As I understand it, Boudin barely eked out a win to begin with. Philadelphia is about twice the size of San Francisco, which has outsized visibility in our political culture but is in fact about the size of Nashville. Philly overwhelmingly reelected its progressive prosecutor. There's something to be said for the idea that, ideology aside, you also just have to seem good at the actual job; the job is not simply a series of policy positions, but also a bunch of real management work. The rap on Boudin is that he did not seem good at the actual job.
So, no, I doubt it.
I don't know what you mean by "the far left" though. The actual far left doesn't re-examine its positions by design, just like the actual far-right. If you mean "the Democratic party", it was never as sold on prison abolition as Twitter would have had you believe.
There's still a lot of room --- and actual bipartisan support! --- for CJ reform in US politics.
> There's still a lot of room --- and actual bipartisan support! --- for CJ reform in US politics
To expand on this: there are legions of non-violent, opportunistic crimes that put young Americans in jail only to release them years later unskilled, difficult to hire and possibly disenfranchised. At the same time, hosts of violent crimes carry relatively short sentences with no attempts at rehabilitation. And all sorts of society-corroding, sociopathic white-collar crime goes unnoticed by a justice system overloaded by the first group.
Reducing penalties on the former, honing focus on the second and creating an enforcement mechanism for the latter finds bipartisan support (first two play on separate sides of the aisle for a bargain; the last has populist appeal in both camps).
What non-violent opportunistic crimes are putting young Americans in jail? Theft? Is there bipartisan support for reducing its penalties? Or do you mean some other one?
I can see bipartisan support for reducing penalties for victimless, non-oppotunistic crimes, like drug use.
You have a very rose colored view of the world. Some folks are presented with an opportunity to sell (or be an accessory to the sale) and the deal is too good to pass up because the alternative is starving.
Perhaps I do, and perhaps I don't. But I'd prefer we discuss the issue than my general view of the world.
Let's take your scenario: someone is on the brink of starvation, and an opportunity to sell drugs (and not starve) falls in their lap. They take it (without any prior plan). This is definitely opportunistic.
What happens if the above situation is repeated a second time? Do we consider that opportunistic as well?
How many times does someone have to take such an opportunity before we consider them selling drugs as being 'what they do' or part of their plan?
Unless the chance of being arrested is close to 100%, it's unlikely that someone's first arrest for selling drugs coincides with the first time they sold drugs. So is it really opportunistic?
Look, if the answer is starving or selling drugs, I know what most folks are going to do.
There might not be other opportunities available. Until we've eliminated the threat of homelessness and starvation for everyone living here (which we absolutely could do), there will always be people who had no other choice.
I would like statistics around how many drug dealers started selling because it was a choice between starvation and drug dealing. In my own anecdotal view, many people get involved in that lifestyle in their early 20s and do it because they enjoy the popularity, drugs, and tax free income. I'm sure there are some that have "no other choice" but I would prefer to see some actual honest figures.
Some data that suggests many get into it to feed their own addictions (which can be a "no other choice" scenario), meant more are collected by police as "dealers" even though they are just holding drugs for personal use. There's lots of research here, unsurprisingly.
Is there a broad call for this? Definitely. Will things ever be arranged thus? Probably never.
The teenager crimes--drugs & petty thievery--are cut & dry, no contracts, no fine print, yes & no answers. "Did you, or did you not, take the bicycle?" White collar crime--unless the perpetrator was extraordinarily careless--can consume orders-of-magnitude more legal time, & requires more specialized/knowledgeable judges & attorneys (who are obviously in short supply).
Most municipalities fund their district attorney's office begrudgingly. Say some madman of a DA decided to put JP Morgan in his sights. How well will he fare against them with his 2nd/3rd tier attorneys on a shoestring budget?
The legal system is our sublimation of "might makes right". Established white collar criminals have sufficient might.
> Philadelphia is about twice the size of San Francisco, which has outsized visibility in our political culture but is in fact about the size of Nashville.
Well yeah, SF's visibility comes because it's the original centre of what is now a much bigger area.
Philly is now setting murder records and has the second-worst per-capita murder rate among large cities. And the DA's office is seeing an unprecedented exodus of staff, with many of Krasner's hires among them. Oh, and congresswomen are being carjacked in broad daylight.
It seems like Krasner just lucked out on the timing of his reelection bid, as during the democratic primary the scope of the problem was not yet apparent. I bet Philly wishes they had a California-like recall mechanism right about now.
The Bay Area, from what I can tell, has a lot of faux-left people actually running the show. People who are actually left and not centrist have been pushing for some sort of rent/landlord reform for decades, and the landlords have enough money to continue resisting and probably will do so for quite some time.
I'm glad I don't live there, tbh, SF sounds like a boring version of the nightmare futures written about in dystopian fiction.
When you're writing things like "you're part of the problem", you've departed from the norms of this place. There's a place for that kind of advocacy, but it's not HN; we're here for curious conversation. Even some people ordinarily inclined to agree with you will recoil from this kind of rhetoric here.
I mean, we do have a far-left but it's not particularly doing stuff right now. The last time it was active they were blowing up buildings across the US or trying to bomb the US capitol [1] [2]. We're 30-40 years removed from that, and the far-right is more active right now. They definitely do exist and I'd say groups that are analogous to them certainly exist right now.
Consciously choosing to not prosecute serial felons doesn't accomplish any of those goals. He broke the social contract humans have with each other that makes society function. It's recall worthy (the voters agree).
Political spectrums are always relative, and the spectrum of one country does not align well with the spectrum of another.
So while the policies you mention (social justice etc) might be main stream in one country, they can be far left in another.
Left-wing politics in the US would be centrist in much of Europe and positively right wing in say Cuba or Venezuela.
But you are not alone in your false equivalence - take for example the way many Cuban exiles in florida equate the democratic party with the communist Cuban regime (both described as left wing in their native countries.)
So comparing policies and parties from two different countries, and trying to use the same "scale" (left and right) is prone to error.
An error well understood, and exploited, by politicians everywhere.
Have you tried putting weed in your carry-on on any foreign airline? The drug laws in many America cities and states are "far left" relative to the rest of the world. Coincidentally, lax drug laws have caused many issues in SF that led to Chesa Boudin's recall
When the school board members got recalled they blamed it on Asians Uncle Tom-ing to white supremacists. So, no, I don't think they'll re-examine anything. I'd love to be wrong though.
The fact that you referred to him as she just shows you have no idea who you are talking about. Chesa was literally raised by communist terrorists. I don't use either of those words lightly.
I’m curious how many people would agree with this comment. If Chesa and his policies are not considered far left, who/what is? It seems that his polices were on the extreme end of the progressive spectrum, and that both his supporters and critics would agree with that statement.
I can't find anything the guy has said about the benefits of communisim, or worker revolts, I'm certainly open to change my mind if I've just missed his Leninist screed somewhere. Please link.
Otherwise, no, hes not far left, some people around here just think anyone left of Mussolini is a socialistcommunist and can't tell the words apart, and that hurts everyone when it isn't called out, as it drags discourse further down.
Politically I think the "don't enforce the law" camp includes the median democratic voter, especially in SF.
People keep getting shot and burgled in my neighborhood which used to be quite safe, the only thing keeping me from voting Republican until Democrats learn to stop being stupid is that the Republicans are so opportunistic and unprincipled that they'll gladly cheer while the republic is overthrown.
I dunno man, seems like he's a strong law and order DA. The only problem is he's applying the laws to people who normally get to do whatever they want, so yeah a well funded recall campaign.
Oh yeah, and those people who normally get to break the law with impunity are the cops.
I agree with you, but this is more a matter of linguistic convenience than lack of education or perspective imo. The people who call chesa far left in the USA know perfectly well what they mean, other people have no trouble understanding it either.
Chesa being thrown out on his ear just means a slightly more moderate liberal will be installed in his place. Your belief that this represents a swing to the republican party is outlandish and deranged. This is San Francisco we're talking about.
Coincidentally, crime rates in Alameda County are anecdotally only getting worse. I've never seen it as bad as it is now, in terms of blatant property theft, armed robberies, and mentally deranged homeless.
> Chesa represents what I believe will be a self-inflicted shift to the Republican Party by many moderate and formerly left wing voters.
It won't change much locally beyond the Democrats that win being one notch closer to moderate. Nationally, it feeds a narrative Republicans will push about how this is what the most progressive policies in the country will get you, then re-air the video of people shooting up in the Civic Center BART station.
Looks like having a DA raised by Weather Underground was too much, even for San Francisco:
"Boudin fell in love with David Gilbert in the 1970s and gave birth to their son Chesa in 1980. When her son was 14 months old, she was arrested and subsequently incarcerated for murder and bank robbery. Her son was raised by former Weatherman leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn."
It is disingenuous to say Weather Underground had anything to do with this recall. San Francisco voters knew of his parents' background back in 2019, and still gave him a chance. Ultimately he was kicked out due to his performance (or lack thereof).
If I were raised by people who had their justifications for "murder and bank robbery," I would also find it difficult to get my hackles up over shoplifters at the Walgreens. Apparently, the voters of SF had a lower tolerance for such things.
It is not "disingenuous" to attribute his recall to WU. It is common sense.
You are talking politics--the domain of public policy--where people often disagree on the means, while being mostly in agreement on the ends. I am talking value systems--regarding lawlessness as a tool rather than a dysfunction. Regardless of one's politics, I suspect most people are offended by the idea of using lawlessness in this way--as evidenced by his brief tenure.
Basketball for example: Say the fans see a player traveling. The referee also sees it, but does nothing. How will the fans react? Value systems. Rules are there to be enforced. People get pissed off when the rules aren't enforced, or enforced inconsistently.
I think it goes without saying that apples occasionally fall far from the tree... occasionally.
If we are talking about radicalism (far right or far left), lawlessness, and value systems in general, get intertwined with politics.
Radicals will often see violence and law breaking as a means to an end.
I'm not saying this is the case, I don't know much about Boudin. Just mentioning that sometimes being brought up as a child regarding lawlessness as acceptable can sometimes result in the opposite views as an adult. It's not cut and dry.
Political views often shift over the course of a lifetime. Those that rebel with opposite views from their parents in their 20s often shift further center in their middle age.
>Crime overall has fallen since Mr. Boudin took office in January 2020
lol, that's pretty easy to do when you just stop prosecuting people. Same way graduation rates increase if you just stop failing people. Who cares about the actual purpose of institutions or whether goals are being achieved, just make sure the numbers are what we want
DA parents were domestic terrorists jailed or murder (google it)
So he was raised with parents in jail and became a defendant attorney. He took power he took revenge on the system and people by stopping prosecuting people in the name of social justice, and letting crime run rampant.
Straight out of a Batman movie, just in real life there is no Batman to save SF.
People had enough and are revolting against this lying lunatic. Good riddance.
Interesting. However your explanation does not look exactly impartial, what is the story from their side of things?
It also looks stupid and petty to "take revenge" from the system when the system can expel you before you actually do any significant damage. Wouldn't be more logical to rise to the top and bring it down from there by playing the system?
That crime is going down (but see grand-grand-grand parent's point about less prosecutions).
That these policies actually help the homeless or reduces crime(initial evidence does not look good).
That voters voting for recall are brain-washed by misinformation from Republicans (?!. Ah yes the classic misinformation bogeyman misleading the poor gullible voters).
Judging from the chart, looks like about a 20% drop in felony prosecutions in 2020/2021 compared to a typical previous year, plus a larger drop in the number of misdemeanor prosecutions. (Which, note, are separate statistics from the number of reported crimes.)
The once-in-a-century pandemic also had significant effects here, both on the DA office and courts, and on the level/types of crime in the city, making it hard to get a clear causal story about the relation between prosecution decisions vs. crime rates.
What is the “actual purpose” of the DA’s office in your view: to prosecute as many cases as possible, irrespective of circumstances?
Yes. In our adversarial justice system, we rely on the DA to eagerly prosecute, the defense attorney or public defender to eagerly defend, the judge or jury to render the verdict, and the legislature to pass laws. Trying to compensate for dysfunction in one system by introducing dysfunction in another only makes the issues worse.
Boudin was a public defender, and a pretty good one at that. He carried the public defender mindset into the DA's office, and it didn't work well.
(You edited your comment to add "irrespective of circumstances", which changes the meaning. There will always be gray areas where we rely on the judge or the DA to exercise discretion, but in a healthy system the scope of those areas can't amount to refusing to enforce entire statutes or reinterpreting statutes by executive policy.)
We expect eager prosecution in the courtroom, but DAs should exercise discretion about when to bring charges at all. I have not followed this story close enough to have an opinion about its application in San Francisco, but nationally I feel pretty confident we should be dialing the knob down not up.
I live in SF but don’t fully buy into the idea that any rise or fall in overall crime is on him.
He entered office right before Covid hit and there’s a dozen different factors that could have played a role here. Regardless it’s clear property crime is bad and downtown is still a ghost town with every other store deserted and companies don’t want to host conferences here anymore.
I don’t think anyone believes recalling him with magically fix any of these issues. To me I see it as more symbolic and a sort of public venting among voters of being fed up with quality of life issues that rarely seem to be top of mind of politicians anymore, and recalling a progressive DA sends a clear message.
I don't like what I've heard about Boudin at all, but can someone explain how the 40% who supported Boudin might feel about this? What is their motivation? Is it as simple as not worrying too much about crime and believing Boudin's approach is justified?
It’s a gross abuse of the recall process. Recalls should be reserved for flagrant abuses of power, egregious ethical lapses, or profound incompetence.
If voters are just unhappy with an elected official, they should follow the normal election process. The SF DA is up for a routine election in November of 2023.
Turning recalls into a routine part of politics, where billionaire-backed activists can try to dump a bunch of money into advertising and redo every election they didn’t like the outcome of, in low-turnout primaries or special elections, ends up costing the city a fortune and distorting the ordinary political process.
Presumably the people who voted for the recall believe he's guilty of all three of those. Certainly, a prosecutor who refuses to prosecute criminals could be described as engaging in profound incompetence. It's hard to get worse at doing your job than outright refusing to do it.
I didn't really know anything about him beyond all the media the last year calling him the "Progressive DA in San Francisco" ... and then I read his wikipedia page and WEW.
I'm genuinely gobsmacked that a) people are surprised he behaved the way he did as DA and b) that some actually thought it was a good idea to elect a communist as chief law enforcement officer. Maybe don't do that? In any case, this is a rare but good story about democracy's fail safe mechanisms kicking in.
Speaking in general terms, its likely due to low voter primary turnout. The change side of the party (the progressive side) is much more organized since they are attempting to challenge the status quo and therefore have much more recently put in place infrastructure to get out the vote (perhaps peaking in response to the tech influx/peak BLM/Trump) to get Chesa in.
The incumbents are generally properly larger but largely apathetic/too busy trying to afford SF rent - unless things go too far in the wrong direction.
I think the recent attempts by the newly installed progressives at renaming schools (while the schools were closed for covid), changing the admissions to the magnet school to be non-test based, etc. - led to some infrastructure being built among the moderate, middle class family democratic voting base - particularly on the western side (Richmond/Sunset) which is mostly Asian.
The fact that the media reported a lot of Anti-Asian crime in SF that Chesa didn't seem to do much about - probably fit well with this newly organized group.
I’m saddened that - as a society - we can’t seem to get away from the idea that the answer to crime is to “be tough on crime.”
This recall seems to be an expression of our basic urge to punish, rather than any real desire to address the problems that lie at the root of most crime.
We’ve tried the “tough on crime” approach for so many years, and all it’s really done is inflate the prison population (with mostly non-white people, at that).
Hopefully someday we can break the cycle and make real changes that will (in time) reduce crime by addressing the sources of the problem in the first place.
I suppose it's better to say "roots," plural. Nobody knows what lies at the roots of crime for _certain_, but there has been a lot of research into the topic. Several things seem to be strongly correlated with increased risk for criminal behavior, but we can't draw direct causality relationships quite yet. The Wikipedia article on it is informative, and viewpoint-neutral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_correlations_of_cr...
One of the more interesting possible roots of criminal behavior is lead exposure as a child. It's not entirely clear, of course (socioeconomic status is a confounding factor that is hard to eliminate), but there seems to at least be some strong correlation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
My point isn't that we should be redirecting more resources to lead removal than to recalling a prosecutor (even though I _do_ think lead removal is a wise use of resources). My point is that deterrence and punishment is "cleaning up after the fact," rather than trying to address problems at their source.
The question "what should society do with criminals" implies a belief that criminality _must_ exist in a society. Perhaps to some degree, it is true. But it seems as though redirecting our efforts to prevent criminality in the first place by addressing the underlying root causes would ultimately be a far better use of our resources, and far more effective.
Yes, but what should society do with the criminals we already have? Even the most forgiving people can only stomach so much theft, vandalism, rape, murder, etc, before they snap.
There is actually a very real concept that known penalties deters crime. If you stop any significant punishment, criminals are aware, emboldened, and crime increases. Milwaukee is recently reeling in thousands of reckless car thefts, and this is what the perps say themselves:
"I know people who have got 200 car thefts, 300 car thefts."
Interviewer: "Have you thought about how you would do that time?"
"Shit, you only get 3 weeks. It's a misdemeanor!"
Interviewer: "You only do 3 weeks for stealing a car?"
100 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadSo, no, I doubt it.
I don't know what you mean by "the far left" though. The actual far left doesn't re-examine its positions by design, just like the actual far-right. If you mean "the Democratic party", it was never as sold on prison abolition as Twitter would have had you believe.
There's still a lot of room --- and actual bipartisan support! --- for CJ reform in US politics.
To expand on this: there are legions of non-violent, opportunistic crimes that put young Americans in jail only to release them years later unskilled, difficult to hire and possibly disenfranchised. At the same time, hosts of violent crimes carry relatively short sentences with no attempts at rehabilitation. And all sorts of society-corroding, sociopathic white-collar crime goes unnoticed by a justice system overloaded by the first group.
Reducing penalties on the former, honing focus on the second and creating an enforcement mechanism for the latter finds bipartisan support (first two play on separate sides of the aisle for a bargain; the last has populist appeal in both camps).
I can see bipartisan support for reducing penalties for victimless, non-oppotunistic crimes, like drug use.
Low level, non-violent drug offenses are the low-hanging fruit [1].
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/101...
How are these 'opportunistic'? All of them require planning.
Perhaps I do, and perhaps I don't. But I'd prefer we discuss the issue than my general view of the world.
Let's take your scenario: someone is on the brink of starvation, and an opportunity to sell drugs (and not starve) falls in their lap. They take it (without any prior plan). This is definitely opportunistic.
What happens if the above situation is repeated a second time? Do we consider that opportunistic as well?
How many times does someone have to take such an opportunity before we consider them selling drugs as being 'what they do' or part of their plan?
Unless the chance of being arrested is close to 100%, it's unlikely that someone's first arrest for selling drugs coincides with the first time they sold drugs. So is it really opportunistic?
There might not be other opportunities available. Until we've eliminated the threat of homelessness and starvation for everyone living here (which we absolutely could do), there will always be people who had no other choice.
https://www.drugsandalcohol.ie/3914/1/2875-Understandingdrug...
Some data that suggests many get into it to feed their own addictions (which can be a "no other choice" scenario), meant more are collected by police as "dealers" even though they are just holding drugs for personal use. There's lots of research here, unsurprisingly.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
The teenager crimes--drugs & petty thievery--are cut & dry, no contracts, no fine print, yes & no answers. "Did you, or did you not, take the bicycle?" White collar crime--unless the perpetrator was extraordinarily careless--can consume orders-of-magnitude more legal time, & requires more specialized/knowledgeable judges & attorneys (who are obviously in short supply).
Most municipalities fund their district attorney's office begrudgingly. Say some madman of a DA decided to put JP Morgan in his sights. How well will he fare against them with his 2nd/3rd tier attorneys on a shoestring budget?
The legal system is our sublimation of "might makes right". Established white collar criminals have sufficient might.
Well yeah, SF's visibility comes because it's the original centre of what is now a much bigger area.
It seems like Krasner just lucked out on the timing of his reelection bid, as during the democratic primary the scope of the problem was not yet apparent. I bet Philly wishes they had a California-like recall mechanism right about now.
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/12/23/exodus-261-philadelphi...
SF and the Bay Area have been preventing housing creation for decades: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/, to the point that average SF rent is $3700/month: https://bungalow.com/articles/what-is-the-real-cost-of-livin.... The Bay Area is more politically left than anywhere else in the U.S.
I'm glad I don't live there, tbh, SF sounds like a boring version of the nightmare futures written about in dystopian fiction.
1: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1980s-far-left-female... 2: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/remembering-left-w...
So while the policies you mention (social justice etc) might be main stream in one country, they can be far left in another.
Left-wing politics in the US would be centrist in much of Europe and positively right wing in say Cuba or Venezuela.
But you are not alone in your false equivalence - take for example the way many Cuban exiles in florida equate the democratic party with the communist Cuban regime (both described as left wing in their native countries.)
So comparing policies and parties from two different countries, and trying to use the same "scale" (left and right) is prone to error.
An error well understood, and exploited, by politicians everywhere.
We do have a drug epidemic happening but the answer certainly isn't locking people up.
you're right. There is no far left.
Otherwise, no, hes not far left, some people around here just think anyone left of Mussolini is a socialistcommunist and can't tell the words apart, and that hurts everyone when it isn't called out, as it drags discourse further down.
People keep getting shot and burgled in my neighborhood which used to be quite safe, the only thing keeping me from voting Republican until Democrats learn to stop being stupid is that the Republicans are so opportunistic and unprincipled that they'll gladly cheer while the republic is overthrown.
Oh yeah, and those people who normally get to break the law with impunity are the cops.
It won't change much locally beyond the Democrats that win being one notch closer to moderate. Nationally, it feeds a narrative Republicans will push about how this is what the most progressive policies in the country will get you, then re-air the video of people shooting up in the Civic Center BART station.
"Boudin fell in love with David Gilbert in the 1970s and gave birth to their son Chesa in 1980. When her son was 14 months old, she was arrested and subsequently incarcerated for murder and bank robbery. Her son was raised by former Weatherman leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn."
It is not "disingenuous" to attribute his recall to WU. It is common sense.
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/shoplifters-walking-into...
A (ethical) social experiment can be made by looking at siblings later in life (e.g. the Hitchens brothers).
Basketball for example: Say the fans see a player traveling. The referee also sees it, but does nothing. How will the fans react? Value systems. Rules are there to be enforced. People get pissed off when the rules aren't enforced, or enforced inconsistently.
I think it goes without saying that apples occasionally fall far from the tree... occasionally.
Radicals will often see violence and law breaking as a means to an end.
I'm not saying this is the case, I don't know much about Boudin. Just mentioning that sometimes being brought up as a child regarding lawlessness as acceptable can sometimes result in the opposite views as an adult. It's not cut and dry.
lol, that's pretty easy to do when you just stop prosecuting people. Same way graduation rates increase if you just stop failing people. Who cares about the actual purpose of institutions or whether goals are being achieved, just make sure the numbers are what we want
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1533544746173571079
Or the way COVID cases drop when you stop testing!
Straight out of a Batman movie, just in real life there is no Batman to save SF.
People had enough and are revolting against this lying lunatic. Good riddance.
It also looks stupid and petty to "take revenge" from the system when the system can expel you before you actually do any significant damage. Wouldn't be more logical to rise to the top and bring it down from there by playing the system?
That crime is going down (but see grand-grand-grand parent's point about less prosecutions).
That these policies actually help the homeless or reduces crime(initial evidence does not look good).
That voters voting for recall are brain-washed by misinformation from Republicans (?!. Ah yes the classic misinformation bogeyman misleading the poor gullible voters).
The once-in-a-century pandemic also had significant effects here, both on the DA office and courts, and on the level/types of crime in the city, making it hard to get a clear causal story about the relation between prosecution decisions vs. crime rates.
What is the “actual purpose” of the DA’s office in your view: to prosecute as many cases as possible, irrespective of circumstances?
Boudin was a public defender, and a pretty good one at that. He carried the public defender mindset into the DA's office, and it didn't work well.
(You edited your comment to add "irrespective of circumstances", which changes the meaning. There will always be gray areas where we rely on the judge or the DA to exercise discretion, but in a healthy system the scope of those areas can't amount to refusing to enforce entire statutes or reinterpreting statutes by executive policy.)
He entered office right before Covid hit and there’s a dozen different factors that could have played a role here. Regardless it’s clear property crime is bad and downtown is still a ghost town with every other store deserted and companies don’t want to host conferences here anymore.
I don’t think anyone believes recalling him with magically fix any of these issues. To me I see it as more symbolic and a sort of public venting among voters of being fed up with quality of life issues that rarely seem to be top of mind of politicians anymore, and recalling a progressive DA sends a clear message.
If voters are just unhappy with an elected official, they should follow the normal election process. The SF DA is up for a routine election in November of 2023.
Turning recalls into a routine part of politics, where billionaire-backed activists can try to dump a bunch of money into advertising and redo every election they didn’t like the outcome of, in low-turnout primaries or special elections, ends up costing the city a fortune and distorting the ordinary political process.
I'm genuinely gobsmacked that a) people are surprised he behaved the way he did as DA and b) that some actually thought it was a good idea to elect a communist as chief law enforcement officer. Maybe don't do that? In any case, this is a rare but good story about democracy's fail safe mechanisms kicking in.
Blame the "tough on crime" crowd for that. They thought he'd be putting everyone in gulags, like any proper communist would.
The incumbents are generally properly larger but largely apathetic/too busy trying to afford SF rent - unless things go too far in the wrong direction.
I think the recent attempts by the newly installed progressives at renaming schools (while the schools were closed for covid), changing the admissions to the magnet school to be non-test based, etc. - led to some infrastructure being built among the moderate, middle class family democratic voting base - particularly on the western side (Richmond/Sunset) which is mostly Asian.
The fact that the media reported a lot of Anti-Asian crime in SF that Chesa didn't seem to do much about - probably fit well with this newly organized group.
This recall seems to be an expression of our basic urge to punish, rather than any real desire to address the problems that lie at the root of most crime.
We’ve tried the “tough on crime” approach for so many years, and all it’s really done is inflate the prison population (with mostly non-white people, at that).
Hopefully someday we can break the cycle and make real changes that will (in time) reduce crime by addressing the sources of the problem in the first place.
One of the more interesting possible roots of criminal behavior is lead exposure as a child. It's not entirely clear, of course (socioeconomic status is a confounding factor that is hard to eliminate), but there seems to at least be some strong correlation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
My point isn't that we should be redirecting more resources to lead removal than to recalling a prosecutor (even though I _do_ think lead removal is a wise use of resources). My point is that deterrence and punishment is "cleaning up after the fact," rather than trying to address problems at their source.
The question "what should society do with criminals" implies a belief that criminality _must_ exist in a society. Perhaps to some degree, it is true. But it seems as though redirecting our efforts to prevent criminality in the first place by addressing the underlying root causes would ultimately be a far better use of our resources, and far more effective.
"I know people who have got 200 car thefts, 300 car thefts."
Interviewer: "Have you thought about how you would do that time?"
"Shit, you only get 3 weeks. It's a misdemeanor!"
Interviewer: "You only do 3 weeks for stealing a car?"
"Hell ya, it's a misdemeanor."
https://youtu.be/fbTrLyqL_nw?t=429