By Dan McLaughlin
Thursday, April 16, 2020
In any crisis, there will always be politicians who see
an opportunity to enact their preexisting agenda. As the coronavirus hit San
Francisco, that meant an opening for Chesa Boudin, the radical leftist elected
as the city’s district attorney in 2019.
The Red-Diaper DA
Boudin is your classic “red-diaper baby,” the child and
stepchild of the most extreme of Sixties radicals. His parents, Kathy Boudin
and David Gilbert, were members of the revolutionary Weather Underground, whose
crimes included bombing government buildings such as the Capitol, the Pentagon,
and the State Department. The group’s activities landed Bernardine Dohrn on the
FBI’s Most Wanted List in the early 1970s. Both Dohrn and her husband, Weather
Underground bomber Bill Ayers, remain unrepentant to this day, although the suppression
of evidence due to illegal surveillance and prosecutorial misconduct prevented
them from serving serious jail sentences. Dohrn ultimately did time in 1980 for
inciting a riot.
All that wasn’t radical enough for Gilbert and
Kathy Boudin, so they and a splinter group (joined by members of the “Black
Liberation Army”) staged dozens of robberies, culminating with an armed robbery
of a Brink’s armored car in Rockland County, N.Y., in October 1981, almost a
year after Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in. The Brink’s bandits came
loaded for combat, with body armor, shotguns, and M-16s that blew
a huge hole in the reinforced windshield glass of the armored truck. The
ambush and a subsequent shootout killed Nyack Police Officer Waverly Brown,
Nyack Police Sergeant Ed O’Grady, and Brink’s security guard Pete Paige, who
collectively left behind three widows and six fatherless children, the youngest
six months of age.
Gilbert and Kathy Boudin drove the getaway cars. Gilbert
remains in prison, serving a sentence of 75 to life. Chesa Boudin talks to him
regularly; in a recent profile in the New Yorker, Boudin cites him as a
sympathetic example of inmates facing the pandemic. Kathy Boudin was released
in 2003 after two decades in prison and was hired (predictably enough) to teach
at Columbia University (Dohrn got a gig at Northwestern Law). While the two
Brink’s robbers were imprisoned, Ayers and Dohrn took custody of their son
Chesa, then a toddler, and raised him. Dohrn then served another seven months
in 1982 for refusing to cooperate with the Brink’s grand jury.
As you may recall, the Weather Underground became an
issue in the 2008 presidential election. Barack Obama effectively launched his
political career in 1996 with his first fundraiser for his first state senate
campaign in the home of Ayers and Dohrn. Obama by then had routed hundreds of
thousands of dollars of educational foundation grants to projects under Ayers’s
control. Many of us were skeptical at the time of the claim by Obama and his
campaign that he had been unaware of who Ayers and Dohrn really were. The pair
had been national news. Obama was well-versed in Sixties radicalism. The
Brink’s case, the most sensational in the history of my home town of Nanuet,
was front-page news throughout the New York area for over a year while Obama
himself was attending Columbia Law School. Moreover, a reasonable person might
think that, at some point, he’d have asked where this kid they were raising
came from.
Blood alone does not make you a radical, of course; Kathy
Boudin’s brother Michael is a respected First Circuit judge appointed by George
H. W. Bush. But being raised by unrepentant terrorists clearly rubbed off on
Chesa Boudin. After college, he headed for Venezuela to work for socialist
strongman Hugo Chávez. Boudin co-wrote a book flacking for the oppressive
regime, a regime that would ultimately ruin the oil-rich nation’s economy and
reduce its people to desperate poverty. In 2006, he told the New York Times,
“The fact that we have a country that’s trying to create an alternative model
is bold and ambitious and unique.” In a 2009 Nation piece — entitled
“Chavez for Life?” — he argued, as the subtitle put it, that “there are at
least three reasons why we should congratulate Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez on his
recent success abolishing term limits.” He also wrote a memoir, Gringo: A
Coming-of-Age in Latin America, drawing this acid evaluation from New
York Times book reviewer Dwight Garner:
Mr. Boudin seems surprised to learn
that not all of South America’s poor want the things he wants for them. “Why
weren’t they as eager as I to criticize imperialism?” he asks, adding, “Many in
the town aspired to a consumer lifestyle like the ones they saw on television.”
About the political activities of
his parents, Mr. Boudin writes: “Certainly violence is illegitimate when it
targets civilians or intends to cause generalized or widespread fear, but my
parents never did either of those.” At another point, he adds that his parents
“paid a heavy price for their radical politics.” They didn’t pay that heavy
price for their politics. They paid it for the part they played in the deaths
of three men.
Chesa Boudin seems like a genial
guy with a bright future stretching far ahead of him. If “Gringo” is any
indication, that future should not include committing sentences to paper with the
intention of distributing them widely.
Boudin’s view in his early writings that his parents’
part in the killings of two policemen and a private armored-car guard did not
count as violence against “civilians” tells us a lot about his real opinion of
what the lives of police officers are worth (he is more politic now when
discussing the case but still takes pains to argue that his parents were not
the triggermen). And his youthful combination of utopian romance about radical
change with his disinterest in how that change affects the lives and desires of
ordinary working people was echoed in his campaign last year for district
attorney.
Consider Boudin’s announced priorities as district
attorney before entering office. His experience since returning from Venezuela
has been as a public defender, not a prosecutor. Endorsed
and funded by a who’s who of left-wingers, Boudin fits neatly within what
Andy McCarthy calls the “Progressive
Prosecutor Project” in left-leaning cities nationwide. In November, Boudin
welcomed his election victory — which he heard of while returning from a visit
to Gilbert in prison — by declaring, “It’s time for radical change to how we
envision justice. I’m humbled to be a part of this movement that is unwavering
in its demand for transformation.’”
What kind of radical change? Boudin, who promised more
prosecutions of police officers and named specific defendants he would have
charged, started off with a toxic relationship with the San Francisco Police
Officers Association. The POA spent $600,000 on attack ads calling Boudin “the
number one choice of criminals and gang members,” and it issued a statement on
his victory, lamenting that, “unfortunately, the election results mean that San
Francisco residents will have to suffer through another four years of the . . .
policies that have plagued our city and decimated public safety.” At Boudin’s
Election Night party, “progressive city Supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer took to a
microphone to lead a chant of ‘F— the POA.’”
Moreover, it’s not just cops within his jurisdiction that
Boudin wants to prosecute. During his campaign, the San Francisco Examiner
reported that he pledged to “create a unit to help prevent undocumented
immigrants charged with crimes from being deported” while “the unit would also
be tasked with investigating and prosecuting ‘illegal tactics’ by the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” But the Supreme Court, since an 1890 case
immunizing U.S. Marshals from state prosecution for killing a former chief
justice of the California Supreme Court while defending Supreme Court justice
Stephen Field, has frowned on state efforts to prosecute federal law
enforcement for acts taken in the course of their official duties. The Fifth
Circuit upheld that rule as recently as 2017. It was not at all clear how
Boudin planned to use state resources to lock up federal law-enforcement
officers without the cooperation of the federal courts.
Who doesn’t Boudin want to prosecute? During the
campaign, in response to an ACLU questionnaire, he said, “We will not prosecute
cases involving quality-of-life crimes. Crimes such as public camping, offering
or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and
will not be prosecuted.” In a city whose most notorious public problem is an
epidemic of defecation on public sidewalks, you might think that stopping
the avalanche of poop would be a bigger priority than putting more criminals
back on the streets or locking up more cops. Clearly, if you think that, you
are not Chesa Boudin. San Francisco, as a result, was set to embark on a
program of “radical change” of its public safety with the same attitude that
Hugo Chávez once brought to radically transforming Venezuela’s economy.
Boudin was able to win because of a combination of a
divided opposition and San Francisco’s eccentric system of “ranked choice
voting,” such that a candidate with only a little over third of the vote could
be declared the victor without a runoff. Fittingly, Boudin won on the strength
of ballots naming him No. 2.
Never Let a Crisis
Go to Waste
So how has Boudin reacted in office? As a sympathetic New
Yorker profile observed:
As covid-19 has been spreading
throughout the country, Boudin has been outspoken in urging criminal-justice
leaders to reduce their jail and prison populations. But he also acknowledges
the difficulty of doing so. “The decision about whether or not to release a
particular individual from custody is often a challenging one,” Boudin told me.
“As a law-enforcement official, as a politician, you are always going to have
in the back of your mind the fear that someone you release will end up
committing another crime, potentially a serious crime, during a period when
they otherwise would have been incarcerated. And that fear has driven
decision-making for decades in the criminal-justice arena. That fear of a
Willie Horton moment has driven decision-making, legislation, executive action
around criminal justice.” But “crises like this force us all,” he said, “to
look in the mirror and make difficult decisions, ask difficult questions about
what our priorities are.”
Naturally, Boudin’s priorities are the same ones they
were before the virus. As he boasted to NPR’s Terry Gross in an interview last
week, “we’ve reduced the county jail population since I took office in January
by nearly 40 percent.” Boudin argues: “Compared to March of 2019, this past
month has seen a decrease in crime of approximately 40 percent. So we’re both
decreasing the jail population and seeing a parallel decrease in crime rates.” Of
course, it is not that surprising that crime is down (for now) with the whole
state locked down. Boudin has his sights set on bigger national game: He
recently told Forbes that “COVID-19 is highlighting that the system of
mass incarceration, in and of itself, is violent because it exposes people to
disease and other forms of violence, like sexual assault.”
Not all of his ideas are pro-criminal; he has also
promoted temporary housing for victims of domestic violence. But the “Willie
Horton” scenario that Boudin paints mainly as a public-relations problem is not
hypothetical. Just yesterday, a Hillsborough County, Fla, inmate who was
released due to coronavirus concerns was arrested for committing a murder in
Tampa the day after his release:
26-year-old Joseph Edward Williams
. . . was just recently booked into jail on March 13 for possession of heroin
(less than four grams), a third-degree felony, and possession drug
paraphernalia, a first-degree misdemeanor. . . . He was previously convicted of
two felony offenses including burglary of an unoccupied conveyance in 2012 and
felon in possession of a firearm in 2018, in addition to five misdemeanor
convictions. Throughout the course of his criminal history, Williams has been
arrested for 35 charges in total.
You will notice that Williams had been arrested for
nonviolent offenses.
Consistent with his prior advocacy for arresting federal
immigration officers, Boudin demanded that Gavin Newsom, California’s
arch-progressive governor, shut down federal immigration detention facilities.
Even for Newsom, who has taken to referring to the onetime Bear Flag Republic
as a “nation-state,” seizing federal property and reenacting Fort Sumter was a
step too far. As Newsom’s press secretary conceded, “the federal government has
exclusive authority over immigration law.”
Responsible law enforcement requires continually
reevaluating the lessons of public safety. The great success of crime reduction
since the early 1990s counsels against unlearning the lessons of that era. That
does not mean that society should stop asking hard questions about what
criminal-justice reforms could be undertaken safely. But a left-wing radical
who is ideologically opposed to previous successes and who takes an adversarial
stance toward the entire enterprise of law enforcement is unlikely to strike
the right balance.
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