San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is fighting for his job, with a recall election on Tuesday’s ballot. 

Mr. Boudin is part of a recently elected wave of similarly minded progressive prosecutors in Seattle, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. Their movement seeks to prevent certain offenders from repeatedly churning through the system by, for example, diverting them to mental health, drug misuse, or education programs. They seek accountability of rogue police officers and greater post-conviction justice. They support better victims’ services and treating juvenile suspects as juveniles – not as adults.

Why We Wrote This

A recall vote facing San Francisco’s district attorney may indicate an underlying doubt that criminal justice reforms across the country can handle the challenges posed by rising crime rates.

But crime rates across the United States went up during the pandemic. And in a midterm year when crime and violence have edged up to rank third among the list of Americans’ top concerns – behind inflation and the economy – Mr. Boudin and other reformist prosecutors are under attack.

“Voters fundamentally understand that the reason they elect DAs is to put the bad guys behind bars,” says veteran Democratic strategist Garry South, in Los Angeles. If Mr. Boudin is recalled – and several polls point to that likelihood – “it sends a message to Democrats that even in a very liberal bastion like San Francisco, prosecutors have to do their job, and they have to be perceived as doing their job. If they just come off as reformers of the criminal justice system, that’s not what they’re hired to do.”

San Francisco

It’s been a mixed day for Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s embattled district attorney. One of the nation’s most progressive prosecutors, he’s fighting an unprecedented recall election – a test of criminal justice reform in America’s most liberal city, and, Mr. Boudin argues, an unfair test. 

On one of his recent “merchant walks” in the ethnically diverse Excelsior neighborhood, many shopkeepers happily take a campaign sign for their window. They appreciate his personal attention, fluent Spanish, and efforts to speak Chinese, Russian, and even Farsi. Pedestrians stop him for a photo or to offer encouragement. A passing driver shouts support.

But he also hears from critics. More than one business on his sidewalk tour of taquerias, auto shops, and small retailers has been burgled – a hardware store just the day before. People have witnessed unchecked retail theft at two nearby Walgreens. One of them closed last year. Mr. Boudin backtracks to talk with a man who is hosing down a bright blue Yamaha motorcycle in the driveway at Pro Image Auto Collision on Mission Street. “I understand you support the recall. What’s your concern?” he asks.

Why We Wrote This

A recall vote facing San Francisco’s district attorney may indicate an underlying doubt that criminal justice reforms across the country can handle the challenges posed by rising crime rates.

The worker says the district attorney has had “all these years” to change the city – and Mr. Boudin interrupts, talking over him. “How many years have I had?” he quizzes. The shop worker keeps speaking, driving to the point that people who commit crimes need to be held accountable. “I agree,” says Mr. Boudin, pointing out that he’s been in office less than 2 1/2 years, and was almost immediately shut down by the pandemic. Despite that, he tells the man he has been able to increase the rates that charges have been brought in cases of homicides, sexual assaults, and drug sales, compared with his predecessor.

The employee continues hosing down the bike, unconvinced. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”  

This “seeing is believing” is Mr. Boudin’s challenge, and to some extent, a challenge for Democrats in a midterm year when crime and violence have edged up to rank third among the list of Americans’ top concerns – behind inflation and the economy, according to a March survey by Gallup. Political and criminal justice experts warn not to extrapolate a national trend from a single locale. And yet, Mr. Boudin is not the only progressive prosecutor under attack, with George Gascon in Los Angeles and Alvin Bragg in Manhattan having to backpedal on some reforms. Mr. Gascon is also being hounded by a second attempt at a recall. Even when reformist prosecutors have voter support, some state legislatures are trying to clip their wings. That’s the case in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner won reelection last year.  

“Voters fundamentally understand that the reason they elect DAs is to put the bad guys behind bars,” says veteran Democratic strategist Garry South, in Los Angeles. If Mr. Boudin is recalled – and several polls point to that likelihood – “it sends a message to Democrats that even in a very liberal bastion like San Francisco, prosecutors have to do their job, and they have to be perceived as doing their job. If they just come off as reformers of the criminal justice system, that’s not what they’re hired to do.”

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin talks with business owners and residents in San Francisco on May 17, 2022. Mr. Boudin is one of a number of progressive prosecutors across the U.S. who are under fire for their attempts at criminal justice reform.

A reformer whose parents were incarcerated

When Mr. Boudin ran for district attorney in 2019, he emphasized his upbringing as a child of incarcerated parents. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were members of the militant, leftist Weather Underground. After a 1981 botched armored truck heist, they were convicted of felony murder for their supporting roles. His mother was released in 2003. She died in May. His father was released late last year.

The toddler was raised by adoptive parents in Chicago, who had also been members of the radical group. He grew up to graduate from Yale Law School and eventually became a public defender in San Francisco – driven by his personal experiences with the criminal justice system. But he switched roles to pursue the top prosecutor job, running on a reform platform to end racist, mass incarceration. 

Mr. Boudin is part of a wave of similarly minded district attorneys in Seattle, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere who were elected over the past five years or so. Their movement seeks to prevent certain offenders from repeatedly churning through the system by, for example, diverting them to mental health, drug misuse, or education programs. They seek accountability of rogue police officers and greater post-conviction justice. They support better victims’ services and treating juvenile suspects as juveniles – not as adults. 

A lightning rod for the city’s ills

In a city with a history of progressive prosecutors, Mr. Boudin barely won his race, besting his opponent by 1.6 percentage points.

Now it’s not his background, but his performance that’s up for discussion. The debate boils down to a charge that he’s too lenient with criminals, but the reality is more complex. In a city where two-thirds of voters recently polled say they feel less safe than in 2019, and 57% want to recall Mr. Boudin, the DA has become a lightning rod for everything that ails San Francisco, from homelessness and rampant open-air drug use and overdoses, to auto burglaries, hate crimes, and spectacular smash-and-grab retail theft. 

Homicides in the city were up during the pandemic, from a half-century low. In the first five months of 2022, they’re slightly down, while assaults and rape are up, and larceny and theft up substantially.

“There are so many moving parts” behind crime trends and the recall, says Magnus Lofstrom, policy director of criminal justice at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. The pandemic interrupted lives and included a period of “wild fluctuations” in crime that affected people’s feelings about public safety, he says. 

Nationally in 2020, residential burglaries plunged by more than half but homicides rose by nearly 30%, and hate crimes against Asians surged by 76%, according to the FBI. Gun sales flourished and so did gun deaths. To control contagion, homeless shelters reduced their populations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention encouraged encampments; jails and prisons released certain inmates early, and courts operated at far below capacity.  

Given the many factors influencing crime, Mr. Loftstrom says that “there’s a limitation [to the effect] a district attorney can have on crime rates.”

“We cannot do it alone”

When Mr. Boudin is campaigning, he works the personal angle – if a shopkeeper is Taiwanese, he mentions a glorious trip surfing on the Taiwanese coast. He expresses empathy for a difficult last two years, and hands out his business card for people to email him directly. But many people want to know what he’s doing about crime, about cleaning up the city. That’s when he delves into the workings of government: He’s not the sanitation department, the mayor, the board of supervisors, or the police. That he can only prosecute the cases that police send him.

“We cannot do it alone,” he told the Monitor about lessons learned in his brief tenure. “We have to work with other agencies.” When asked what he’s most proud of, he says, “I’m most proud of how we handled the pandemic.”

Since taking office in 2020, he as well as his supporters say, the DA ended cash bail, reduced the jail population, added Chinese speakers to victims services, charged police officers for abuse of force, went after ghost guns, and set up an Innocence Commission to review wrongful convictions. Joaquin Ciria – in prison for 32 years for a murder he did not commit – was the first person exonerated after a review by the commission. He was released in April.  

Mr. Boudin and his campaign point to misinformation and fearmongering from the recall side, which they describe as an aggressive drive by Republicans and the police union. They are pushing “a false narrative of rising crime and an ineffectual DA. That’s not true,” says John Avalos, former representative for the Excelsior neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors – which overwhelmingly supports Mr. Boudin. “We know he’s done what he’s promised.” 

The initial recall effort was started by Richie Greenburg, who ran as a Republican for mayor in 2019. It’s since been taken on by some high-profile Democrats, including a former San Francisco Democratic Party chair, Mary Jung. Republicans are contributing to the recall, but its organizers say 83% of donors are Democrats or people not identified with a party.  

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Brooke Jenkins, a former assistant district attorney for San Francisco, speaks at a literature drop-off rally in the city’s Portola neighborhood, May 21, 2022. She quit her job last year to help lead the recall effort against her former boss, District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

“Balance. That’s my word.”

Democratic leaders who support the recall say they still advocate criminal justice reform. Just not Boudin-style.

“One of the main issues is that Chesa has taken a one-size-fits-all approach,” says Brooke Jenkins, a former homicide prosecutor who quit last year to join the recall campaign. She says she is among 40 colleagues who have left the office under Mr. Boudin. “Balance. That’s my word.”

In an interview before setting off with volunteers for a literature drop, she says Mr. Boudin started off with several blanket policies: never charge juveniles as adults, never use gang charges, never use prior serious and violent felonies as a punishment enhancement, never use cash bail. While she supports “the spirit” of such changes, the problem is that “you never leave yourself the room for exceptional circumstances.”

Ms. Jenkins mentions a homicide case in which there was video evidence, but the exact identity of the shooters was indiscernible. Prosecutors could have persisted with gang conspiracy charges used specifically for these kinds of cases, but didn’t because of the policy, she says. Over the next 11 months, two of them shot people. “Chesa’s alternative [to incarceration] is release, release, release.”

If Mr. Boudin is recalled, Ms. Jenkins and others hope the mayor will appoint someone with experience as a prosecutor. Mr. Boudin still has his public defender’s hat on, she says.  

Mr. South, the Democratic strategist, reaches back in history, to the failed campaign of President George H.W. Bush in 1992. A recession had not yet officially started, but people felt economic pain. “People felt it, but he kept saying, ‘Look at the statistics.’” Whether it’s a district attorney like Mr. Boudin or LA’s Mr. Gascon, if the perception is that crime is out of control, homelessness is taking over the sidewalks, and people are stealing catalytic converters, “it doesn’t matter what the statistics are.”

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On its face, the effort to recall San Francisco Dist. atty Chesa Boudin is a debate about how a relatively small, atypical city battles crime, a philosophical dispute about how often to lock up offenders and the relative success of efforts to divert nonviolent criminals into treatment programs that keep them out of jail.

In reality, the recall is a battle over facts versus feelings, a case study in the power of millionaires to set a political agenda, a lesson on the limits of enacting reform through progressive prosecutors and the difficulty of changing the status quo.

That’s why the June 7 referendum on Boudin holds significance far beyond the 47 square miles of San Francisco, where violent crime rates are near historic lows, viral videos of smash-and-grabs and the twin crises of homelessness and drug deaths notwithstanding.

Since his upset victory, Boudin has made the establishment uneasy: Yale-educated public defender, son of imprisoned Weather Underground leaders, relative newcomer and political novice in a city where politics is a blood sport and people proudly trace their local lineage back generations. He emerged from obscurity in 2019 to campaign on a detailed platform that promised to upend a system that disproportionately prosecutes black and brown people.

As Democrats across the country face voters’ fears about rising crime rates, many have retreated from reforms — including Los Angeles Dist. atty George Gascón, who faces a likely recall himself later this year. Boudin has instead implemented the ideas that got him elected: Jail as a last resort. No cash bail or gang enhancements. Not prosecuting juveniles as adults. Charges against police who use excessive force. Increased victim services. Review of lengthy sentences handed down under obsolete laws during the war on drugs. Charges against employers for wage theft.

Boudin’s policies have won him newspaper endorsements, but he faces an uphill battle in the recall election. His core mission — to rethink crime and punishment — is a jolt to the status quo at an already fragile moment. The rush to blame him for myriad long-standing ills has resonated amid the frustrations and anger at all the life-altering changes of the last two years. Tragedies and mistakes are easy to exploit, especially in the wake of a pandemic that has exacerbated the city’s glaring inequality, upset its economic base of tourism and tech, and heightened fears of crime.

His agenda does not lend itself to sound bites, while the reverse is true for his opponents. Allowed to collect donations in unlimited amounts, they have spent millions, first to pay signature gatherers to get the recall on the ballot and now on a television advertising blitz.

The names on the five- and six-figure contributions on file with city and state agencies — a who’s who of tech, finance and real estate moguls — signal the extent to which those accustomed to exerting influence in the city view Boudin’s agenda as a threat . Executives with Blockchain, Lyft, Y Combinator, Grove Capital, Twin Tree Ventures, Route One Investment, Prime Finance, Initialized Capital. The three largest contributors have been the California Assn. of Realtors, Shorenstein Realty and Republican billionaire William Oberndorf.

Boudin, whose parents spent decades in prison for their role as getaway drivers in a 1981 robbery that ended with three shot dead, is an easy figure to caricature and a convenient target in a city grappling with visible, intractable problems — spreading homeless encampments, record drug overdose deaths, increased burglaries, gun violence and car break-ins.

The recall attempt also illustrates a lesson with national ramifications about the limits of relying solely on reform prosecutors to enact change.

District attorneys have enormous power; they alone decide what charges to file. That unchecked power has ripple effects in a system where most cases never go to trial. If prosecutors overcharge, they have more leverage to get plea bargains. If they seek diversion, fewer people end up behind bars. If they prosecute police officers, that conduct becomes subject to public scrutiny.

But a district attorney trying to change the country’s reliance on incarceration has little or no control over either the key drivers of the problem or the infrastructure that could help solve it. City, county and state officials determine housing policy, drug and mental health treatment options — all the ancillary services needed to reshape a world where the county jail is often the largest provider of drug and mental health counseling and the largest homeless shelter. In many ways, the recall is a proxy battle for how a liberal city deals with poverty.

Boudin was not naïve about the challenges, both internal and external.

“In many ways, getting here tonight was the easy part,” he warned amid the cheers the night of his victory party. “What comes next is essential …. We have our work cut out for us. This is not going to be easy.”

But he reckoned without a pandemic that shut down the city and transformed patterns of crime. He could not have anticipated the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in a city almost one-third Asian. He expected to have four years, which might be just enough time to show that his policies could reduce recidivism rates, one of the clearest measures of criminal justice success.

Nor do facts carry weight the way they once did. It is not only the far right that has embraced the idea that truth is what you think it is, that facts are what you experience. Recall supporters mock data that shows that crime is down; they post photos of broken car windows and ask, are you going to believe statistics, or your own eyes? Boudin, whose crusade is proving that locking up more people does not make the rest of us safer, makes an attractive target.

Here are some facts.

According to FBI and San Francisco police statistics, overall crime — and violent crime — has decreased from 2019 to 2022. Homicide increased from a historic low, but less steeply than in nearby jurisdictions with traditional law-and-order prosecutors.

The jail population in San Francisco dropped by about 40% since Boudin took office, a decrease spurred by the urgency of COVID-19 but maintained as the pandemic subsided.

Boudin has charged crimes presented by police — who are making arrests in only about 8% of the crimes reported — at roughly the same levels as his predecessor, but he has sent more cases to diversion courts that allow offenders to avoid criminal prosecution if they successfully complete programs.

Those are nuanced messages to impart amid a blizzard of television ads that blame the city’s ills on a wide-eyed radical who lets dangerous criminals roam the streets. Crimes make headlines; Success stories are less well-known, and perhaps of less import to those pouring millions of dollars into the recall. A man wrongfully convicted of murder and freed after 32 years was front-page news. But not the 58 San Franciscans, serving lengthy prison sentences they would not receive today, resentenced and sent home with reentry plans and regular visits from a social worker. (Only two have been arrested, according to the DA’s office.)

Like much of the country, San Francisco is struggling to find a post-pandemic equilibrium, complicated by its reliance on tourism that has dried up and tech companies that have gone remote. Two-thirds of the workers have not returned to offices. San Francisco International Airport, once one of the busiest in the country, has regained barely half its pre-pandemic volume. The median sale price for a home was $1.6 million in April, while the city spent millions on a tent village for the homeless that has filled United Nations plaza in the shadow of City Hall.

If Boudin’s grassroots campaign to keep his job beats the odds, he will have a reprieve of 18 months to make his case before the next election, and a bully pulpit to leverage the notoriety of San Francisco for national reform.

If the status quo triumphs, his enemies will have to find a new scapegoat for the anguishes of a divided city in the throes of reinvention.

Miriam Pawel is the author, most recently, of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.”

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