Three years after San Francisco elected Chesa Boudin to be district attorney, the city’s voters removed him from office in the middle of his first term, in an extraordinary recall of a sitting prosecutor.
What went wrong for Boudin?
The former public defender and criminal justice reform advocate won the top prosecutor job in November 2019 after campaigning to tackle mass incarceration and police misconduct. He followed through and eliminated cash bail; created a wrongful conviction unit that freed a man imprisoned for decades; reduced the jail and prison population by focusing on alternatives; stopped prosecuting children as adults; and brought nine criminal cases against officers for misconduct.
But during the pandemic, he faced intensifying backlash from law enforcement, tech industry leaders, conservatives and residents concerned about crime. Backed by ultra-wealthy funders, including a billionaire GOP mega donor, the recall supporters raised $7.2m and ran a campaign that blamed Boudin’s policies for the complex problems of crime, violence, homelessness, drug addiction and other challenges in the city.
The recall message won out in a low-turnout election on Tuesday, with initial results showing 60% of voters supporting his removal, despite a lack of evidence that Boudin’s reforms were causing an uptick in crime rates.
San Francisco, like cities across the US, saw an increase in homicides, but overall violent crime has decreased during his tenure. The DA has a limited impact on the root causes of crime, but chooses which cases to prosecute and what charges to file and what punishments to pursue; police are largely responsible for solving crimes and making arrests, and judges make the final decisions about sentencing and whether to release defendants.
Mayor London Breed, a moderate Democrat who has been critical of Boudin and criminal justice reform, will appoint his replacement, but has not yet announced her pick.
Some national pundits have suggested the recall shows Democratic voters support tough-on-crime policies and oppose reform. But reform activists in California are skeptical of that conclusion. Boudin and his supporters say they were unable to overcome the huge financial advantage of their opponents and noted the struggle to get residents to the polls in a city fatigued with voting, after already having two special elections this year.
“People have been just completely bombarded by ads and years of fear mongering and sensationalism in the media about ‘rising crime’ and ‘San Francisco being unlivable’,” said Emily Lee, co-director of San Francisco Rising Action Fund, a racial justice group. “Even though violent crime is down in San Francisco, facts didn’t matter. People emotionally were driven by that narrative. And it is a tough time. People want easy answers to hard problems, like homelessness and the drug overdose crisis, and they want something to latch onto.” Voters most affected by crime and the criminal system were probably not well represented at the ballot box, Lee added.
The vast majority of the city’s residents on Tuesday voted for Rob Bonta, the progressive state attorney general who has supported reform and was facing challengers that favored a punitive approach.
In neighboring communities, reform candidates also performed well this week. DA Diana Becton in Contra Costa county, who has backed progressive policies, held a significant lead over her law enforcement-backed challenger as of Wednesday, and a civil rights attorney was in the lead for DA in Alameda county, which includes Oakland.
“I don’t think voters are saying they want to be tough on crime. They’re saying they want safety and solutions,” said Cristine DeBerry, executive director of Prosecutors Alliance of California, which backed Boudin. “The reality is the status quo approach hasn’t worked.”
While the takeaways from election day are mixed, advocates fear the impact of Boudin’s removal in San Francisco could be significant.
‘He brought my family hope’
Boudin had faced strong opposition for bringing criminal cases against police officers, and activists fear Breed, who has repeatedly sided with law enforcement, will appoint a successor who will dismiss those cases.
In 2020, Boudin filed manslaughter charges against former San Francisco police officer Chris Samayoa, who fatally shot Keita O’Neil, 42, in 2017. O’Neil, who went by the nickname “Icky,” was unarmed and fleeing when he was killed. Boudin was the first DA to file such charges in the city.
“He brought my family hope,” April Green, O’Neil’s aunt, said on Wednesday. “He gave us the possibility that there could be a change, that something good could come out of my nephew’s death, that finally, finally, an officer could be held accountable, that accountability could stretch across that blue line. My folks go to jail for a ticket, for being stopped, for being profiled. And here we have this man in a position of power who wants to hold the officers equally accountable as us.”
A judge delayed a preliminary hearing for the officer last month, prompting outrage in court from O’Neil’s family and supporters, who feared the delay could allow a new DA to change course if Boudin was recalled.
When the charges were first filed, “it was like [Boudin] brought my nephew back to life. And now I feel like he’s going to be murdered again,” Green said. “I’m going to mourn him all over again.” She feared the mayor would “appoint someone who is police-connected, who loves ‘law and order’,” adding, “I have no doubt that officer is going to walk away with murder.”
Breed’s office did not respond to an inquiry Wednesday. Samayoa’s lawyer declined to comment on the recall.
The recall campaign was a “racist movement”, Green said: “You have these conservative people who are scared of Black and Latino men, who do not look at them as humans, who want them sight unseen and locked up,” she added. “They wanted Boudin out because he was trying to help them and give them a second chance and rehabilitate them.”
Janos Marton, an advocate who previously ran as a progressive DA candidate in Manhattan, said Boudin’s loss was a setback, and signaled that the criminal justice reform movement needed stronger messaging to counter escalating attacks: “We need to communicate to people why criminal justice reform will keep people safe in the short run and in the long run.”
Marton, national director of advocacy group Dream Corps Justice, added, “We have to put the people most directly impacted by these policies at the front of the room, whether people who are formerly incarcerated or family members, the people who can really bring home how atrocious the current prison system is.”
Cheryl Thornton, a Boudin supporter who works in public health in San Francisco, said she feared the potential return of cash bail, noting that she has seen firsthand how people get stuck in jail for minor offenses because they cannot afford to pay a fee and then lose their housing and employment in the process: “Mass incarceration is coming back. Our city says it’s liberal and progressive, but it’s really not.”
Thornton said she hoped to see reforms that would prevent these kinds of recalls in the future: “We have to find a way to not let rich people come in here and just dump money into a political race to get the outcome they want.”
