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SAN FRANCISCO – Chesa Boudin entered the Lucky Pork Store, established in 1949, seeking help.
The district attorney has problems. On Tuesday, he faces a revocation election a little more than halfway through his first term, shaped by the pandemic and the feeling among the often fearful and always frustrated residents of this city that his approach to prosecution is too lax to to the times.
In fluent Spanish, Boudin made his release. “They’re attacking me,” he told Hipolito Barraza, the store’s manager.
“With millions, I heard,” Barraza replied.
“We have less than a week and we need your support,” Boudin said.
“And then we work together,” Barraza said with a smile.
This is Boudin’s career in office. He was elected in 2019 as a “progressive prosecutor”, a term given to a dozen district prosecutors across the country who have tried to reduce what they consider to be excessively punitive convictions and general incarceration rates, which have affected the people of color disproportionately. .
He The revocation campaign has revealed a city debating the nature of the crime, how to measure it their falls and spikes, and who to blame for perceptions of danger. Other primary contests across the state are asking similar questions, as California is once again trying to strike a balance between deterrence and fairness, a changing course that has shaped its policy for decades.
After pioneering the so-called “three-strike” laws in the 1990s that toughened sentences, state voters, facing drastically overcrowded prisons, agreed in 2014 to soften some sentences and reclassify some crimes as misdemeanors.
Like most major U.S. cities, San Francisco has seen an increase in homicides during the pandemic, although rates remain well below those of recent decades and other cities have experienced larger per capita jumps. In general, violent crime remains at some of the lowest levels in four decades.
Property crime, which deepened during the pandemic as workers staying at home left the city virtually empty, is gradually declining to pre-covid levels. Home burglaries are still higher than pre-pandemic levels and, terribly, often happen when residents are at home. The nature of these intrusions adds to the predominant feeling here that city law enforcement agencies have only loose control over the overall problem.
The state of the streets, including many of the major commercials, remains heartbreaking, an open-air scenario of human misery defined by homelessness, mental illness and drugs. In 2020, twice as many people died here from drug overdoses as from covid-19. All this has greatly altered the political environment.
“The issues that were relevant to voters when Boudin was elected – criminal justice reform, prison overcrowding, police conduct – are not the same issues that stand out to voters now,” said Jason McDaniel. associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. . “What’s more prominent now is this feeling that things aren’t going well, whether it’s with covid, economics, homelessness or other issues. That’s a change.”
The entry or exit verdict on Boudin has also sparked a new argument over the use of withdrawal, a proven method of civic democracy in this state that was first envisioned as a way to rid the government of corruption. and limiting influence. of special interest of big money. No need to mount one.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) easily defeated a retreat effort against him. Boudin’s contest is the second-only reminder effort in that city this year, the first to successfully eliminate three San Francisco School Board members.
“That says a lot more about the playbook that police unions and Republican workers are using these days than about my policies,” Boudin said in an interview between polling stations in the district of the mission. the city.
“There will be a reaction,” he said. “They can’t win the election, so they rely on the revocations and other measures to take power from those we have elected.”
Public drama is not new to the prosecutor. Boudin was born to David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who in the early 1980s were members of Weather Underground, a violent anti-imperialist group characterized by the FBI as a domestic terrorist organization.
When Boudin was just over a year old, his parents were involved in the 1981 theft of a Brink truck in a suburb about 35 miles north of New York City. The failed effort resulted in the death of the armed guard and two policemen.
Kathy Boudin pleaded guilty to murder and robbery. She was released from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2003 and died last month. David Gilbert, was convicted of murder and robbery. After more than forty years in prison, Gilbert was released from the Shawangunk Correctional Facility late last year.
Boudin was raised by Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who co-founded the Weather Underground in the 1960s.
Chesa Boudin, a former public defender in San Francisco, followed another liberal Attorney at Work: George Gascon, a former Los Angeles police officer who now works amid controversies similar to those of the District Attorney.
Like Boudin, 41, Gascon faces resistance inside his office, with many front-line prosecutors believing the new charge rules are too lenient. But Boudin’s situation is worse, according to recent polls.
Boudin has made the withdrawal part of the message, arguing it is a distraction to solve the city’s most pressing social problems.
“My main argument is not that this is unfair to me, but that it will do nothing to make us safer,” he said. “What is happening is undermining democracy and undermining public safety.”
Boudin’s opposition took shape about a year after his tenure, when a Republican-led rebel effort to overthrow him gave way to another Democratic-led leadership, representing 63 percent of the electorate. from the city. The main organization is called San Franciscans for Public Safety, which by the end of May had spent $ 3.8 million on the “Yes to H” campaign, as the withdrawal effort is officially known.
Other groups that have raised money for the withdrawal will increase total spending against Boudin to more than $ 4 million.
The money comes from venture capitalists, some of them Republicans, doctors and lawyers, and many real estate developers and associations. About 80 percent of its donors are from San Francisco.
Boudin can spend only half of that amount looking to keep his job, although McDaniel, a political science professor, said that given the care he has received in his career and the apparent gap in the polls. , “money will not determine the outcome. of this race.”
Leading revocation group leaders include Brooke Jenkins, a homicide prosecutor in Boudin’s office until last fall when she dropped a dispute over whether to allow a man convicted of murdering his mother sentence.
Jenkins stated that she should not be allowed to do so, worrying that it would lead to a release long before someone she believes was very dangerous. Boudin, he said, finally told him to allow the madness argument in the sentence.
Jenkins said much of the energy behind the withdrawal stems from the feeling that Boudin is not taking responsibility for the crime that residents experience every day., including a frightened and vulnerable Asian-American community that has long regarded this city as a sanctuary.
There have also been major incidents, such as a coordinated robbery ring that hit Union Square, rich in tourists late last year, that have dominated the crime debate.
One case involved 45-year-old Troy McAlister, who passed a red light on New Year’s Eve 2020 and killed two women crossing a street in downtown San Francisco. At the time, police said McAlister, who fled the scene, was armed and had alcohol and methamphetamine in the system.
Law enforcement records showed that McAlister was on parole at the time and that Boudin’s office had refused to file charges against him for several alleged crimes in previous months. Boudin said he had referred these cases to the parole board for consideration. But the killings helped galvanize the opposition to his tenure.
“It’s about the San Franciscans wanting a district attorney who is really dedicated to prioritizing public safety,” Jenkins said. dit. “The problem with people with Chesa is that he’s been deaf to their demands for responsibility. They think things have gone a little too far with the crime and they don’t feel like he’s setting the right tone.”
If you remember Boudin, the mayor of London Breed (D), with whom he shares a strained relationship, will nominate his replacement until next year’s election when he would have been at the polls. When asked if she is a candidate to replace Boudin, Jenkins replied: “I trust the mayor will make the right decision.”
Turnout for the retreat is expected to be very low, a mixture of withdrawal fatigue and the fact that top-tier races for the U.S. governor and Senate are slightly contested. Early voting patterns have shown that more conservative neighborhoods have participated more intensely so far, but Boudin won his first race with a large turnout on election day.
What Boudin is doing now, as much as time allows, is spending his days on the street. As I walked down Mission Street last week, Boudin greeted as a few people shouted his name in support. A Prius blew a horn in his favor. The smell of weeds, carried away by a strong wind from an open-air craft market, was joined by a few calls from sellers of “we’re with you.” This is a neighborhood that has to vote hard for Boudin if it wants to have a chance.
Outside La Coroneta Taqueria, Tommy Ak, a 49-year-old taxi driver, wanted to talk to Boudin. His car has broken down three times in the last two years, …