Photo: Ian Allen When Chesa Boudin was sworn in as district attorney of San Francisco on January 8, 2020, he seemed perfectly cast for the moment. Since 2016, a new class of progressive prosecutors had been claiming victories in liberal cities from Chicago to St. Louis, pledging to undo decades of tough-on-crime policies.
The argument is especially pitched in San Francisco, where police-department data shows that overall crime actually decreased 23 percent in 2020, but surges in burglary and car theft have many convinced that the city is headed for disaster. A poll conducted recently by the Chamber of Commerce found 70 percent of San Franciscans saying that quality of life in the city was deteriorating and 40 percent saying they planned to move away.
Boudin typically begins with his parents, who joined the militant organization known as the Weather Underground in the 1960s to fight against American apartheid and the war in Vietnam. In 1981, when Boudin was 14 months old, they left him with a babysitter to serve as unarmed getaway drivers while members of another revolutionary group robbed a Brink’s armored car in Nanuet, New York.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2011, Boudin clerked for a federal judge in San Diego . The next year, Boudin moved to San Francisco and took a fellowship with the public defender’s office, where, he jokes, he learned that local juries “will acquit anybody. There’s no better place to try a case if you’re a defense lawyer.”
During Gascón’s tenure, a booming real-estate market pushed squatter and homeless communities out of empty lots and abandoned buildings and into sidewalk tent cities. Car break-ins and other property crimes worsened, and public defecation and intravenous-drug use became commonplace. Gascón’s policies, fairly or otherwise, took much of the blame.
With ranked-choice voting, Boudin won by a margin of less than 2 percent after three rounds. Upon taking office in January 2020, he started making exactly the reforms he had promised. He became the first district attorney in America to eliminate the practice of requesting cash bail. He announced a diversion program aimed at keeping parents out of jail.
That same month, Cyan Banister, a prominent venture capitalist who formerly worked at the Peter Thiel–backed Founders Fund, released security-camera footage showing a burglar stealing what she claimed was more than $30,000 worth of computer gear and appliances while her 9-year-old son was home. Banister changed her Twitter name to “Recall Chesa Boudin” and donated thousands of dollars to Greenberg’s recall effort.
Danielduane “Weathermen Terrorists” and “convicted killers”.
Danielduane The way I casually deflect blame regarding a 94yr old woman stabbed by a repeat offender, as I’m talking to the media for another puff piece, while surfing instead of working on the 5,000+ open cases that I claim vex me, so perfectly sums up my approach to criminal justice. 🤣✊
Danielduane I love that the Radical Left of the 60s is now referred to the “Old Left”. The “Old Left” was always used in reference to the left of the 1940s and 50s. The Marxists and Union organizers of the McCarthy era. They were often somewhat horrified by the “New Left” of the 60s.
Danielduane He's failed San Francisco.
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