San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin today filed an unfair business practices lawsuit against food delivery service DoorDash, which has consistently classified its employees as independent contractors rather than employees, contrary to California law.

“I assure you that this is just the first step of many to fight for worker safety and equal enforcement of the laws,” Boudin said at the virtual press conference today. This lawsuit is being led by Assistant District Attorney Scott Stillman's White Collar Crimes Against Employees Unit – “and I did not bring ADA Stillman into the office to file a single lawsuit,” Boudin continued.

No messages were returned for DoorDash as of press time.

Today's lawsuit was filed at Section 17200 of the State Business and Professions Codewhat applies to ““Any unlawful, unfair or fraudulent commercial act.” Either a prosecutor or a prosecutor can take action under this code – and in fact, in May, Attorney General Dennis Herrera, along with colleagues in Los Angeles and San Diego, filed a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft for their Employees had allegedly miscategorized.

According to the California Supreme Court decision: “Dynamex” decision of April 2018, a three-point test was established to determine whether workers should be classified as employees or independent contractors.

No reasonable interpretation of this ruling could result in Doordash workers—or Uber and Lyft drivers, or many others—being classified as anything other than employees.

In April 2019, it was revealed that DoorDash was applying the tips DoorDash had given its employees to their base wages instead of serving as tips – which led to this A complaint is filed against the company with the city's Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement.

In September 2019, the “Dynamex” decision was essentially codified as law under AB5, authored by Rep. Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego).

“When you think of theft, you don’t often think of wage theft,” said Gonzalez, who took part in today’s virtual press conference. “If an employee stole from his boss, he would go to prison. But employers steal from their employees in large quantities every day.”

By misclassifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees, companies can avoid paying the minimum wage, providing mandatory breaks, and providing health care or sick days. Workers in such conditions are subsidized by the social safety net, which in turn is subsidized by taxpayers and law-abiding corporations.

“DoorDash has a long history of being an exploitative employer,” Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at UC Hastings, told Mission Local. “Like Uber, the company’s business model is based on the fiction that its employees are independent contractors. This means that the people whose work led to the company’s sky-high valuation will not have access to a wage floor, workers’ compensation in the event of an injury, or unemployment insurance if they are fired through no fault of their own.”

During the ongoing pandemic, Dubal continued, these workers have continued to be classified as “essential” and have “risked their lives to deliver food from restaurants to families in lockdown.”

“DoorDash has vigorously fought the employment claims of its delivery drivers,” Dubal said. “This lawsuit today – filed by the San Francisco District Attorney – puts the state’s weight behind these allegations.”

DoorDash Complaint by Joe Eskenazi on Scribd

Update, 2:20 p.m.: A statement from Max Rettig, DoorDash Global Head of Public Policy:

More than ever, Californians from all walks of life are looking to DoorDash for flexible earning opportunities, working an average of a few hours per week. Throughout the pandemic, DoorDash has supported Dashers on and off the road with free safety equipment, telemedicine, wage replacement and more. Today's action aims to disrupt Dashers' essential services, deprive hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, parents, retirees and other Californians of valuable job opportunities, deprive local restaurants of much-needed revenue, and make it more difficult for consumers to receive prepared food Store groceries, groceries and other essentials safely and reliably. We will fight to continue to offer Dashers the flexible earning opportunities they want during these challenging times.

If you would like to continue to employ us – and have not already done so – support us now.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin has been recalled, the Associated Press is projecting.

59.9% of San Francisco voters opted to oust the district attorney by voting Yes on Proposition H, compared to 40.0% who voted to keep him in office, according to the last preliminary election returns Tuesday at 10:40 pm

Boudin’s recall has national implications, a sign that voters are increasingly concerned about public safety, and illustrating a cleavage in priorities between progressive activists and rank-and-file Democratic voters even in deep-blue San Francisco.

Mary Jung, the former chair of the city’s Democratic Party who became chair of the recall campaign, stated that “San Francisco voters sent a clear message that they want a District Attorney who prioritizes public safety for every community. San Francisco voters are engaged and well-informed. They know that we can have important criminal justice reforms and public safety for all, but that neither was being achieved with Chesa in office.”

Jung stated that “San Franciscans want leadership that holds serious, violent, and repeat offenders accountable while never forgetting the rights of victims and their families.”

“This election does not mean that San Francisco has drifted to the far right on our approach to criminal justice,” Jung continued. “In fact, San Francisco has been a national beacon for progressive criminal justice reform for decades and will continue to do so with new leadership. By recalling Boudin from office, San Francisco can now move forward in charting a better and safer path for our city.”

California primary election 2022 results

In a speech at The Ramp on the waterfront, Boudin interpreted the results as the result of frustration with the city’s intractable problems, such as City Hall corruption, and societal changes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

“People are right to be frustrated. There’s so much room for improvement. People should hold all of us to a higher standard,” Boudin said.

Nonetheless, Boudin continued to blame the recall on the right-wing.

“Let me make it very clear about what happened tonight,” Boudin said. “The right-wing billionaires outspent us three-to-one and exploited an environment in which people are appropriately upset.”

Boudin was first elected as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2019, before many of the tumultuous events that have rocked American society in recent years — the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, the nationwide increase in violence, the 2020 election and both impeachments of former President Donald Trump, and the mass protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Boudin had been a deputy public defender and promised one of the most far-reaching experiments in criminal justice reform that a major American city had seen. He promised to go after rogue police and large corporations and reduce mass incarceration and racial disparities within the system.

For Boudin, the fight was personal ⁠—his parents, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, spent much of Chesa Boudin’s life in prison due to their role in a 1981 robbery while they were part of the violent leftist group the Weather Underground.

Boudin was also a leading face in a national movement of progressive prosecutors, a movement that included his predecessor as San Francisco’s top prosecutor, George Gascon.

Boudin’s 2019 run had been the first open race for district attorney in about a century, until Gascon abruptly resigned prior to his run for Los Angeles District Attorney, leading Mayor London Breed to appoint her favored candidate, Democratic regular Suzy Loftus, as the interim district attorney.

Loftus lost the position in the final round of ranked choice voting by a margin of 1.6%, and just months after Boudin took the reins of the office it seemed like the winds were in his favor as tens of millions of Americans expressed outrage over the very injustices Boudin promised to fight.

SF DA Chesa Boudin addresses recall, crime live in primetime on KRON4

But the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown brought with it a nationwide increase in homicides and violent crime. While San Francisco’s homicide rate has been about the same for most of the last decade, burglaries have risen 45% since 2019, and in 2021 alone the city saw a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders of 567%.

The alleged December 31, 2020 killing of two women in a south of Market intersection by Troy McAlister was a crucial turning point. McAlister had trouble with the law for most of his adult life, and between June and December 2020 was arrested by the San Francisco Police Department five times. In each of the cases, however, the DA’s office declined to file charges.

A petition asking Boudin to resign garnered almost 15,000 signatures and its author, former Republican mayoral candidate Richie Greenberg, spearheaded the first recall petition, which came up short.

In a statement to KRON4 on Tuesday, Greenberg stated that the recall was “a bittersweet effort.”

“We shouldn’t be popping champagne bottles,” he stated. “People have died under Chesa Boudin’s watch. Lives have been ruined, families broken, businesses shuttered.

“Let this recall send a clear message to the rest of City Hall officials that we are unhappy with their governance,” he continued. “Polls recently show dismally low approval ratings for the Board of Supervisors, who need to take a hard look in the mirror and consider actual changes they each need to make in addressing our city’s myriad issues.”

And, however, an effort spearheaded by former San Francisco Democratic Party chair Mary Jung and bolstered by the support of former Assistant District Attorney Brooke Jenkins gained more and more momentum through 2021, qualifying for the ballot.

The signs were coming, though: Boudin’s chief of staff David Campos lost an assembly bid in April in a nearly 2-1 loss.

The recall succeeded despite only two supervisors endorsing it, and with the opposition of a majority of the city’s supervisors, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Democratic Party, though Breed’s silence was conspicuous.

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Breed, whose crackdown on poor street conditions in the Tenderloin neighborhood was questioned by Boudin, will now get to choose his successor.

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“This was never about one vote count, it was never about one election night party, it was never about specifically which person gets to be in the office of the district attorney,” he added. “This is a movement, not a moment, in history.”

Brooke Jenkins, a former assistant district attorney in Boudin’s office, and a lead organizer in the campaign to remove him, voiced gratitude at an election night party at the Del Mar lounge in the Marina District.

“I feel relieved. I feel hopeful for San Francisco,” she told KQED. “We knew all along this was not a Republican billionaire effort, that this was not a pushback against reform, that we were trying to protect reform. That we knew a DA can balance implementing reform with prioritizing public safety.”

The recall was largely driven by San Francisco’s more conservative neighborhoods — including the Sunset District, Marina District, Park Merced, and St. Francis Wood — where overall turnout was higher than in progressive-leaning districts that generally stood by Boudin.

While Boudin’s loss is decisive, he won’t be required to leave office until 10 days after the election is declared official by the Board of Supervisors, which may take place at its June 25 meeting. Mayor London Breed is expected to announce Boudin’s replacement soon thereafter.

A number of names have been floated to replace Boudin, including Jenkins, prosecutor Nancy Tung (who said she would run in a future election), and San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani (one of the few elected officials to endorse the recall).

Breed on Wednesday insisted the city is not backing away from progressive criminal justice reforms, and pledged to meet with community groups and police officials before appointing the next DA.

“This does not mean that criminal justice reform in San Francisco is going anywhere. It does not mean that there will be, all of a sudden, a significant setback,” she said. “We want justice. But we also want to make sure that people have a second chance.”

A group of recall supporters — including Brooke Jenkins, center — take a selfie during an election night party at Del Mar in San Francisco on June 7, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

And, Boudin may also choose to run in a future district attorney’s race. But newly appointed Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former San Francisco police spokesperson who became one of the few elected officials to endorse Boudin’s recall, said he doesn’t think another election would bode well for Boudin, based on Tuesday’s vote.

“It could happen, yeah. But I think the numbers say something,” Dorsey said.

In the meantime, Dorsey noted, the debate over Boudin’s record has fractured the community, pitting neighbor against neighbor.

“The most important thing is, we’ve got to put the hurt feelings behind us and move the city forward,” he said.

The historic recall garnered national attention, bitterly dividing Democrats in the city on issues of crime, policing and public safety reform. The effort was fueled by a tsunami of contributions — more than $7 million, according to filings at the San Francisco Ethics Commission — from well-heeled donors, including real estate interests and Republican billionaire William Oberndorf, who individually gave north of $650,000.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin addresses a crowd at The Ramp restaurant after the effort to recall him succeeded. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

In contrast, recall opponents raised less than half as much — about $3 million — with the largest donations from the American Civil Liberties Union, a criminal justice reform PAC and tech billionaire Chris Larsen.

For months, the Yes on H campaign has saturated San Francisco media with online, television and radio ads, while also investing heavily in a field operation and a texting campaign.

The post San Francisco Voters Oust District Lawyer Chesa Boudin in Unprecedented Recall appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin will not run for re-election this year, saying he would instead take time with his family after “more than three years of nearly non-stop campaigning” in a thread posted to Twitter Thursday.

The announcement comes less than a month after the swearing in Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, who was appointed to the role by Mayor London Breed. Jenkins, who worked under Boudin until she quit help lead the recall effort against him, has announced her intent to run in the November special election.

Though Boudin had never committed to running in November, his presence loomed large for both supporters and critics who braced for a heated battle between him and Jenkins. His decision to bow out will reshape the next DA’s race, and raises the question of who Boudin’s supporters will back.

In a 14-tweet thread, Boudin said over the past few weeks he had taken stock of the burden that campaigning has had on his family, adding that while he was “committed to criminal justice reform, I’m also committed to my family.

“My son is on the verge of taking his first step and speaking his first word. My wife’s research on multiple sclerosis at UCSF deserves the same support she has offered my work. My elderly father just came home from prison after more than 40 years,” Boudin said. “My mother died in May and I have not had time to clean out her apartment or plan her memorial or even mourn her death.”

Boudin went on to list his proudest accomplishments his team achieved during his two and a half years in office, including an expansion of victim services, resentencing work, a worker protection unit and their “historic strides in police accountability.”

Boudin could go after the DA post again in the next regular election, in November 2023. He has already filed paperwork with the city if he chooses to do run next year. Boudin’s tweets made no mention of whether he would run again in 2023.

Both Boudin and Jenkins declined to be interviewed Thursday.

Boudin’s absence clears the path for other contenders to challenge Jenkins in the fast-paced runup to this fall’s election. He leaves up for grabs a large and impassioned swath of supporters, upset about both the recall and the current direction of the office, and ready to throw their weight against Jenkins.

Primed to court this contingency is Joe Alioto Veronese, a civil rights attorney who announced his candidacy months before Boudin’s recall election.

“When it comes down to it, 45% of the people voted to keep him,” Alioto Veronese said in a Thursday interview, referring to the outcome of the recall.

“That’s because there’s a large population … of people that believe in criminal justice reform. “I have been doing criminal justice reform since 2004, when I was a police commissioner here in San Francisco.”

Aside from Jenkins and Alioto Veronese, only one other candidate, Maurice Chenier, has declared their intention to run in November, according to the San Francisco Elections website. Chenier could not be reached for comment.

Other moderates who were on Breed’s short list for the District Attorney appointment last month, including veteran prosecutor Nancy Tung and San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani, are not expected to run. Jenkins recently named Tung chief of special prosecutions, a top leadership position in her administration.

Rachel Marshall, who served as communications director and policy adviser for Boudin until she was fired by Jenkins last month, said Boudin’s decision came as a disappointment to his supporters.

“I know that so many of us who are committed to this movement still believe in him and our mission and want to continue,” Marshall said.

This week, in her first major policy announcement since taking office Jenkins said she would be revoking the plea offers extended to at least 30 defendants accused of selling drugs, and would seek harsher penalties against certain offenders.

The announcements were swiftly cheered by many of the city’s moderates who believed Boudin was too soft on drug offenders, but blasted by progressives as reminiscent of the nation’s failed War-on-Drugs policies.

“The only thing that has changed since Jenkins took over, when it comes to crime, is that the DA is no longer blamed for what happens,” Marshall said Thursday.

Alioto Veronese said many of his proposed policies will appeal to the city’s progressives, including the elimination of civil assessments, no-knock warrants, and “doing away with cash bail in a way that doesn’t pull the system apart.”

“I think the DA’s office needs to have one focus, and that’s fighting crime in San Francisco,” he said. “The DA shouldn’t be focused on ribbon cutting ceremonies, protecting the mayor or conducting social experiments.”

Potential candidates have until Aug. 12 to file their nomination petitions.

Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy

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San Francisco was conquered by the United States in 1846, and two years later, the Americans discovered gold. That’s about when my ancestors came—my German great-great-great-grandfather worked at a butcher shop on Jackson Street. The gold dried up but too many young men with outlandish dreams remained. The little city, prone to earthquakes and fires, kept growing. The Beats came, then the hippies; the moxie and hubris of the place remained.

My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone wanted to travel by unicycle or be a white person with dreadlocks or raise a child communally among a group of gays or live on a boat or start a ridiculous-sounding company, that was just fine. Between the bead curtains of my aunt’s house, I learned you had to let your strangeness breathe.

It was always weird, always a bit dangerous. Once, when I was very little, a homeless man grabbed me by the hair, lifting me into the air for a moment before the guy dropped me and my dad yelled. For years I told anyone who would listen that I’d been kidnapped. But every compromise San Francisco demanded was worth it. The hills are so steep that I didn’t learn to ride a bike until high school, but every day I saw the bay, and the cool fog rolling in over the water. When puberty hit, I asked the bus driver to drop me off where the lesbians were, and he did. A passenger shouted that he hoped I’d find a nice girlfriend, and I waved back, smiling, my mouth full of braces and rubber bands.

So much has been written about the beauty and mythology of this city that maybe it’s superfluous to add even a little more to the ledger. If he ever got to heaven, Herb Caen, the town’s beloved old chronicler, once said, he’d look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” The cliffs, the stairs, the cold clean air, the low-slung beauty of the Sunset, the cafés tucked along narrow streets, then Golden Gate Park drawing you down from the middle of the city all the way to the beach. It’s so goddamn whimsical and inspiring and temperate; so full of redwoods and wild parrots and the smell of weed and sourdough, brightly painted homes and backyard chickens, lines for the oyster bar and gorgeous men in chaps at the leather festival. But it’s maddening because the beauty and the mythology—the preciousness, the self-regard—are part of what has almost killed it. And I, now in early middle age, sometimes wish it weren’t so nice at all.

Performers in Washington ParkTwo nudists walking by a food cart

But I do need you to love San Francisco a little bit, like I do a lot, in order to hear the story of how my city fell apart—and how it just might be starting to pull itself back together.

Because yesterday, San Francisco voters decided to turn their district attorney, Chesa Boudin, out of office. They did it because he didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.

On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words DIGNITY ON WHEELS. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.

A couple of years ago, this was an intersection full of tourists and office workers who coexisted, somehow, with the large and ever-present community of the homeless. I’ve walked the corner a thousand times. Now the homeless—and those who care for the homeless—are the only ones left.

During the first part of the pandemic, San Francisco County lost more than one in 20 residents—myself among them. Signs of the city’s pandemic decline are everywhere—the boarded-up stores, the ghostly downtown, the encampments. But walking these streets awakens me to how bad San Francisco had gotten even before the coronavirus hit—to how much suffering and squalor I’d come to think was normal.

Stepping over people’s bodies, blurring my eyes to not see a dull needle jabbing and jabbing again between toes—it coarsened me. I’d gotten used to the idea that some people just want to live like that. I was even a little defensive of it: Hey, it’s America. It’s your choice.

If these ideas seem facile or perverse, well, they’re not the only ones I’d come to harbor. Before I left, I’d gotten used to the idea of housing so expensive that it would, as if by some natural law, force couples out of town as soon as they had a kid. San Francisco now has the fewest children per capita of any large American city, and a $117,400 salary counts as low-income for a family of four.

I’d gotten used to the crime, rarely violent but often brazen; to leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows. A lot of people leave notes on the glass stating some variation of Nothing’s in the car. Don’t smash the windows. One time someone smashed our windows just to steal a scarf. Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.

A campsite outside City HallA family walks by a man laid out on the sidewalk

A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.

It was easier to ignore this kind of suffering amid the throngs of workers and tourists. And you could always avert your gaze and look at the beautiful city around you. But in lockdown the beauty became obscene. The city couldn’t get kids back into the classroom; so many people were living on the streets; petty crime was rampant. I used to tell myself that San Francisco’s politics were wacky but the city was trying—really trying—to be good. But the reality is that with the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.

But this dogmatism may be buckling under pressure from reality. Earlier this year, in a landslide, San Francisco voters recalled the head of the school board and two of her most progressive colleagues. These are the people who also turned out Boudin; early results showed that about 60 percent of voters chose to recall him.

Residents had hoped Boudin would reform the criminal-justice system and treat low-level offenders more humanely. Instead, critics argued that his policies victimized victims, allowed criminals to go free to reoffend, and did nothing to help the city’s most vulnerable. To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up.

If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it. The fog keeps things temperate. There’s nowhere in the world with more beautiful views. City workers and volunteers bring you food and blankets, needles and tents. Doctors come to see how the fentanyl is progressing, and to make sure the rest of you is all right as you go.

In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a 37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours. He wore blue shorts and even in death clutched his backpack.

I can’t stop thinking about how long he lay there, dead, on that corner, and how normal this was in our putatively gentle city. San Franciscans are careful to use language that centers people’s humanity—you don’t say “a homeless person”; you say “someone experiencing homelessness”—and yet we live in a city where many of those people die on the sidewalk.

Here is a list of some of the organizations that work with the city to fight overdoses and to generally make life more pleasant for the people on the street: Street Crisis Response Team,  EMS-6, Street Overdose Response Team, San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, Street Medicine and Shelter Health, DPH Mobile Crisis Team, Street Wellness Response Team, and Compassionate Alternative Response Team. The city also funds thousands of shelter beds and many walk-in clinics.

The budget to tackle homelessness and provide supportive housing has been growing exponentially for years. In 2021, the city announced that it would pour more than $1 billion into the issue over the next two years. But almost 8,000 people remain on the streets.

Alison Hawkes, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health, said money spent on the well-being of the homeless goes to good use: Many people “end up remaining on the street but in a better situation. Their immediate needs are taken care of.”

But many are clearly in an awful situation. San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.

Of course, you can’t blame the plague of meth and opioids on my hometown. Fentanyl is a national catastrophe. But people addicted to drugs come from all over the country in part for the services San Francisco provides. In addition to the supervised drug-use facility in the plaza, San Francisco has a specially sanctioned and city-maintained slum a block from City Hall, where food, medical care, and counseling are free, and every tent costs taxpayers roughly $60,000 a year. People addicted to fentanyl come, too, because buying and doing drugs here is so easy. In 2014, Proposition 47, a state law, downgraded drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, and one that Boudin said he wouldn’t devote resources to prosecuting.

This approach to drug use and homelessness is distinctly San Franciscan, blending empathy-driven progressivism with California libertarianism. The roots of this belief system reach back to the ’60s, when hippies filled the streets with tents and weed. The city has always had a soft spot for vagabonds, and an admirable focus on care over punishment. Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents. When the pandemic began, the drug crisis got worse.

In 2019, someone posted a picture in a Facebook group called B.A.R.T. Rants & Raves, where people complain about the state of the regional transportation system. The photo was of a young man, slumped over on a train. People were chiming in about how gross the city was.

A woman named Jacqui Berlinn wrote in the comments, simply: “That’s my son.”

His name is Corey Sylvester and he’s 31 years old. She posted a photo of him when he was sober: “May he return there soon.”

Berlinn has five children, and is also raising Sylvester’s daughter. Since she posted that comment, she’s become an activist, calling on the city to crack down on drug sales, put dealers in jail, and arrest her son so he’s forced to become sober in jail, which she sees as the only way to save his life. She told me that she feels San Francisco has failed people like him: “Nothing that is being done is improving the situation.” Her work is nonpartisan, she said, but “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I really want to see Boudin recalled.”

Not long ago, we met on a stoop by the Civic Center, where her son used to hang out. She hadn’t seen him in months, but she spoke with him periodically. She cried as she talked about his journey into drugs. She said he was a heroin addict. He’d get sober after stints in jail, but it wouldn’t last. “I’d see him sometimes, and he didn’t look that bad, and that was how it was for 10 years,” she told me. “But then the dealers started putting fentanyl in everything, and being on fentanyl, it’s changed him, deteriorated him so rapidly … Before, he looked pretty healthy and smiling. And now he’s got this stoop. He walks almost at a 40-degree angle, like an old man.”

He’s been stabbed twice. He got an infection in his thumb, and she thought he might lose the hand. “They need to stop ignoring the fact that there are people out here selling fentanyl on the streets,” she said. “When it was just heroin—I can’t believe I’m saying ‘just heroin.’ Fentanyl is different. We’re normalizing people dying.”

One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin neighborhood when she came across someone else’s son. “He was naked in front of Safeway … And he was saying he was God and he was eating a cardboard box.”

She called the police. Officers arrived but said there was nothing they could do; he said he didn’t want help, and he wasn’t hurting anyone. “They said it’s not illegal to be naked; people are in the Castro naked all the time … They just left him naked eating cardboard on the street in front of Safeway.”

What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice.

A boarded-up store downtown

Last year, I bought my wife her wedding ring at a beautiful little antique store a few blocks from my childhood home. It was ransacked at the end of December. The shaken owner posted a video; the showcases were empty and the whole place was covered in glass.

You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

The head of CVS Health’s organized-crime division has called San Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime.” Thefts in San Francisco’s Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.

The movement to decriminalize shoplifting in San Francisco began in 2014 with Proposition 47, the state law that downgraded drug possession and also recategorized the theft of merchandise worth less than $950 as a misdemeanor. It accelerated in 2019 with the election of Boudin as district attorney.

It is difficult to remember now, but the Boudin election was thrilling for the city. It occurred during the heights of rage against President Donald Trump, when more and more people were becoming aware of police violence against Black people and demanding criminal-justice reforms. London Breed, the city’s first Black female mayor, wanted a liberal moderate for D.A., but Boudin ran to the left as a fierce progressive ideologue whose worldview was shaped by his imprisoned parents, members of the Weather Underground. He was a public defender, not a prosecutor at all. He had worked in Venezuela and in 2009 congratulated the former dictator Hugo Chávez for abolishing term limits. Boudin was a charismatic figure. His campaign manager called him “a national movement candidate.”

The Police Officers Association fought hard against him, spending $400,000 on a barrage of attack ads, according to the San Francisco Examiner. They didn’t work. At Boudin’s election party, a city supervisor led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck the POA.” During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.

But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.

It has become no big deal to see someone stealing in San Francisco. Videos of crimes in process go viral fairly often. One from last year shows a group of people fleeing a Neiman Marcus with goods in broad daylight. Others show people grabbing what they can from drugstores and walking out. When a theft happens in a Walgreens or a CVS, there’s no big chase. The cashiers are blasé about it. Aisle after aisle of deodorant and shampoo are under lock and key. Press a button for the attendant to get your dish soap.

The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went far beyond it.

Under Boudin, prosecutors in the city could no longer use the fact that someone had been convicted of a crime in the past to ask for a longer sentence, except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Boudin ended cash bail and limited the use of gang enhancements, which allow harsher sentences for gang-related felonies. In most cases he prohibited prosecutors from seeking charges when drugs and guns were found during minor traffic stops. “We will not charge cases determined to be a racist pretextual stop that leads to recovery of contraband,” Rachel Marshall, the district attorney’s director of communications, told me.

Boudin is a big proponent of “collaborative courts” that focus on rehabilitation over jail time, such as Veterans Justice Court and Behavioral Health Court, and under his tenure they tried more cases than ever before. In 2018, less than 40 percent of petty-theft cases were sent to these programs, compared with more than 70 percent last year. Marshall said it was the judges who decided which cases to divert, not Boudin, and eligibility rules for the collaborative courts have loosened in recent years. But critics also pointed out that Boudin got fewer convictions overall: 40 percent in 2021, compared with about 60 percent under his predecessor.

About 60 prosecutors had left since Boudin took office—close to half of his team. Some retired or were fired, but others quit in protest. I talked with two who joined the recall campaign. One of them, a homicide prosecutor named Brooke Jenkins, told me she left in part because Boudin was pressuring some lawyers to prosecute major crimes as lesser offenses. (Marshall said this was “a lie.”) She couldn’t be part of it. “The victims feel hopeless,” Jenkins told me. “They feel he has lost their opportunity for justice. Right now what they see and feel is that his only concern is the criminal offender.” (I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jenkins run for D.A. herself, though this isn’t something she’s floated yet.)

A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration of the rank and file: “Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18 months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.”

Boudin has a rugged jawline and fast, tight answers for his critics. His office vehemently rejected the argument that he wasn’t doing enough to tackle crime. “The DA has filed charges in about 80 percent of felony drug sales and possession for sales cases presented to our office by police,” Marshall pointed out. After all, he could prosecute people only if the police arrested them, and arrest rates had plummeted under his tenure. So how could that be his fault? But why had arrest rates plummeted? The pandemic was one reason. But maybe it was also because the D.A. said from the beginning that he would not prioritize the prosecution of lower-level offenses. Police officers generally don’t arrest people they know the D.A. won’t charge.

Left: A man sweeping up broken glass after a car was broken into in the Tenderloin. Right: The Civic Center.

In 2020, I interviewed Boudin while working on a story for The New York Times. When we talked about why he wasn’t interested in prosecuting quality-of-life crimes, he explained that street crime is small potatoes compared with the high-level stuff he wants to focus on. (“Kilos, not crumbs” is a favorite line.) He has suggested that many drug dealers in San Francisco are themselves vulnerable and in need of protection. “A significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps as many as half—are here from Honduras,” he said in a 2020 virtual town hall. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have … Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death. Some of them have had family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers.”

Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. No one wants people incarcerated for unfair lengths of time. No one wants immigrants’ relatives to be killed by MS-13. Few of Boudin’s policy ideas—individually, and sometimes with reasonable limitations—are indefensible. (Ending cash bail for truly minor offenses, for instance, protects people from losing their job and more while in jail.) But as with homelessness, the city’s overall take on criminal-justice reform moved well past the point of common sense. Last month a man who had been convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019 was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those charges were dismissed and he was released on probation. It really didn’t inspire confidence that the city was taking any of this seriously.

Boudin’s defenders liked to dismiss his critics as whiny tech bros or rich right-wingers. One pro-Boudin flyer said Stop the right-wing agenda. But the drumbeat of complaints came from plenty of good liberals, and so did the votes against him. If it were only the rich, well, the rich can hire private security, or move to the suburbs. And many do. They’re not the only people who live here, and they’re not the only ones who got angry.

It may not have been so clear until now, but San Franciscans have been losing patience with the city’s leadership for a long time. Nothing did more to alienate them over the years than how the progressive leaders managed the city’s housing crisis.

Consider the story of the flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street. It slopes down 2.2 acres in the sunny southern end of the city and is filled with run-down greenhouses, the glass long shattered—a chaos of birds and wild roses. For five years, advocates fought a developer who was trying to put 63 units on that bucolic space. They wanted to sell flowers there and grow vegetables for the neighborhood—a kind of banjo-and-beehives utopian fantasy. The thing they didn’t want—at least not there, not on that pretty hill—was a big housing development. Who wants to argue against them? In San Francisco the word developer is basically a slur, close to calling someone a Republican. What kind of monster wants to bulldoze wild roses?

Decades of progressive governance in San Francisco yielded a thicket of regulations—safety reviews, environmental reviews, historical reviews, sunlight-obstruction reviews—that empower residents to essentially paralyze development. It costs only $682 to file for a discretionary review that can hold up a construction project for years, and if you’re an established club that’s been around for at least two years, it’s free. Plans for one 19-unit-development geared toward the middle class were halted this year because, among other issues raised by the neighbors, the building would have increased overall shadow coverage on Dolores Park by 0.001 percent.

The flower farm at 770 Woolsey Street

The cost of real estate hit crisis levels in the 2010s, as ambitious grads from all over the world crammed into the hills to work in the booming tech industry. Soon, there was nowhere for them to live. Tech workers moved into RVs, parked alongside the poor and unhoused. Illegal dorms sprang up. Well-paid young people gentrified almost every neighborhood in town. In 2018, when London Breed was elected mayor at the age of 43, she had only just stopped living with a roommate; she couldn’t afford to live alone.

Existing homeowners, meanwhile, got very, very rich. If all other tactics fail, neighbors who oppose a big construction project can just put it on the ballot. If given a choice, who would ever vote to risk their property value going down, or say “Yes, I’m fine with a shadow over my backyard”? It doesn’t happen.

Rage against this pleasant status quo has come from a faction of young renters. I once went to a training session in the Mission District run by a pro-housing group called YIMBY—for “Yes in My Backyard.” I watched a PowerPoint presentation (“And here’s another reason to be mad at your grandparents! Next slide.”) and then joined the group for drinks.

“The elderly NIMBYs literally hiss at people,” said Steven Buss, who now runs a moderate organizing team called GrowSF, about the tension at community housing meetings. (One foggy night, at one of those meetings, I heard the hissing, and it was funny, and the project they were talking about never got built.)

Gabe Zitrin, a lawyer, popped in: “Like 770 Woolsey. I love kale too, but you could house 50 kids and their families on that site. It’s about priorities. They want a farm. They’re selfish and they’re vain. A farm does not serve the common good. I can’t tell them not to want it—but I can tell them that housing is what we need more. I don’t want to end up surrounded by a bunch of super-rich people and a farm.”

The city’s progressives seem to feel that it is all just too beautiful and fragile to change. Any change will mean diminishment; any new, bigger building means the old, charming one is gone, and the old, charming resident is probably gone too. The flow of newcomers is out of control; they should just stop coming here. The community gardens have to stay, along with the sunlight spilling across the low buildings. No one thinks about it as damning teachers and firefighters to mega-commutes. No one thinks of it as kicking out the middle class. Given the choice between housing people in sidewalk tents or in new buildings that might risk blocking an inch of their view of the bay, San Franciscans, for years, chose the tents.

The anger directed at Chesa Boudin probably could have been contained. The petty crime was frustrating, but it wasn’t what lit the city up for revolution. The housing crush is miserable, but it’s been that way for more than a decade now. The spark that lit this all on fire was the school board. And the population ready to rage was San Francisco’s parents.

The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.

One night in 2021, the meeting lasted seven hours, one of which was devoted to making sure a man named Seth Brenzel stayed off the parent committee.

Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.

“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”

Someone else called in, identifying herself as Cindy. She was calling to defend Brenzel, and she was crying. “He is a gay father of a mixed-race family,” she said.

A woman named Brandee came on the call: “I’m a white parent and have some intersectionality within my family. My son has several disabilities. And I really wouldn’t dream of putting my name forward for this.” She had some choice words for Cindy: “When white people share these kinds of tears at board meetings”—she pauses, laughing—“I have an excellent book suggestion for you. It’s called White Tears/Brown Scars. I’d encourage you to read it, thank you.”

Allison Collins, a member of the school board, dealt the death blow: “As a mixed-race person myself, I find it really offensive when folks say that somebody’s a parent of somebody who’s a person of color, as, like, a signifier that they’re qualified to represent that community.”

Brenzel remained mostly expressionless throughout the meeting. He did not say a word. Eventually the board agreed to defer the vote. He was never approved.

The other big debate on these Zoom calls was whether to rename schools named for figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Dianne Feinstein, the first female mayor of San Francisco. The board labeled these figures symbols of a racist past, and ultimately voted to rename 44 “injustice-linked” schools—though after a backlash, the board suspended the implementation of the changes.

The board members were arguably doing what they had been put there to do. Collins and her two most progressive colleagues were elected in 2018, the year before Boudin, and it was a headier time, when Trump’s shadow seemed to loom over even the smallest local office. Collins had a blog focused on justice in education, and there was a sense that she would champion a radical new politics. But during the endless lockdown, enthusiasm began to wane, even among many people who’d voted for her. They found themselves turned off by the board’s combative tone—as well as by its actual ideas about education.

In February 2021, board members agreed that they would avoid the phrase learning loss to describe what was happening to kids locked out of their classrooms. Instead they would use the words learning change. Schools being shut just meant students were “having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure,” Gabriela López, a member of the board at the time, said. “They are learning more about their families and their cultures.” Framing this as some kind of “deficit” was wrong, the board argued.

That same month, the board voted to replace the rigorous test that screened applicants for Lowell, San Francisco’s most competitive high school, with a lottery system. López had explained it this way: “Grades and standardized test scores are automatic barriers for students outside of white and Asian communities.” She said they “have shown to be one of the most effective racist policies, considering they’re used to attempt to measure aptitude and intelligence. So the fact that Lowell uses this merit-based system as a step in applying is inherently racist.”

Collins echoed that: “‘Merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centered on white supremacist framing.”

If you didn’t like these changes, tough. A parent on Twitter accused López of trying to destroy the school system, and she replied with the words “I mean this sincerely” followed by a middle-finger emoji. In July, on the topic of the declining quality of life in San Francisco, she wrote, “I’m like, then leave.”

Gabriela López must have thought that history was on her side. Boudin, too. But things are turning out differently. If there was a tipping point in this story, it was when the city’s Asian American parents in particular got really, really mad.

As Allison Collins’s profile rose during the pandemic, critics started looking through her old tweets. There were bad ones. In 2016, she had written: “Many Asian Americans believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact many Asian American teachers, students and parents actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”

She also complained about Asian Americans not speaking out enough about Trump: “Do they think they won’t be deported? Profiled? Beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still considered ‘the help.’”

The San Francisco Bay Area is 52 percent white, 6.7 percent Black, and 23.3 percent Asian. And many Asian San Franciscans were horrified by the tweets.

“Her comments deeply insulted my family and the entire Chinese community in San Francisco,” Kit Lam told me. Lam is an immigrant from Hong Kong with two children in public school. He works for the school district, in the enrollment department, though he just learned that his job will be eliminated next month. He said he knew what richer parents were doing during the pandemic because he saw the paperwork: They were pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools. Lam didn’t have that choice.

In April 2021, he started going on 1400 AM, the Bay Area’s Chinese-language radio station, to express his outrage. He spoke out against school closures and the decision to get rid of the admissions test for Lowell. Asian students have traditionally been overrepresented at Lowell; getting in is one of the best ways for high-achieving poor and middle-class kids in San Francisco to rise up the economic ladder.

Many people from his community agreed with him. They began gathering signatures and raising money for a campaign to recall Collins, López, and another progressive board member, Faauuga Moliga. Siva Raj, one of the recall organizers, told me that roughly half of those volunteering for the campaign spoke Chinese.

After the tweets came to light, a member of the board asked Collins to voluntarily step down. But she refused. Instead, she sued five of her fellow members. She also sued the district. She asked for $87 million, citing, among other afflictions, “severe mental, and emotional distress,” “damage to self-image,” and “injury to spiritual solace.”

Her case was tossed. And in February 2022, San Franciscans voted decisively to remove all three from the board. A landslide 76 percent voted to recall Collins, and the other two were recalled by about 70 percent each. They have been replaced by moderates, appointed by the mayor. Collins and López slammed their opponents as agents of white supremacy, but the turnout was diverse, and impressive, especially for a special election: More people voted to recall the board members than had cast votes for them in the first place.

Boudin’s opponents, likewise, came from all over the city. He liked to say they were funded by elites, and the recall campaign did raise about twice as much money. But wealthy people have donated to the pro-Boudin campaign, too. The racial group that was most likely to say they wanted Boudin recalled? Asian Americans. Their allies included many from the remnants of the city’s middle class, as well as the same sort of swayable liberals who went from voting for Collins to recalling her.

Now a number of groups are trying to address quality-of-life issues in the city. There is the new California Peace Coalition, which opposes the open-air drug markets, and includes parents of drug users who are at risk of or have died from overdose. There’s Innovate Public Schools and Stop Crime SF, which are self-explanatory. Shine On SF is “reigniting civic pride” by cleaning up the city’s streets. SF.Citi is advocating for the interests of tech workers.

For a long time, says Michelle Tandler, a start-up founder who documented downtown’s collapse on Twitter, “San Francisco progressives and Democrats were so focused on Trump that they weren’t paying attention.” Suddenly, they’re paying attention.

And Mayor Breed is responding. She was elected during the Trump administration, like Boudin and the school board, and her approval numbers are also faltering. But she’s in a different mold. Breed is a canny politician who knows which way the wind is blowing, and is open to changing course depending on the results.

Just a few years ago, she had proudly embraced the “defund the police” movement; no longer. This spring, after the city’s gay-pride parade banned police officers from marching in uniform, Breed announced that out of solidarity, she wouldn’t march either.

I took a stroll with her back in February. She had just given a press conference on anti-Asian hate crimes outside a senior center in Chinatown. As in places like New York, the city had seen a spike in the reporting of hate crimes against Asians. People were scared. Breed grew up in the city’s projects and knows residents who have had family members shot and killed recently. “I know a lot of people who supported Chesa because there was a strong push for criminal justice,” she told me. “I don’t think people believed that it meant that justice would not occur.” She added, “That’s not justice reform, if everyone who commits the crime is getting off for the crime.” Now she’ll have a chance to replace him.

As we talked, we walked through Chinatown, then up past the $7 million homes of Russian Hill and down into North Beach. The bay lay ahead; the cable-car drivers waved to the mayor; the city’s problems seemed far off. But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and sidewalks are full of fentanyl’s chaos. She declared it to be in a state of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law enforcement there.

The order was mostly symbolic—the drug problem isn’t limited to a few bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor to trot out some new rhetoric: “What I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care.” It was time, she said, to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

Sunset at Alamo Square Park

My hometown isn’t turning red on any electoral maps. But the shift is real. The farm at 770 Woolsey? The developer finally has approval to turn it into housing. If progressives have overplayed their hand, gotten a little decadent in culture-war wins and stirring slogans, without the good government to back them all up, San Francisco is showing the way toward an internal reformation.

Before the school-board vote, the last local recall in San Francisco was in 1983. There has not been this level of conflict at farmers’ markets, where dueling signature-gatherers face off across from the organic-dog-treat kiosk, in almost 40 years. This is, in part, because until recently many San Franciscans were afraid. If a tech worker complained, they were reviled. If an aging hippie complained, they were a racist old nut. It was easier to blame all of our issues on outsiders—those Silicon Valley interlopers who came in and ruined the city. The drugs, the homelessness, the crime—blame the Google employees who skewed the city’s condo market and brought in their artisanal chocolates, their scooters, their trendy barbers. If not for them and the inequality they created, San Francisco would still be good.

There’s some truth to that: You cannot tell the story of the housing crunch without the tech boom. But people started looking at City Hall, and at the school board. They realized there were no tech bros there. The fentanyl epidemic and the pandemic cracked something. With the city locked down endlessly, with people dying in the streets, with schools closed, it was slowly becoming okay to say Maybe this is ridiculous. Maybe this isn’t working.

Of course, it’ll take more than a couple of recall votes to save San Francisco. When I asked Breed about the new center for addicts in the plaza—the creation of which she supported—she seemed a little uncomfortable and soon after wanted to wrap up our interview. She said something vague about how not all change can happen at once.

NIMBYism and fentanyl are as much a part of the San Francisco landscape now as the bridge and the fog. And the school board is still school-boarding. At the end of May, it announced that the district would no longer use the word chief in any job titles, out of respect for Native Americans (despite the fact that the word actually comes from the French chef).

The other day I walked by Millennium Tower. Once a symbol of the push to transform our funky town into a big city, it’s a gleaming 58-story skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco, and it’s been sinking into the ground—more than a foot since it was finished in 2009. A group of men in hard hats was just standing there, staring up at it. The metaphor is obvious, but San Francisco has never been a subtle city. I’d like to believe those guys finally had a plan to fix the tower. At least they seemed to accept that it needed fixing.

For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”

San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.

San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

Because Herb Caen was right. It’s still the most beautiful city you’ll ever see.

The post Chesa Boudin Recall: How San Francisco Grew to become a Failed Metropolis appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Boudin derangement syndrome: Since taking office in 2020, the DA has become the locus of a corporate backlash. (Courtesy of the Recall Chesa Boudin campaign)

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After just two years in office, Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco, gets blamed for every crime in the book—even offenses committed before he took office and beyond the city limits. For his efforts to tackle wage theft, end cash bail, expand the program that diverts nonviolent offenders from prison, and prosecute abusive cops, Boudin has been rewarded with a recall campaign scapegoating him for all of this city’s woes. The vote takes place on June 7, and recent polls suggest it will be an uphill battle for Boudin and progressives.

Loaded with cash from local billionaires, Big Tech, and other corporate interests, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and an allied group called San Franciscans for Public Safety have poured a whopping $5.1 million into the campaign to recall Boudin. Real estate interests have also kicked in, including more than $600,000 from Shorenstein Realty Services, a major local developer. As the Democratic strategist Cooper Teboe told Forbes, Boudin is “the unfortunate recipient of all of the anger from the investor class and the billionaire class.” The recall’s top funder is the Republican billionaire William Oberndorf, who donated $3.7 million to federal candidates in 2020—mostly to Republicans, including Senators Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton.

While Boudin is the primary target, this centrist uprising first came to public attention in February when it spearheaded the recall of three school board members (a campaign that was financed heavily by Oberndorf and the billionaire investor Arthur Rock). Next came electoral threats to progressive supervisors who didn’t support the school board recall, revealing a larger political agenda. Then, in late April, corporate interests mounted a gerrymandering effort that could put some supervisor districts in the centrist camp. And now, the furious push to recall Boudin.

“There is a big money effort to roll back progressive politics in San Francisco,” says Tim Redmond, founder and editor of the progressive news site 48 Hills, who has covered politics here since 1986.

Related Articles

Propelling this movement is a well-financed narrative that has insinuated itself into local media and politics—and a sizable portion of the electorate. This narrative blames San Francisco progressives for complex crises whose causes reach back decades and far beyond the city line. The writer Michael Shellenberger, who’s making an improbable run for the California governor’s office, bizarrely blames the left for the city’s ills in his book San Fransicko, with its bombastic subtitle: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

At the heart of this reactionary movement is a misdiagnosis of genuine problems. Burgeoning homelessness and drug addiction here are preventable tragedies. Housing costs are among the highest in the nation, with the median single-family home priced at $2 million, far out of reach for most people. The city also hosts the world’s greatest concentration of billionaires, and the Bay Area is home to California’s most glaring inequality, with the top 10 percent of earners raking in 12.2 times what folks in the bottom 10 percent make.

While progressives have often held a majority in the city’s legislature, they haven’t had a mayoral ally since Art Agnos lost to conservative Frank Jordan in 1991; the city’s “strong mayor” charter also adds to centrists’ power when they control the executive branch. Rising homelessness, addiction, and crime are the result of national and regional crises, including woefully insufficient spending on supportive housing for homeless people. Redmond says the current scapegoating is “a total distraction from the fundamental inequalities in the US and in San Francisco.” If anything, progressive policies like the city’s living wage ordinance, universal health care access, rent control, tenants’ rights laws, and taxes on extreme wealth have blunted these crises.

Current Issue

Chasing Chesa, Fomenting Fear

When he was elected in November 2019, Boudin was hailed as a bright new star in a wave of reforming district attorneys that included Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins in the Boston area, and Kim Foxx in Cook County, Ill. All have faced criticism, but the backlash in San Francisco has been particularly virulent, prompting pundits to label it “Chesa Boudin Derangement Syndrome.” As the San Francisco Examiner writer Gil Duran described it, “Every crime trend—even those pre-dating his tenure—can somehow be blamed on him. Car burglarized? Blame Boudin. Walgreens and CVS closing hundreds of stores nationwide? Boudin’s fault. National fentanyl epidemic? Thanks, Boudin. Police not making enough arrests? Boudin hurt their morale.” One recent recall campaign ad featured a man who closed his store because of drug dealing—but a reporter revealed that the business had been shuttered before Boudin was elected.

San Francisco has its share of urban problems. But analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle found that “reported crime data does not clearly show a trend toward worsening public safety.” Even as crimes like car break-ins have increased in the city (as they have statewide and beyond), violent crimes are way down. But that hasn’t stopped the fearmongers from fanning a political wildfire.

The typically center-right Chronicle surprised locals with a strong editorial against the recall, arguing, “Crime stats that mirror those of when Boudin took office do not justify a recall. Violent crime is low and has stayed low even as it has surged across the country…. Cities across the country—regardless of their criminal justice approach—have struggled after COVID lockdowns lifted.” The Examiner and the local Democratic Party also reject the recall, as have many former prosecutors and judges.

Blaming the victims: Municipal workers trash an encampment of unhoused people just a few blocks from San Francisco’s City Hall. (Christopher D. Cook)

Scapegoating Homeless People

On a recent afternoon, across the street from a shining new glass tower of condos for sale a few blocks from City Hall, city workers descended on tents arrayed neatly on the sidewalk’s edge. A burly public works employee snatched and tossed a silver tent onto a platform truck, atop other “junk” bound for the dump.

“The man that lives in there is a 65-year-old dude who’s out on a medical appointment,” a fellow tent dweller, an amply tattooed Marine veteran, told me. “It’s our constitutional right to live here, to have a home. You can’t take that away from us,” he urged the workers in an increasingly irate voice. When I asked who’s demanding the tent removals, city workers insisted, “The mayor, London Breed.”

Trashing an elderly homeless man’s shelter and belongings—a violation of city policy, advocates tell me—is brutally familiar in this city, where “there are more anti-homeless laws than in any other city in the state,” says Jennifer Friedenbach, the longtime director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “Homelessness in San Francisco is a popular wedge issue,” she continues. “And politicians—Shellenberger no exception—stoke fear of homeless people to get their name in the paper…. Homeless people, drug dealers, and criminals are all lumped together and scapegoated.”

A Twitter account named “BetterSOMA” (referencing the South of Market area) posts photographs of homeless people shooting up or crumpled on the sidewalk, a humiliating public exposure that could haunt these people’s futures. When I confronted the group about this practice, BetterSOMA and its acolytes came at me like piranhas. As one put it, “It should be humiliating. They should be shamed. If you coddle street addicts, MORE SHOW UP and are lured into depravity.” Another insisted, “They are drug addicts. Their dignity went out the window before the photos pal.”

The pandemic has only intensified the street crises, Friedenbach says. “People have been out there for two years—their [precarity] has gotten much worse, their drug use much worse.” Meanwhile, Friedenbach sees a growing “promotion of tried-and-failed strategies” such as criminalization and forcing homeless mentally ill people into institutions through conservatorship. The forces behind the recall campaign, she adds, “are complaining about homelessness and then fighting against the solutions,” citing Mayor Breed’s opposition to voter-approved measures to expand funding for homeless services and shelters.

As the writer Gray Brechin, founder of the Living New Deal, puts it, “The question isn’t asked enough: Why are people taking so many drugs? To dull the pain of living in this incredibly cruel society. At the root of it is poverty,” he says, and “a dystopic neoliberal environment that is guaranteed to drive people insane” while living on the streets.

Follow the Money

Fueling this city’s centrist octopus is an engine of big money—largely from Big Tech, real estate, and other corporate interests. And these efforts reach beyond the recalls: As 48 Hills documented, Oberndorf has given at least $300,000 to Neighbors for a Better San Francisco—money spent campaigning against progressive candidates and measures. In 2020, the group and its corporate allies—all aligned with Mayor Breed—spent big to oppose Proposition I, a real estate transfer tax on the wealthiest property owners to help fund emergency aid and affordable housing in the pandemic. (Voters approved the measure by a large margin and rejected several centrist candidates.)

The centrist constellation includes tech-funded groups like GrowSF, AdvanceSF (whose leadership is a who’s who from the Chamber of Commerce), and the YIMBY (“Yes in My Back Yard”) movements pushing a maximal growth agenda that includes “streamlining” environmental reviews to spur more building, principally of market-rate housing. This agenda is part of what the writer Rebecca Solnit calls the “free-market fundamentalism” that has become a local religion. “The constant narrative going on for decades is that if we just build enough buildings, housing will become affordable,” Solnit told me. “But we have more than 40,000 vacant units here,” she notes, citing a city report. “We have a distribution problem, not a supply problem.”

Observing this array of centrist and big money groups, Redmond concludes, “They’re all connected, and the money proves that. Politics takes money, and they’ve got the money.” He adds, “Well-financed efforts at framing the debate have had an effect.”

In April, after many epic late-night hearings, the city’s Redistricting Task Force finalized a new electoral map that could favor centrist district supervisors at the expense of progressive stalwarts like Connie Chan, another target of real estate interests. In an e-mail obtained by 48 Hills, the real estate developer Nick Podell, a board member of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, crowed, “For the 1st time in the 40 years that I’ve lived in the City, there is a large coordinated centrist/moderate movement to take on Progressive power.” That effort, Podell wrote, is poised to “flip 3 districts with Progressive Supervisors to moderate majorities.” The local Republican leader Richie Greenberg cheered the centrist map, writing, “Connie Chan is TOAST.”

San Francisco is chronically conflicted. A nominally liberal town where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 10-fold, it is also a historical hub of finance capital, extreme wealth accumulation, and corporate profit, which all fuel (and fund) a moderate and sometimes conservative politics, particularly on economic issues. Since the Gold Rush, says Solnit (who has lived here since 1980), San Francisco “has always had a progressive wing and a corporate moderate wing. Because Republicans don’t have traction here, people think of us as this quasi-socialist utopia, but it’s not true…. Now we have millionaires buying elections through recalls.” As the Examiner columnist Lincoln Mitchell explains, the city’s rich and powerful “are not always conservative or right wing, but they have a vision that is distinctly not progressive.” Their “moderate-to-conservative vision,” Mitchell says, “is one where businesses and developers are empowered and given incentives to operate more or less how they like, where fear of crime is fetishized, and where homelessness is understood as a problem not of human suffering but as a quality-of-life issue for the housed.”

Crisis conditions: Two years into the pandemic, precarity, poverty, addiction, and inequality have only gotten worse. (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Big Tech’s Shadow

The writer and activist Roberto Lovato offers a scathing diagnosis of his native city’s neoliberal tilt, pointing to Silicon Valley’s ethos of “digital Darwinism.” The recalls, Lovato explains, show the cumulative effects of Big Tech’s power: “You’re looking at what Silicon Valley did over all these years, the near-totalitarian control of the body politic of San Francisco.” This “greed machine,” he argues, is manufacturing “a normalization of displacement…. One way to do it is to reengineer the political system.”

“There’s a fascistic cruelty beneath the shiny silicon surface of San Francisco,” Lovato says—one that displaces communities and cultures in the name of relentless growth and profit. “All my friends who grew up here have been displaced. The organic growth of the Mission [District] that created the largest concentration of murals in the world has been displaced by gentrification and tech workers buying $14 burritos…. They use our murals to push us out.”

“Tech has such a libertarian tendency,” Solnit says, “but a lot of it is economically regressive. We don’t have the language to express how many of these folks are Burning Man libertarians while being economic Republicans.” Tech’s predominance here, she adds, has cultural as well as political implications: “Everything is DoorDashed and smartphoned; it’s a much more mediated experience. The desire to avoid human contact has been such a part of the tech culture—the desire to live in one of the most densely urban centers in the country while being hostile to much of that life.”

Even amid this centrist uprising, San Francisco progressives have mustered some positive changes. A voter-approved tax on vacant storefronts took effect in January, and activists are preparing a ballot measure to tax up to 40,000 vacant residential units to pressure landlords to fill them (a similar effort worked well in Vancouver). In March, the city enacted a groundbreaking law enabling tenants to form union-like associations to bargain with landlords. It’s also worth remembering that in 2019, city voters elected Boudin on the platform of criminal justice reform that he’s now implementing. On June 7 and beyond, voters here have a chance to reject this corporate-funded reactionary movement. San Francisco, as always, remains intensely contested terrain.

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Monday night though, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was on the offensive. He was the feature speaker at a town hall meeting at Manny’s in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Boudin addressed a crowd of nearly 200 San Franciscans as his recall election on June 7 is now less than three months away.

“I’m proud of the fact that in my two years in office we’ve increased our charging rate for sexual assault, we’ve increased our conviction rate for homicide cases, and we filed more than 10,000 new criminal cases,” said Boudin .

VIDEO: Bay Area DA’s meet with crime survivors to find solutions, better ways to support victims

The crowd inside at Manny’s was there to ask Boudin questions, but a pro-recall crowd of two dozen people were outside, making it known they aren’t happy with the district attorney. In fact we even saw drama between someone appearing to be a Boudin supporter, and another person in favor of the recall.

“This DA, his policies have failed!” said a recall supporter.

“How do you know if his policies have failed? If he hasn’t had a chance to do that and the police have been sabotaging him!” said a Boudin supporter.

“I haven’t really had a chance to govern properly. I’m not making excuses, I’m just stating facts here but I took office in January 2020, less than two months later I was told by the Department of Public Health that I and my staff couldn’t go into our office,” said Boudin.

RELATED: Anger among San Francisco’s Asian American voters may influence DA Boudin recall, report says

But over the course of the last two year’s San Franciscans have seen vehicle theft property crimes continue to plague the city and thefts continue to hurt businesses.

Boudin though refusing to answer our questions about that as he left Monday’s town hall.

“I’m really late for another event. Happy to talk about it, really late for another event,” said the district attorney as he walked away from our camera.

Homelessness was a main focus at the town hall along with diversion programs instead of incarceration in certain cases. Boudin making reference to a successful program in Eugene, Oregon where social workers respond to calls instead of police.

“I think if we’re serious about reducing violence, reducing the police clearance rate, about building public safety, then we’ve got to invest in programs like that one,” said Boudin.

Copyright © 2022 KGO-TV. All rights reserved.

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“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.

The post Clueless San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin disses law-abiding residents appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Chesa Boudin and Lorenzo Charles became friends during monthly visits to their mothers in a maximum-security prison.

Lorenzo’s mother was behind bars for a relatively minor drug offense; Kathy Boudin, a leader of the radical Weather Underground, was doing 20 years to life for her role as an unarmed getaway driver in a 1981 Brinks robbery near New York City that ended with three dead.

When 6-year-old Chesa screamed at his mother for abandoning him as an infant, Lorenzo calmed him. When Chesa refused to do homework, his mother urged him to emulate Lorenzo, an A-student who lived with his grandmother in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood.

Not yet 5 years old, Chesa had been visiting his father in prison for almost four years. A few years later, he began to spend weekends with him in trailer visits.

(Family handout)

Chesa lived in Chicago with his adopted family of activist intellectuals. With their support, he channeled his anger into achievement. He lost touch with Lorenzo. In his first semester at Yale, Chesa received a letter from his father, imprisoned for his role in the Brinks robbery. He had met Lorenzo on his cell block. Doing time for burglary.

It’s a story so central to Boudin’s life that he tells it over and over, always with the same last line: For Lorenzo, “the odds played out.”

Lorenzo’s fate drew Boudin to research and write about those odds against children of incarcerated parents, which deepened his convictions about injustice and racism, which propelled him to law school and a job as public defender in San Francisco.

And then he made a move in some ways as radical as his parents’ choices: In 2019, he ran for San Francisco district attorney, promising to use incarceration as a last resort, tackle systemic racial inequities and prosecute police brutality.

Everything about his victory was improbable. He was a 39-year-old public defender who had never prosecuted a case. In a city where politics is a blood sport, he was a candidate who had never run for anything since class vice president in sixth grade. His four parents, the two who bore him and the two who raised him, had been faces on FBI Most Wanted posters.

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin, center, with his chief of staff, David Campos, and Rachel Marshall, director of communications and policy advisor, at a news conference in 2020 announcing manslaughter charges against a former San Francisco police officer, Chris Samayoa, who fatally shot an unarmed carjacking suspect in 2017.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Opponents registered the domain name recallchesaboudin.org. within days of his being sworn in. Fueled by tech money, fears of crime, and San Francisco politics, the June 7 recall election has made Boudin a lightning rod for every tragedy in the city, the target of anger over homeless encampments, drug dealing, gun violence and home burglaries.

San Francisco voters’ verdict on Boudin will reverberate far beyond the city’s 47 square miles, including in Los Angeles, where Dist. Atty. George Gascón faces a potential recall. Because if you can’t make radical change in San Francisco, what future does the progressive prosecutor movement have?

::

Two months after he took office, Boudin spoke at a Columbia University conference that focuses on ending mass incarceration. In the front row was his mother Kathy, paroled in 2003, doctorate in education in 2007, founder of the center that organizes the annual event.

“I never wanted to run for office,” Boudin said. “Because of the compromise. Because of the mucky, disgusting policymaking process. The moral clarity of being a public defender was safer, was easier…. But I found myself, I think we all find ourselves, in a pretty unique historic moment…. And now I face the slippery slope of compromise. Every day.”

When he stood up in court, which he did often, he was clear what “for the people” meant: “A lot of people in my role don’t think that ‘the people’ include those they are prosecuting.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin during his swearing-in ceremony in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2020.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

He was trying to disrupt the paradigm that divides the world into good victims and bad criminals, that equates locking people up with public safety, that measures success by convictions. He was trying to redefine success as interventions that healed victims and held criminals accountable, yet offered a path to redemption.

He hired former public defenders in top jobs to “bring people into the office who don’t just theoretically know that the person they’re prosecuting is a three-dimensional person … who have seen racial profiling and what it looks like in police reports. Seen people who are wrongfully accused.”

He was trying to convince career prosecutors that they had been wielding their enormous power wrongly.

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“They don’t want to believe that for their entire life, their entire career, they’ve been doing harm,” he said months later at a symposium. “They don’t want to believe that an outsider like me, a career public defender, knows better than they do how to be a prosecutor, or how to be a prosecutor that helps promote public safety.”

This, more than any specific reform, has made him a polarizing figure, loved and reviled, savior and threat.

“I just want to live in a city where the DA prosecutes crime,” tweeted Michelle Tandler, an entrepreneur and recall supporter. “My home has been overrun by radicals and the criminals they empower.”

The COVID-19 pandemic bred insecurity and fear, addicts and homeless stood out on empty San Francisco streets, home burglaries surged as tourists vanished and tech workers left the city, and Boudin’s past, which shapes all that he does, was reduced to a simple refrain: son of terrorists.

::

On Oct. 20, 1981, Kathy Boudin dropped her 14-month-old son at the babysitter and joined his father, David Gilbert, assigned to pick up members of the Black Liberation Army after they robbed a Brinks truck in a suburban mall.

Chesa Boudin credits time spent in the Childrens Center at the Bedford Hills state prison, an unusual family-oriented visiting space for mothers and children, with enabling him to establish a strong relationship with his mother Kathy.

(Family Handout)

The plan went awry; Black revolutionaries shot and killed a Brinks guard and two police officers. Boudin and Gilbert were arrested at the scene.

Chesa was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, friends of his parents from the movement. By 7, he was flying solo more than a dozen times a year from their Chicago home to New York for prison visits.

Chesa Boudin with his two fathers, David Gilbert, left, and Bill Ayers, who along with his wife adopted the toddler after his parents’ arrest.

(Family handout)

“We’d be going about our lives, and then Chesa would be gone for four days,” said Sam Kass, a close friend since childhood. “He would go off into this other world and then come back to ours. And we’d be running around and riding bikes.”

By junior high, years of therapy helped channel his rage and guilt into ambition and achievement. “It was a very conscious decision,” Kass said. “He just worked harder at everything than everybody in everything he did. Whether he was good at it or not.”

He was the A-student who read the most books, the multitasker who editorialized against the abolition of a free period, which he used to email family, eat, talk to teachers, get library books, make photocopies, attend club meetings and catch up on “those little things adults call errands.”

Chesa on his sixth birthday. He was slow to learn to read and suffered epileptic fits as a child.

(Family handout)

His nickname was the Shark: Always moving, or you die.

In a home that was a salon for children as well as adults, Chesa developed both a hard shell and an outspoken sense of injustice.

When teachers told him to wear a name tag the first day at school, Chesa threw such a fit that Ayers had to intercede. The problem was not the name tag, but the itchy yarn around his neck, Boudin recalled in an interview. Thirty-three years later, righteous indignation still tinged his voice:

“I wasn’t being rebellious for the sake of being rebellious. I was uncomfortable.”

Column One

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.

He embraced, first by necessity and then by choice, a life that straddled two worlds.

“Every day I combine two lives: one immersed in the stability of privilege and the other meeting the challenges of degradation,” Boudin wrote in his college application essay.

Reconnecting with Lorenzo Charles became the impetus for research on the rights of children of incarcerated parents and the biases of a system that disproportionately locks up Black men.

Boudin spoke around the country with a friend whose father had been a leader of the Attica prison rebellion.

“I would be the one who would be emotional,” Emani Davis said. “And he would stick to all the points.”

Boudin’s first new program as district attorney allowed parents charged with certain low-level crimes to enroll in classes and therapy in lieu of jail.

In response to criticism that the policy arbitrarily favored parents, Boudin pointed to the capriciousness of a system that sent his mother to prison for 22 years and sentenced his father to life, for the same crime:

“You point me to a place in the criminal justice system where the quality of justice is not arbitrary,” he said.

Weather Underground member Katherine Boudin is led out of the Rockland County Courthouse in New City, N.Y., by sheriff’s officers on Nov. 21, 1981.

(David Handschuh / Associated Press)

On, Oct. 24, 1981, David Gilbert is escorted by police into the Village Hall in Nyack, N.Y., for a hearing on felony murder charges stemming from the Oct. 20, 1981, Brinks armored car robbery at a mall in Nanuet, N.Y., and a subsequent shootout with Nyack police that left three people dead.

(David Handschuh / Associated Press)

Kathy Boudin still has the well-worn paper atlas she kept in her prison cell, immersed in maps that became a lifeline to her teenage son when he discovered travel.

“It was a leap that I remember experiencing as him owning a certain part of life that he created, that he loved, and then he would share with all of us. But it was his,” she recalled.

He counted countries as intensely as he studied. (Now more than 100, on all seven continents.)

The night that Kathy Boudin was released from parole, after seven years during which she could not leave New York without permission, she called her son.

“He said, ‘Great! Now we can travel together,’” she recalled.

::

When Chesa Boudin decided to run for district attorney, the hardest part was telling his parents.

“I was wary, even unhappy about it,” Gilbert wrote in an interview from prison (he was since granted clemency and paroled in November). “I’m skeptical about what one can accomplish in the money-laden arena of electoral politics.”

“I was very concerned that as a prosecutor, you have to prosecute people. You have to put people in prison,” Kathy Boudin said. “What would that be like for him and how would he handle that?”

He handled it by leaning into his family history to make points: People are more than their worst mistake. A man in his 70s with a perfect record during four decades in prison posed no danger to society and belonged at home. Coming face to face with victims can be the most potent rehabilitation.

“The thing that made the biggest difference for my mom was when she met one of the people whose lives she had turned upside down by participating in the crime,” Boudin told a forum.

Neither Kathy Boudin nor Bernardine Dohrn ever expected their son to enter politics. He had been a Rhodes scholar, worked as a translator for the administration of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, written a coming-of-age memoir (ever competitive, he boasts it received the worst review ever in the New York Times), returned to Yale for law school.

Then he found a home at the San Francisco public defender’s office, which he talks about with uncharacteristic passion. “The energy, esprit de corps, commitment — the culture of the institution is one I found to be addictive,” he said.

But the victories of prosecutors like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Rachael Rollins in Boston convinced him that a shift in public opinion had created opportunity for systemic change. In 2018, he was a finalist to run Los Angeles’ vast public defender’s office. That emboldened him when Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney at the time, decided not to run again, creating the first open contest for the office in 110 years.

A political novice, Boudin had two key assets. He was confident he would outwork the competition. And he was a networker since childhood. “There were 400 kids in our high school class,” said his brother Malik Dohrn, seven months older. “I stay in touch with eight. Chesa stays in touch with 400.”

Boudin eked out a narrow victory, defeating Mayor London Breed’s favored candidate.

As he celebrated the night of his inauguration, Boudin had no idea how prophetic his words would soon seem:

“2020 is going to be an amazing year. There’s going to be a roller-coaster ride.”

San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin gestures as he walks with his wife, Valerie Block, during his swearing-in ceremony in San Francisco on Jan. 8, 2020.

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

::

For a while, the roller coaster brought heady highs: The twin crises of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd made Boudin’s agenda both more urgent and politically feasible.

Keeping people out of jail — to provide space for social distance and reduce spread of the coronavirus — became an imperative amid a health emergency. The jail population shrank so quickly the city was able to close a structurally unsafe lockup.

The strength of the Black Lives Matter protests temporarily quieted Boudin’s most outspoken adversary, the police union, and fueled his agenda.

Prosecutors no longer asked for cash bail. They stopped seeking gang enhancements or “three strikes” charges, which dramatically increase the length of sentences. They refused to file charges for contraband seized during pretext stops, which overwhelmingly target Blacks and Latinos

Boudin filed the first homicide charges in the history of San Francisco against a police officer for actions while on duty, then filed charges against four more.

The plunge came with equally dizzying speed. On New Year’s Eve 2020, a man on parole sped through an intersection and hit and killed two women, police said. Multiple agencies could have made different decisions that would have averted the tragedy, but the spotlight was on the district attorney’s failure to press charges that might have kept Troy McAlister behind bars.

McAlister’s name became shorthand for a prosecutor who let dangerous criminals roam the streets. The recall movement gathered momentum.

“As car break-ins and burglaries reached a crisis level in San Francisco, Boudin’s refusal to hold serial offenders accountable is putting more of us at risk,” the recall committee said.

Boudin tried for months to counter the accusations and underlying fears with data: Homicides had increased from a record low in 2019, but at a slower rate than neighboring jurisdictions. Police data showed crime overall had dropped in 2020. He was prosecuting drug cases at higher rates than his predecessor, while police were solving crimes at historically low rates.

He now sees the efforts to focus on the data as a mistake.

“In a world where people have good reason to be really skeptical of what they’re told by the government, if you’re scared, the last thing you want to hear is somebody tell you that your fear is irrational,” he said in March.

Boudin had won election by being the outsider who criticized a failed system; now he owned the system. To redefine public safety, to demonstrate that communities can be safe locking up fewer people, to build a consensus for programs that might break cycles of recidivism, would take years.

“So what do you do? You still have an ethical obligation to implement the best policies with the most consistency and the longest-term impact that you can politically afford to do. That’s the balancing act,” he said.

Boudin gravitates toward sports he characterizes as “mind over matter,” in which “there is literally always a little bit better you can do. And it’s always within your control. Or it feels that way.” He ran his first marathon after college on a course he measured around his parents’ camp in Northern California.

“It was him against him,” Dohrn said. “It was perfect in a way.”

The recall too is Boudin against himself.

He is still the outsider, a political interloper in a tightknit city. In a job that’s often a political springboard — one of his predecessors is now vice president of the United States — he is an anomaly; his ambition, said Judith Resnik, his law school mentor, “is to change what the whole world understands the role of a prosecutor to be.”

He likens his current situation to another favorite sport, chess, which he learned as a child from his grandfather, the prominent civil rights attorney Leonard Boudin.

“To the best of your ability, you’re anticipating what’s coming down the road and how you respond to it so that you’ve thought it through, and you’re not just reacting in the moment,” he said.

“But you can’t always see what’s coming.”

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In the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, it was Cuomo’s last day in office, a time when outgoing governors typically grant commutations. Boudin continually refreshed the governor’s press page, hoping for news.

But the news did not come from the governor’s website. At about 2:30 pm in San Francisco, he received a text from his mother, Kathy Boudin, who had also served prison time in the same incident.

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“David was commuted!” she wrote. “Eligible for parole.”

Boudin excused himself from a Zoom meeting, yelled with joy, found his wife and held her in the hallway.

“We just couldn’t talk,” Boudin recalled in an interview with The Washington Post. “We couldn’t make words come out.”

In his last hours as New York governor, Cuomo commuted the sentences of Gilbert and four others who “demonstrated substantial evidence of rehabilitation and a commitment to their communities,” according to a news release from the governor’s office.

“These clemencies make clear the power of redemption, encourage those who have made mistakes to engage in meaningful rehabilitation, and show New Yorkers that we can work toward a better future,” Cuomo said in a statement.

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Gilbert will now be referred to the New York State Board of Parole, which will consider his release, according to the governor’s office. It added that Gilbert made contributions to AIDS education and prevention programs. He also worked as “a student tutor, law library clerk, paralegal assistant [and] a teacher’s aide,” the statement adds.

Boudin, who is right now facing a recall campaign, was elected as San Francisco’s top prosecutor in 2019 after running on a platform of decarcerating jails, moving away from a cash bail system, and holding police officers accountable for misconduct. He is among a class of so-called progressive prosecutors, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Kim Foxx in Chicago, who were elected in recent years after pledging to enact criminal justice reforms.

During his ascension to San Francisco district attorney — a position formerly occupied by Vice President Harris — Boudin invoked his father’s incarceration as a reason he assumed the role of prosecutor, and his relationship with his father has been intertwined in his political narrative.

“Growing up, I had to go through a metal detector and steel gates just to give my parents a hug,” Boudin said in a 2019 campaign video.

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Boudin, 41, was a baby when the robbery took place. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who were members of the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing militant group, were both convicted of felony murder for their role in the 1981 armed robbery of a Brink’s armored car that left two Nyack, NY, police officers and a security guard dead. Although they did not carry out the murders themselves, Gilbert and Boudin were in the getaway vehicle.

Kathy Boudin was released from prison in 2003 and went on to become a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work.

Chesa Boudin told The Post that he had been trying to have his father’s sentence commuted for years. He and his family applied when former governor David Paterson left office in 2010, and again in 2020 during the pandemic. They reapplied for clemency again this year.

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“We felt like the governor’s people were paying attention,” Boudin said. “But one never really knows with these things.”

While Boudin said he was grateful his father had finally been granted clemency, he acknowledged on Twitter that “his crime devastated many families.” News of the clemency decision invited criticism from some of those victims on Monday.

“It’s absurd,” Arthur Keenan Jr., a retired detective with the Nyack Police Department who was wounded in the shootout, told the New York Times.

Keenan added that Cuomo “is stabbing all of law enforcement in the back, and when I say all, I’m talking about federal, state, local — all across the whole country — because he’s a traitor.”

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Ed Day, the elected leader of Rockland County, where Nyack is located, said that Cuomo had “debased himself,” according to the Times.

“As if victimizing 11 women, including members of his own staff, was not despicable enough, his commutation of the 75-years-to-life sentence of David Gilbert is a further assault on the people of Rockland and New York State,” Day said in a statement, the Times reported. “Andrew Cuomo continues to focus on the well-being of murderers rather than the victims of these horrible offenses.”

Despite those criticisms, Boudin said the news felt “like a weight I’ve been carrying my whole had been lifted.”

He thought about the prospect of sharing “basic daily joy” with his father, and of being able to introduce him to his yet-to-be-born child.

“Not having to take my child through metal detectors and steel gates to meet their grandfather was just one of the most amazing gifts I could have imagined,” he said. “It also made me think about those other families and how nothing will ever make them whole again, and how they will continue to live with the pain and loss that was caused by my parents’ crime.”

The post San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was 3 when his dad went to jail. Cuomo simply granted his father clemency. appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.