“We’re dealing with a small number of wealthy individuals,” said embattled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin of the forces driving his recall vote, in an utterly clueless interview with The New York Times.
Sorry, but numbers don’t lie: 83,000 people signed the current recall petition against Boudin in a city with a population around 874,000. If that’s “small,” we’re curious what he would regard as big.
Other numbers are crucial here, too. Crime is up significantly in the city Boudin works for, with burglaries up 40% from pre-pandemic levels and homicides up almost 37%.
Those increases mostly took place on Boudin’s watch, and citizens are sick of it. His soft-on-crime policies — including the elimination of cash bail, restriction of pretrial detention and letting out as much as 40% of the city’s jail population — have had the same results in the City by the Bay that they’ve had everywhere else.
Take the Tenderloin, a district so riddled with crime and drugs that the city’s Board of Supervisors declared it an emergency zone in December. Almost 150 people died from drug overdoses there in 2021 alone. Boudin’s shocking response? “This is not a new problem.”
In other words, if you lost a loved one to fentanyl or street crime there — too bad!
But for all his la-di-da hand-waving over these tragic figures, Boudin knows his city is in trouble. After a much-publicized looting of a Louis Vuitton store in downtown San Francisco, Boudin tweeted some related words against crime and for law enforcement, saying that criminals shouldn’t “bring that noise to our City,” “Great work by SFPD” and “Standby for felony charges.”
Though it’s a bit rich, considering that his policies helped pave the way for a breakdown in public order.
The fact that SF’s ultra-liberal mayor London Breed has signaled she might be open to supporting the recall clearly has him sweating, too: He says all SF mayors “always” support recalls because they get to appoint replacements. Really? Breed didn’t support one against Boudin’s predecessor (George Gascón, now potentially facing his own recall fight in Los Angeles).
He’s likely also worried about the fact a multiracial, economically diverse coalition of citizens just booted three hyper-woke San Francisco school board members out of office — including one who used racial slurs to describe successful Asian students at the city’s elite schools.
Boudin’s recall vote will take place in early June. So the DA has time, albeit not much, to start turning things around and making his city safer.
Tone-deaf efforts to shift blame onto mysterious moneyed agitators instead of acknowledging that his policies have helped wreck the city are not going to save him.
Considering what he’s done to San Francisco, that’s for the best.
