his office, Boudin said he has no problem filling vacancies.

“There’s a playbook that Republicans and police unions across the country are using to attack criminal justice reform. They exploit tragedies to suggest that those tragedies are a result of reforms,” Boudin said. “They don’t do that in tough-on-crime jurisdictions where the exact same tragedies occur, with more frequency.”

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA — San Francisco voters overwhelmingly recalled all three Board of Education commissioners on the ballot during Tuesday’s election, according to preliminary results.

Initial results released by the San Francisco Department of Elections show 79 percent of voters agreed to recall Commissioner Alison Collins; 75 percent of voters agreed to recall Board President Gabriela Lopez; and 72 percent agreed to recall Board Vice President Faauuga Moliga.

Once the final election results are confirmed, Mayor Breed would be tasked with appointing replacements to serve the remaining respective terms of the recalled commissioners.

The recall was organized by the group Recall School Board Members Lopez, Collins, and Moliga — made up of more than 1,000 volunteers that include parents, educators, and other residents.

The group gathered nearly 80,000 signatures, well above the amount needed to make the ballot.

The group gained support, in part, due to dissatisfaction with the prolonged closure of San Francisco Unified School District schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although elementary schools reopened in April 2021, middle schools and high schools remained closed for in-person learning for the entire school year and reopened in the Fall 2021.

According to recall organizers, commissioners Lopez, Moliga, and Collins were the only commissioners eligible for recall because they have been sitting on the board the longest, not including commissioners who’ve won recent reelections.

The recall comes as the district is facing a budget shortfall of more than $100 million for the next fiscal year, prompting intervention by the California Department of Education.

Both Mayor London Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, among other city and state leaders, supported the recall effort.

“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,” Breed said in a statement on Tuesday night in response to initial voting results.

“There are many critical decisions in the coming months — addressing a significant budget deficit, hiring a new superintendent, and navigating our emergence from this pandemic. These are on top of the structural issues the district has faced for years that include declining enrollment and fixing our school assignment system to better serve families and our students.

The school district has a lot of work to do, and the city is ready to offer support as we all move forward,” she said.

Service Employees International Union Local 1021 and the United Educators of San Francisco have both come out against the recall. Both labor unions represent thousands of SFUSD staff.

The recall election is reportedly costing the city $8 million.

Copyright © 2022 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

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Three woke San Francisco school board members who invested more time on social justice issues – like the botched renaming of 44 schools – instead of reopening them during the pandemic have been ousted in a rare recall election funded largely in part by Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires. 

In a hot-button election, 70% of parents in the liberal city voted to recall the board members on Tuesday, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.  

The school board has seven members, all Democrats, but only three were eligible to be recalled: school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. 

The effort was well-funded by some of Silicon Valley’s billionaires and millionaires, led by early Apple investor Arthur Rock, who poured more than $500,000 of his billion-dollar fortune into the recall. PayPal CEO David Sacks – who has three children and opposes mask mandates and school closures – donated $75,000, and venture capitalist Garry Tan donated $26,000.

Among parents’ main frustrations were that the school board failed to address reopening schools during the pandemic, and instead focused their efforts on renaming 44 because they claimed they were named after ‘problematic’ American icons, like Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln. 

But committee members embarrassed themselves after it was revealed they did not consult historians and used inaccurate Wikipedia entries and other non-scholarly sources to determine which personalities were racist and problematic. 

‘The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last,’ said Siva Raj, a parent who helped launch the recall effort. 

‘Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.’

The school board also scrapped merit-based competitive admissions at elite $42,000-a-year Lowell High School, which disadvantaged Asian American students.  

San Francisco Mayor London Breed is now tasked with appointing replacements to the board – who will also likely be Democrats.   

‘The voters of this city have delivered a clear message that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run school system above all else,’ Mayor London Breed, who supported the recall, said in a statement. ‘San Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.’

The election was the first recall in San Francisco since 1983, since a failed attempt to remove then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein after she passed a handgun ban.

San Francisco School Board Commissioner Alison Collins was voted out during Tuesday’s recall election 

School Board President Gabriela López (left) and Vice President Faauuga Moliga (right), both Democrats, were ousted by parents angered over their prioritizing of progressive initiatives over school reopening  

Sarah Stettler, Jennie Lucas, and Elisa Smith cheer as they celebrate at the pro-recall party at Manny’s restaurant on Tuesday

David Thompson (left) poses for a selfie with his son Lucas Tamayo-Thompson and friend Leanna Louie (right) as they celebrate the board members’ recall on Tuesday in San Francsico

Billionaire and early Apple investor Arthur Rock, 95, poured more than $500,000 into the San Francisco school board recall campaign 

Silicon Valley millionaire investors David Sacks (left) and Garry Tan (right) contributed $75,000 and $26,000, respectively, to help oust the three board members 

Opponents called the recall a waste of time and money, as the district faces a number of challenges including a $125 million budget deficit and the need to replace retiring Superintendent Vincent Matthews.

But parents in the politically liberal city launched the recall effort in January 2021 out of frustration over the slow reopening of district schools, while the board pursued the renaming of 44 school sites and the elimination of merit-based competitive admissions at the elite $42,000-a-year Lowell High School.

The campaign to recall the three school board members attracted major donations from Rock, the 95-year-old billionaire who was an early investor in Intel and Apple; as well as Sacks and Tan. 

Rock, who has an estimated net worth of $1.1billion, has given nearly $400,000 directly to two recall committees, and an additional $150,000 to two political action committees supporting the effort, reported The Daily Beast.

ERRORS MADE BY THE SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL RENAMING COMMITTEE:  

Committee members allegedly used references from Wikipedia and other non-scholarly sources to determine which personalities were racist and problematic. 

Several of those citations has now been proven to be factually incorrect: 

1. One committee member urged that the name of acclaimed American poet James Russell Lowell should be stripped off a high school because a Wikipedia citation stated that he did ‘not want black people to vote’.  

However, that claim is false – and scholarly articles assert that Lowell ‘unequivocally advocated giving the ballot to the recently freed slave’.

2. The committee concluded that Paul Revere’s name should be removed from a middle school after citing an article from the History Channel website. 

Members alleged that Revere’s military activities were tied to ‘the conquest of the Penobscot Indians’, which was untrue. 

3. James Lick – who resided in San Francisco – was also deemed ‘racist’ after members failed to critically read an article about the famous 19th century businessman. 

The committee stated that Lick had funded a sculpture showing an American Indian lying at the feet of white men. 

However, in actuality, Lick died 18 years before the sculpture was created, and it was only partially funded by his posthumous estate. 

Public records indicate that during the 1980s and 1990s, Rock donated money mainly to Republican candidates and causes, but over the past three decades he has emerged as a major Democratic donor, including to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

A major proponent of charter schools, Rock has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board elections in districts from coast to coast, including Los Angeles, Minnesota, New Mexico, Georgia and New York, reported Mission Local.

Additionally, Rock has donated some $12million to charter schools and organizations that promote charter schools all over the country. In San Francisco, the school board has been hostile to the proliferation of charter schools. Opponents of charter schools believe that charters draw the top students from regular public schools, leaving behind the most vulnerable students to be educated, with fewer resources, and reducing the overall quality of public education.  

The second-highest donor to the recall effort in San Francisco is David Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal and general partner at his venture capital fund, Craft Ventures, who contributed $75,000 to push out the three school board members, after bankrolling a failed effort to recall Gov Gavin Newsom. 

Sacks, who has been vocal about his opposition to school closures and mask mandates, tweeted after the vote on Tuesday: ‘Every child deserves a high-quality education. School boards and administrators work for parents and students, not the other way round. Competence matters more than ideology. That’s what San Francisco voters affirmed tonight.’

Garry Tan, co-founder of Initialized Capital, contributed just over $25,000 to the recall effort. Tan began donating to local elections last year, pouring $50,000 into a campaign to recall the ultra-progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who has been widely criticized as being soft-on-crime. 

The mayor, one of the most prominent endorsers of the recall, praised the parents, saying they ‘were fighting for what matters most – their children.’ 

Several of controversial tweets penned by Collins in December 2016 targeting Asian-Americans are pictured 

Siva Raj, a father-of-two tech entrepreneur, helped launch the recall effort alongside his partner Autumn Looijen (pictured together)

The pressures of the pandemic and distance learning have made school board races a hot-button topic as frustrations over pandemic measures reach a boiling point. 

In a statement on Wednesday, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said that San Francisco parents were standing up to have their voices heard. 

‘Over the past two years they have watched liberal school boards in their communities prioritize renaming schools over re-opening classrooms,’ he said. ‘School boards have used ‘equity’ and ‘social justice’ as an excuse to discriminate and lower standards for children. This is exactly what the San Francisco school board did and why three of their members were recalled in a landslide.’ 

Many commenters on Twitter greeted the news of the recall with glee, mixed with disbelief. 

‘There is hope for #California yet! Mindblowing that this is in #SanFrancisco!’ tweeted one user. ‘The recall votes were not even close. This was a powerful statement!’

Another weighed in: ‘DANG I AM SO HAPPY ABOUT THIS!! SUPER PROUD of California right now….and that is NOT a sentence I ever thought would be coming out of my mouth!’

In San Francisco, one of the nation’s most liberal cities, the recall effort split Democrats. Breed, a Democrat, had criticized the school board for being distracted by ‘political agendas.’

The ousted board members – Collins, Lopez and Moliga – had defended their records, saying they prioritized racial equity because that was what they were elected to do.

Both sides agreed that San Francisco’s school board and the city itself had embarrassed itself under the national spotlight.  

One of the first issues to grab national attention was the board’s January 2021 decision to rename 44 schools they said honored public figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices. On the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and trailblazing US Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat.

Instead of consulting historians to inform their decisions, the committee members used inaccurate Wikipedia entries to justify renaming the schools.

Several citations used in the debate have now been proven to be factually incorrect, including a false claim that American poet James Russell Lowell did not want black people to vote and that Paul Revere’s military activities were tied to ‘the conquest of the Penobscot Indians’. 

Activist and first-grade teacher Jeremiah Jeffries, who led the committee, is said to have ‘ridiculed’ a proposal to bring in historians for consultation.

Jeffries reportedly stated: ‘What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so, we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. We’re not debating that. There’s no point in debating history in that regard. Either it happened or it didn’t.’

He added: ‘Based on our criteria, it’s a very straightforward conversation. And so, no need to bring historians forward to say – they either pontificate and list a bunch of reasons why, or [say] they had great qualities. Neither are necessary in this discussion.’ 

The effort drew swift criticism and critics said it made a mockery of the country’s racial reckoning. Angry parents asked why the board would waste time renaming schools when the priority needed to be reopening classrooms.

One of the first issues to grab national attention was the board’s January 2021 decision to rename 44 schools they said honored public figures linked to racism, sexism and other injustices. On the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and trailblazing U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein . Instead of consulting historians to inform their decisions, the committee members used inaccurate Wikipedia entries to justify renaming the schools. Activist and first-grade teacher Jeremiah Jeffries (pictured), who led the committee, is said to have ‘ridiculed’ a proposal to bring in historians for consultation

The school board’s plan to scrap merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell High School, where most students are Asian, drew ire from local parents

After an uproar, the school board scrapped the plan.

Collins came under fire again for tweets she wrote in 2016 that were widely criticized as racist. In them Collins, who is black, said Asian Americans used ‘white supremacist’ thinking to get ahead and were racist toward black students.

Racism against Asian Americans has come under a renewed focus since reports of attacks and discrimination escalated with the spread of the coronavirus, which first appeared in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.

Collins said the tweets were taken out of context and posted before she held her school board position. She refused to take them down or apologize for the wording and ignored calls to resign from parents, Breed and other public officials.

Collins turned around and sued the district and her colleagues for $87million, fueling yet another pandemic sideshow. The suit was later dismissed.

Moliga (far right) canvassed with Dr. Ponipate Rokolekutu, left, and Gaynor Siataga, right, before polls closed on Tuesday

Many Asian parents were already angered by the board’s efforts to end merit-based admissions at the elite Lowell High School, where Asian students are the majority.

As a result, many Asian American residents were motivated to vote for the first time in a municipal election. The grassroots Chinese/API Voter Outreach Task Force, which formed in mid-December, said it registered 560 new Asian American voters.

Ann Hsu, a mother of two who helped found the task force, said many Chinese voters saw the effort to change the Lowell admissions system as a direct attack.

‘It is so blatantly discriminatory against Asians,’ she said. In the city’s Chinese community, Lowell is viewed as a path children can take to success.

SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL BOARD VOTES TO RENAME 44 SCHOOLS OVER ‘DISHONOROABLE LEGACIES’ OF NAMESAKES: 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  U.S. president targeted for his treatment of indigneous people, Abraham Lincoln High School. 

GEORGE WASHINGTON: The first U.S. president and a slave owner, George Washington High School. 

VASCO NUNEZ DE BALBOA: A Spanish explorer targeted by the board over colonization and abuses of indigenous people, Balboa High School.  

MISSION DOLORES: The 7th mission founded by Spanish settlers in their quest to colonize and evangelize the native peoples of California, Mission High School. 

JAMES R. LOWELL:  While initially involved in the movement to abolish slavery, the poet’s support wavered over the years, Lowell High School.  

JAMES DENMAN: Founder of first S.F. school and first superintendent, a racist leader who denied Chinese students a public education, James Denman Middle School.  

EDWARD EVERETT: An American statesman who a speech in 1826 in which he appeared to endorse slavery, despite his arguments that he rejected the slave trade and the act of kidnapping someone into slavery, Everett Middle School. 

HERBERT HOOVER: U.S. president: African-American leaders condemned various aspects of the Hoover administration, including his unwillingness to push for a federal anti-lynching law, Herbert Hoover Middle School. 

JAMES LICK: A land baron whose estate funded the controversial ‘Early Days’ statue depicting Native Americans in a demeaning manner, James Lick Middle School. 

PRESIDIO: S.F. military post estalished in 1776 as Spain’s northern-most outpost of colonial power, Presidio Middle School. 

THEODORE OR F.D. ROSSEVELT: Both U.S. Presidents. Teddy Roosevelt held Racist attitudes toward Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos during the Spanish-American War; F.D received heavy criticism for his internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Roosevelt Middle School. 

HENRY WARE LAWTON: An officer in the U.S. Civil War, Lawton K-8

CLAIRE LILIENTHAL: A S.F. school board member, two school sites

PAUL REVERE: A Patriot in the American Revolution, Paul Revere K-8

ALAMO: A poplar tree or the site of Texas Revolution battle, Alamo Elementary

PEDRO DE ALVARADO: A conquistador, Alvarado Elementary,

EDWIN BRYANT: The author penned editorials supporting the anti-Catholic nativism movement and a series of racist attacks on Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson for his black common law wife and two mixed race daughters, Bryan Elementary

EDWARD HYDE: The English politician and Earl of Clarendon, Clarendon Elementary Second Community and Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program

EL DORADO: Mythical City of Gold, El Dorado Elementary 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN: The US Senator replaced a Condererate Flag at City Hall while the Mayor of San Francisco in 1984, Dianne Feinstein Elementary

JAMES GARFIELD: US President, Garfield Elementary

WILLIAM HENRY GRATTAN : An Irish author regarded as controversial due to the inaccuracy of some of his work, Grattan Elementary

THOMAS JEFFERSON: U.S. president and a slave owner, Jefferson Elementary

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY: Composer of ‘Star Spangled Banner’, Francis Scott Key Elementary

FRANK MCCOPPIN: San Francisco Mayor, Frank McCoppin Elementary

WILLIAM MCKINLEY: US President, McKinley’s expansionist policies are now widely viewed as racist toward indigenous people, McKinley Elementary 

JAMES WILSON MARSHALL: Sawmill worker at Sutter’s Mill, who reported the finding of gold at Coloma on the American River in California on January 24, 1848, sparking the California Gold Rush, Marshall Elementary 

JAMES MONROE: US President and slave owner, Monroe Elementary

JOHN MUIR: The naturalist made comments that invoked racist stereotypes made toward black people, John Muir Elementary

JOSE ORTEGA: A Spanish colonizer, Jose Ortega Elementary

JOSE BERNARDO SANCHEZ: A Spanish missionary, Sanchez Elementary 

JUNIPERO SERRA: Elementary, Spanish priest to be renamed due to colonization and abuses of indigenous people Serra Elementary

GEN. PHILIP SHERIDAN: A Union General in the American Civil War, Sheridan Elementary

GEN. WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN: According to some reports, Sherman did not believe in equality between white and black people despite being a genera in the Northern Army during the Civil War, Sherman Elementary

JOHN SLOAT:  Navy officer and a colonizer who ‘claimed/stole’ California from Mexico, Commodore Sloat Elementary

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: Author, Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary  

ADOLPH SUTRO: S.F. mayor accused of discriminating against black people in the 19th century who wanted to visit the baths named after him, Sutro Elementary

DON ANTONIO DE ULLOA: Spanish General and the the first Spanish governor of Louisiana, Ulloa Elementary 

DANIEL WEBSTER: U.S. Statesman who urged northerners to respect slavery in the South and to assist in the return of fugitive slaves to their owners, Daniel Webster Elementary

NORIEGA: Unclear, Noriega Early Education School

PRESIDIO: San Francisco Military Post formerly established by the Spanish, Presidio EES

ROBERT F STOCKTON: Navy Commodore who captured California during the Mexican–American War, Stockton EES  

The post Three woke San Francisco college board members ousted in uncommon recall election appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Chesa Boudin and Lorenzo Charles became friends during monthly visits to their mothers in a maximum-security prison.

Lorenzo’s mother was behind bars for a relatively minor drug offense; Kathy Boudin, a leader of the radical Weather Underground, was doing twenty 20 years to life for her role as an unarmed getaway driver in a 1981 Brinks robbery near New York City that ended with three dead.

When 6-year-old Chesa screamed at his mother for abandoning him as an infant, Lorenzo calmed him. When Chesa refused to do homework, his mother urged him to emulate Lorenzo, an A-student who lived with his grandmother in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood.

Not yet 5 years old, Chesa had been visiting his father in prison for almost four years. A few years later, he began to spend weekends with him in trailer visits.

(Family handout)

Chesa lived in Chicago with his adopted family of activist intellectuals. With their support, he channeled his anger into achievement. He lost touch with Lorenzo. In his first semester at Yale, Chesa received a letter from his father, imprisoned for his role in the Brinks robbery. He had met Lorenzo on his cell block. Doing time for burglary.

It’s a story so central to Boudin’s life that he tells it over and over, always with the same last line: For Lorenzo, “the odds played out.”

Lorenzo’s fate drew Boudin to research and write about those odds against children of incarcerated parents, which deepened his convictions about injustice and racism, which propelled him to law school and a job as public defender in San Francisco.

And then he made a move in some ways as radical as his parents’ choices: In 2019, he ran for San Francisco district attorney, promising to use incarceration as a last resort, tackle systemic racial inequities and prosecute police brutality.

Everything about his victory was improbable. He was a 39-year-old public defender who had never prosecuted a case. In a city where politics is a blood sport, he was a candidate who had never run for anything since class vice president in sixth grade. His four parents, the two who bore him and the two who raised him, had been faces on FBI Most Wanted posters.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin, center, with his chief of staff, David Campos, and Assistant Dist. Atty. Rachel Marshall at a news conference in 2020 announcing manslaughter charges against a former San Francisco police officer, Chris Samayoa, who fatally shot an unarmed carjacking suspect in 2017.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Opponents registered the domain name recallchesaboudin.org. within days of his being sworn in. Fueled by tech money, fears of crime, and San Francisco politics, the June 7 recall election has made Boudin a lightning rod for every tragedy in the city, the target of anger over homeless encampments, drug dealing, gun violence and home burglaries.

San Francisco voters’ verdict on Boudin will reverberate far beyond the city’s 47 square miles, including in Los Angeles, where Dist. Atty. George Gascón faces a potential recall. Because if you can’t make radical change in San Francisco, what future does the progressive prosecutor movement have?

Two months after he took office, Boudin spoke at a Columbia University conference that focuses on ending mass incarceration. In the front row was his mother Kathy, paroled in 2003, doctorate in education in 2007, founder of the center that organizes the annual event.

“I never wanted to run for office,” Boudin said. “Because of the compromise. Because of the mucky, disgusting policymaking process. The moral clarity of being a public defender was safer, was easier…. But I found myself, I think we all find ourselves, in a pretty unique historic moment…. And now I face the slippery slope of compromise. Every day.”

When he stood up in court, which he did often, he was clear what “for the people” meant: “A lot of people in my role don’t think that ‘the people’ include those they are prosecuting.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin during his swearing-in ceremony in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2020.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

He was trying to disrupt the paradigm that divides the world into good victims and bad criminals, that equates locking people up with public safety, that measures success by convictions. He was trying to redefine success as interventions that healed victims and held criminals accountable, yet offered a path to redemption.

He hired former public defenders in top jobs to “bring people into the office who don’t just theoretically know that the person they’re prosecuting is a three-dimensional person … who have seen racial profiling and what it looks like in police reports. Seen people who are wrongfully accused.”

He was trying to convince career prosecutors that they had been wielding their enormous power wrongly.

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“They don’t want to believe that for their entire life, their entire career, they’ve been doing harm,” he said months later at a symposium. “They don’t want to believe that an outsider like me, a career public defender, knows better than they do how to be a prosecutor, or how to be a prosecutor that helps promote public safety.”

This, more than any specific reform, has made him a polarizing figure, loved and reviled, savior and threat.

“I just want to live in a city where the DA prosecutes crime,” tweeted Michelle Tandler, an entrepreneur and recall supporter. “My home has been overrun by radicals and the criminals they empower.”

The COVID-19 pandemic bred insecurity and fear, addicts and homeless stood out on empty San Francisco streets, home burglaries surged as tourists vanished and tech workers left the city, and Boudin’s past, which shapes all that he does, was reduced to a simple refrain: son of terrorists.

On Oct. 20, 1981, Kathy Boudin dropped her 14-month-old son at the babysitter and joined his father, David Gilbert, assigned to pick up members of the Black Liberation Army after they robbed a Brinks truck in a suburban mall.

Chesa Boudin credits time spent in the Childrens Center at the Bedford Hills state prison, an unusual family-oriented visiting space for mothers and children, with enabling him to establish a strong relationship with his mother Kathy.

(Family Handout)

The plan went awry; Black revolutionaries shot and killed a Brinks guard and two police officers. Boudin and Gilbert were arrested at the scene.

Chesa was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, friends of his parents from the movement. By 7, he was flying solo more than a dozen times a year from their Chicago home to New York for prison visits.

Chesa Boudin with his two fathers, David Gilbert, left, and Bill Ayers, who along with his wife adopted the toddler after his parents’ arrest.

(Family handout)

“We’d be going about our lives, and then Chesa would be gone for four days,” said Sam Kass, a close friend since childhood. “He would go off into this other world and then come back to ours. And we’d be running around and riding bikes.”

By junior high, years of therapy helped channel his rage and guilt into ambition and achievement. “It was a very conscious decision,” Kass said. “He just worked harder at everything than everybody in everything he did. Whether he was good at it or not.”

He was the A-student who read the most books, the multitasker who editorialized against the abolition of a free period, which he used to email family, eat, talk to teachers, get library books, make photocopies, attend club meetings and catch up on “those little things adults call errands.”

Chesa on his sixth birthday. He was slow to learn to read and suffered epileptic fits as a child.

(Family handout)

His nickname was the Shark: Always moving, or you die.

In a home that was a salon for children as well as adults, Chesa developed both a hard shell and an outspoken sense of injustice.

When teachers told him to wear a name tag the first day at school, Chesa threw such a fit that Ayers had to intercede. The problem was not the name tag, but the itchy yarn around his neck, Boudin recalled in an interview. Thirty-three years later, righteous indignation still tinged his voice:

“I wasn’t being rebellious for the sake of being rebellious. I was uncomfortable.”

Column One

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He embraced, first by necessity and then by choice, a life that straddled two worlds.

“Every day I combine two lives: one immersed in the stability of privilege and the other meeting the challenges of degradation,” Boudin wrote in his college application essay.

Reconnecting with Lorenzo Charles became the impetus for research on the rights of children of incarcerated parents and the biases of a system that disproportionately locks up Black men.

Boudin spoke around the country with a friend whose father had been a leader of the Attica prison rebellion.

“I would be the one who would be emotional,” Emani Davis said. “And he would stick to all the points.”

Boudin’s first new program as district attorney allowed parents charged with certain low-level crimes to enroll in classes and therapy in lieu of jail.

In response to criticism that the policy arbitrarily favored parents, Boudin pointed to the capriciousness of a system that sent his mother to prison for 22 years and sentenced his father to life, for the same crime:

“You point me to a place in the criminal justice system where the quality of justice is not arbitrary,” he said.

Weather Underground member Katherine Boudin is led out of the Rockland County Courthouse in New City, N.Y., by sheriff’s officers on Nov. 21, 1981.

(David Handschuh / Associated Press)

On, Oct. 24, 1981, David Gilbert is escorted by police into the Village Hall in Nyack, N.Y., for a hearing on felony murder charges stemming from the Oct. 20, 1981, Brinks armored car robbery at a mall in Nanuet, N.Y., and a subsequent shootout with Nyack police that left three people dead.

(David Handschuh / Associated Press)

Kathy Boudin still has the well-worn paper atlas she kept in her prison cell, immersed in maps that became a lifeline to her teenage son when he discovered travel.

“It was a leap that I remember experiencing as him owning a certain part of life that he created, that he loved, and then he would share with all of us. But it was his,” she recalled.

He counted countries as intensely as he studied. (Now more than 100, on all seven continents.)

The night that Kathy Boudin was released from parole, after seven years during which she could not leave New York without permission, she called her son.

“He said, ‘Great! Now we can travel together,’” she recalled.

When Chesa Boudin decided to run for district attorney, the hardest part was telling his parents.

“I was wary, even unhappy about it,” Gilbert wrote in an interview from prison (he was since granted clemency and paroled in November). “I’m skeptical about what one can accomplish in the money-laden arena of electoral politics.”

“I was very concerned that as a prosecutor, you have to prosecute people. You have to put people in prison,” Kathy Boudin said. “What would that be like for him and how would he handle that?”

He handled it by leaning into his family history to make points: People are more than their worst mistake. A man in his 70s with a perfect record during four decades in prison posed no danger to society and belonged at home. Coming face to face with victims can be the most potent rehabilitation.

“The thing that made the biggest difference for my mom was when she met one of the people whose lives she had turned upside down by participating in the crime,” Boudin told a forum.

Neither Kathy Boudin nor Bernardine Dohrn ever expected their son to enter politics. He had been a Rhodes scholar, worked as a translator for the administration of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, written a coming-of-age memoir (ever competitive, he boasts it received the worst review ever in the New York Times), returned to Yale for law school.

Then he found a home at the San Francisco public defender’s office, which he talks about with uncharacteristic passion. “The energy, esprit de corps, commitment — the culture of the institution is one I found to be addictive,” he said.

But the victories of prosecutors like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Rachael Rollins in Boston convinced him that a shift in public opinion had created opportunity for systemic change. In 2018, he was a finalist to run Los Angeles’ vast public defender’s office. That emboldened him when Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney at the time, decided not to run again, creating the first open contest for the office in 110 years.

A political novice, Boudin had two key assets. He was confident he would outwork the competition. And he was a networker since childhood. “There were 400 kids in our high school class,” said his brother Malik Dohrn, seven months older. “I stay in touch with eight. Chesa stays in touch with 400.”

Boudin eked out a narrow victory, defeating Mayor London Breed’s favored candidate.

As he celebrated the night of his inauguration, Boudin had no idea how prophetic his words would soon seem:

“2020 is going to be an amazing year. There’s going to be a roller-coaster ride.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin gestures as he walks with his wife, Valerie Block, during his swearing-in ceremony in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2020.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

For a while, the roller coaster brought heady highs: The twin crises of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd made Boudin’s agenda both more urgent and politically feasible.

Keeping people out of jail — to provide space for social distance and reduce spread of the coronavirus — became an imperative amid a health emergency. The jail population shrank so quickly the city was able to close a structurally unsafe lockup.

The strength of the Black Lives Matter protests temporarily quieted Boudin’s most outspoken adversary, the police union, and fueled his agenda.

Prosecutors no longer asked for cash bail. They stopped seeking gang enhancements or “three strikes” charges, which dramatically increase the length of sentences. They refused to file charges for contraband seized during pretext stops, which overwhelmingly target Blacks and Latinos

Boudin filed the first homicide charges in the history of San Francisco against a police officer for actions while on duty, then filed charges against four more.

The plunge came with equally dizzying speed. On New Year’s Eve 2020, a man on parole sped through an intersection and hit and killed two women, police said. Multiple agencies could have made different decisions that would have averted the tragedy, but the spotlight was on the district attorney’s failure to press charges that might have kept Troy McAlister behind bars.

McAlister’s name became shorthand for a prosecutor who let dangerous criminals roam the streets. The recall movement gathered momentum.

“As car break-ins and burglaries reached a crisis level in San Francisco, Boudin’s refusal to hold serial offenders accountable is putting more of us at risk,” the recall committee said.

Boudin tried for months to counter the accusations and underlying fears with data: Homicides had increased from a record low in 2019, but at a slower rate than neighboring jurisdictions. Police data showed crime overall had dropped in 2020. He was prosecuting drug cases at higher rates than his predecessor, while police were solving crimes at historically low rates.

He now sees the efforts to focus on the data as a mistake.

“In a world where people have good reason to be really skeptical of what they’re told by the government, if you’re scared, the last thing you want to hear is somebody tell you that your fear is irrational,” he said in March.

Boudin had won election by being the outsider who criticized a failed system; now he owned the system. To redefine public safety, to demonstrate that communities can be safe locking up fewer people, to build a consensus for programs that might break cycles of recidivism, would take years.

“So what do you do? You still have an ethical obligation to implement the best policies with the most consistency and the longest-term impact that you can politically afford to do. That’s the balancing act,” he said.

Boudin gravitates toward sports he characterizes as “mind over matter,” in which “there is literally always a little bit better you can do. And it’s always within your control. Or it feels that way.” He ran his first marathon after college on a course he measured around his parents’ camp in Northern California.

“It was him against him,” Dohrn said. “It was perfect in a way.”

The recall too is Boudin against himself.

He is still the outsider, a political interloper in a tightknit city. In a job that’s often a political springboard — one of his predecessors is now vice president of the United States — he is an anomaly; his ambition, said Judith Resnik, his law school mentor, “is to change what the whole world understands the role of a prosecutor to be.”

He likens his current situation to another favorite sport, chess, which he learned as a child from his grandfather, the prominent civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin.

“To the best of your ability, you’re anticipating what’s coming down the road and how you respond to it so that you’ve thought it through, and you’re not just reacting in the moment,” he said.

“But you can’t always see what’s coming.”

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Mark Z Barabak Los Angeles Times

San Francisco is quite familiar with earthquakes, and what happened Tuesday — the ouster of three extreme lefties from the Board of Education — was not one of those.

Earthquakes are sudden and unexpected. The recall was neither.

The removal of board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins was destined the moment the city’s liberal establishment, led by Mayor London Breed, joined the effort along with several discontented millionaires, who threw in loads of cash.

What happened Tuesday was more a foreshock, a warning — as if Democrats needed any more of those — that November’s midterm elections could be very bad indeed, as parents unsettled by two years of pandemic-related upheaval vent their frustrations at the polls.

The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.

In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.

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The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.

In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time board members wasted.

Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the city’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)

Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.

All of which was too much for this famously tolerant city, as students struggled with distance learning and public schools remained closed even as others in neighboring communities reopened.

Inclusion, sensitivity and righting history’s wrongs are all well and good. But there was a strong sense that “we are not getting the basics right,” as Siva Raj, a father of two who helped launch the recall effort, put it.

He and others would have removed all seven members of the board, but only the three who were targeted were eligible for removal.

It is foolish — and one of the bad habits of political prognosticators — to overinterpret the results of any one election. To be clear, San Francisco hasn’t changed. A city that gave Joe Biden 85% support won’t be voting Republican in anyone’s lifetime.

But the results are noteworthy precisely because the recall took place in liberal San Francisco. It’s not a case of pro-Trumpers seeking to ban books, or conservatives stirring up unfounded concerns about critical race theory being introduced into grade schools. Parents have emerged as one of the most potent forces in politics today, and woe to anyone seen as standing in the way of their kids’ education.

Liesl Hickey, a veteran GOP strategist, has dubbed 2022 the year of the angry K-12 parent. “They are mad,” Hickey told the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter, “and they want to hold someone accountable.”

That’s what bodes poorly for Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Midterms elections are almost always a referendum on the party in power, and the voters most likely to turn out are those who are angry and wish to make known their discontent.

Public schools may be back to regular business by the fall. But it’s a good bet that parents won’t be forgiving or forgetting what’s taken place over the last two plague years, and in that way San Francisco’s recall election may be the early rumblings of a much larger shakeup to come.

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