[ A billionaire-funded recall campaign pinned San Francisco’s
myriad problems on progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin. That
recall succeeded on Tuesday, but the city’s problems aren’t going
anywhere as long as inequality remains meaningfully unaddressed.]
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SAN FRANCISCO ELITES SCAPEGOATED CHESA BOUDIN FOR THE CITY’S
PROBLEMS. IT WORKED.  
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Abe Asher
June 8, 2022
Jacobin
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_ A billionaire-funded recall campaign pinned San Francisco’s
myriad problems on progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin. That
recall succeeded on Tuesday, but the city’s problems aren’t going
anywhere as long as inequality remains meaningfully unaddressed. _

San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin looks on during an
election-night event on June 7, 2022, in San Francisco, California,
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

 

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly opted to recall their progressive
district attorney, Chesa Boudin, on Tuesday night, ejecting the
reformer from office not three years after he was elected promising
“radical change to how we envision justice.”

There was little suspense. Boudin trailed in numerous polls of the
recall, with several surveys in the weeks leading up to the election
showing the recall succeeding by double digits — a reflection of
widespread frustration with life in a city that, like so many others,
is facing acute, overlapping crises in housing, affordability, and
certain types of crime.

San Francisco’s troubles are not, despite what the recall
campaign broadcast
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the city, Boudin’s fault. There is zero evidence to suggest that his
relatively decarceral approach in the district attorney’s office
caused a spike in crime; in fact, rates of violent crime
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the city dropped between 2019 and 2021, and San Francisco’s murder
rate remains low compared to other major cities.

Boudin was unquestionably an activist district attorney — he ended
his office’s use of cash bail, restricted its use of sentencing
enhancements, and established an Innocence Commission to review
possible wrongful convictions
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but it’s not at all clear that voters were specifically rejecting
his policy choices. Throughout the recall campaign, voters continued
to tell pollsters that they support Boudin’s agenda. A _San
Francisco Examiner_ poll
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in late May found that while 62 percent of voters disapproved of the
district attorney himself, sizable majorities supported ending cash
bail, sending people convicted of low-level crimes to diversion
programs instead of jail, and expanding mental health treatments. A
plurality supported stopping misdemeanor prosecutions altogether.

Californians, as Gil Duran noted in a piece
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the _Examiner_ poll, are as aware as anyone that mass incarceration
has done nothing to keep communities safe. Despite the ferocious
backlash against 2020’s Black Lives Matter uprising and the
Democratic Party leadership’s wholesale embrace of police in its
aftermath, tough-on-crime politicians did not sweep Tuesday night’s
primary in other
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of the state.

But Boudin’s recall also demonstrated clearly the extent to which
the voting population of San Francisco — California was on track for
a historically low
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turnout on Tuesday — is struggling with the realities of life in a
city where staggering levels of inequality have fractured communities
and made life more precarious for all but the ultrawealthy.

San Francisco does not have high levels of violent crime. What the
city has experienced intermittently since the onset of the pandemic
are elevated levels of money-motivated crimes like burglaries and
carjackings in its wealthiest neighborhoods — places like Pacific
Heights, the Marina, and Haight-Ashbury, where the median income is
well over $150,000. The _San Francisco Chronicle_ reported
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February that in the city’s ten wealthiest neighborhoods, the rate
of money-motivated crime increased by 8 percent between 2020 and 2021
even as it fell in less affluent neighborhoods.

Again, there is no reason to believe that this is Boudin’s fault.
San Francisco’s historically racist
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force solves fewer than 9 percent of reported offenses, meaning more
than nine out of ten crimes committed in the city never even reach the
district attorney’s purview. A study
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last year found that there is no correlation whatsoever between the
crime rate and the policies of the district attorney, and
tough-on-crime prosecutors like failed state attorney general
candidate Anne Marie Schubert have had no more success
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crime rates in their jurisdictions.

But the spike in money-motivated crime in San Francisco’s wealthiest
neighborhoods is revealing. It makes it easier to understand how the
narrative of a city in the throes of a terrifying crime wave took hold
despite the relatively low rate of violent crime citywide, and it
hints strongly at the broader problems Boudin was scapegoated for.

San Francisco’s crime patterns are in line with what you might
expect to see when you have rampant economic inequality. A study
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in Oxford’s _European Journal of Public Health_ that surveyed
thirty-three different countries found that “societies with large
income differences and low levels of trust may lack the social
capacity to create safe communities.” Similar studies have also
linked inequality [[link removed]] to crime,
and San Francisco, as newly elected state assemblyman Matt Haney said
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years ago, has “some of the most extreme inequality anywhere in the
world.”

It also has plenty of people who were eager to demagogue perceptions
about crime for their own gain. Though the recall had the support of a
small number of prominent Democrats and a much larger share of
Democratic voters, including Asian Americans, it was primarily funded
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exorbitant sums of money from hedge fund manager and Republican
megadonor William Oberndorf and a roster of Silicon Valley titans and
venture capitalists who were politically opposed to Boudin from the
beginning and started organizing to recall him before he’d been in
office even a year. A number of those actors were also directly
threatened by Boudin’s focus on prosecuting corporate malfeasance.

Boudin may have made a handful of mistakes in office, but his greatest
sin, if anything, was winning election in the wrong year — taking
office just months before the pandemic upended his city’s economy
and the backlash against racial justice reforms won in the summer of
2020 began threatening the tenures of progressive prosecutors across
the country.

If people in San Francisco and other major cities feel unsafe,
it’s not because of prosecutors who aren’t interested in packing
jails, but because the country is riven by inequality and inequality
breeds social dysfunction that affects both poor and wealthy
neighborhoods alike. It is completely understandable that San
Franciscans are frustrated with the state of their city and anxious
about the lack of security that has over the last several years
increasingly permeated daily life for even relatively privileged
Americans. It is unsurprising that much of the city and region’s
elite set Boudin up to take the fall.

Removing Boudin won’t change the material conditions that set the
stage for Tuesday night’s result. Boudin’s replacement will be
chosen by the city’s centrist mayor London Breed, whose last
handpicked candidate lost to Boudin in 2019. Whoever Breed appoints
will be dealing with the same macro problems that Boudin faced but
will be much less likely to pursue the progressive agenda that San
Francisco steadfastly claims it wants.

As Boudin told his supporters at his election night party, he is part
of a national movement “that recognizes we can never incarcerate our
way out of poverty.” As long as San Francisco is so unequal, that
inequality will continue to be a fact of daily life. Addressing its
root causes — not cutting short the career of one district attorney
— remains the only way to change that.

_Abe Asher is a journalist whose reporting on politics, social
movements, and the climate has been published in the Nation, VICE
News, the Portland Mercury, and other outlets._

* Chesa Boudin
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* recall
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* criminal justice reform
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* Money in Politics
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