Chesa Boudin Must Go

National Review Online

Monday, June 06, 2022

Recent polling indicates that 64 percent of San Francisco Democrats support recalling their district attorney, Chesa Boudin. San Francisco Democrats are right to feel this way. We urge voters to vote for his removal tomorrow.

For those in need of an introduction, Boudin is left-wing royalty. When he was 14 months old, his parents were arrested and convicted of murder for their role in the Brink’s armored-car robbery of 1981, which killed two cops and a Brink’s guard. They were members of the left-wing Weather Underground. He was raised by fellow Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Boudin temporarily served as a translator in the Venezuela Presidential Palace under Hugo Chávez.

In 2019, with the backing of George Soros, he ran for district attorney on a platform of ending mass incarceration and cash bail, as well as paralyzing police under the guise of aggressively hunting for evidence of police misconduct. Upon taking office, he unveiled an even more radical agenda of de-emphasizing the prosecution of drug cases and property offenses. In the first year, he reduced San Francisco’s jail population by 25 percent.

Boudin’s defenders say that the crime statistics in San Francisco under his term are murky: Some forms of crime are up and some are down. And there is a disconnect between the spreadsheets and how residents feel. But when you look deeper, it becomes obvious why residents feel less safe in San Francisco. While car break-ins declined after Boudin took office during the pandemic, home burglaries skyrocketed.  In 2021, homicides were up 36 percent in San Francisco compared to 2019. Vehicle theft, arson, and larceny are all up. Major retailers like Walgreens and Target are closing stores or reducing their hours in San Francisco because of the increase of burglaries.

San Francisco under Boudin became a premiere theater for a new form of “smash and grab” style of robbery at luxury retailers. Viral videos of such brazen robberies, and an enormous increase in home burglaries, are not going to endear citizens to a D.A. who announced his intention to ignore property crimes.

But it’s not just theft. Public disorder rose precipitously in some sections of San Francisco, especially the Tenderloin district, which became an open-air drug market crowded with homelessness and menace. Boudin’s tactic for going soft-on-drug crimes was to charge fentanyl dealers not with “possession with intent to sell” but with “accessory after the fact.” His excuse for doing so is that illegal immigrants charged with dealing drugs would be made more vulnerable to deportation. (How dare America deport fentanyl dealers, who contribute so much to our society!) At least that’s an honest, if perverse form of reasoning. His other excuse is that some dealers are themselves the victims of trafficking. No evidence for this exists.

After taking office, Boudin released lifelong criminal Troy McAlister for time served on armed-robbery charges that could have resulted in 25 years to life imprisonment. After the release, McAlister was arrested several more times, and Boudin never filed new charges. McAlister then went on to allegedly kill two people while drunkenly fleeing a robbery in a stolen car.

Or consider Joseph Williams, who was arrested twice in 2021 on suspicion of felony domestic violence. Boudin released him twice because victims would not cooperate. A month after his second release, Williams allegedly killed a seven-month-old.

Not all of San Francisco’s criminal and disorderly pathology is Boudin’s fault. San Francisco mayor London Breed initially slashed SFPD’s police budget by $120 million. Seeing the results — increased crime and voter dissatisfaction — she dramatically repented last December and has since increased policing budgets and outlined a campaign of energetic enforcement. Boudin is a critic of these efforts.

Boudin’s record reflects his deepest views. He sees the criminal-justice system and the police as the problem in the lives of criminals, and he views the public’s impatience with crime and its demands for justice and good public order as the cause of more evil than good. He is not just bad at the job, but unfit for office. His recall is a necessary precondition for improving life in San Francisco.