A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, JUNE 7 , 2022
In pandemic times, crimes
against Asian American resi-
dents here have risen sharply and
many feel a frightening unpre-
dictability in a city they have
known and loved for generations.
Boudin is suffering perhaps most
among these voters, who for
differing reasons helped propel
the school board recalls.
“They spit at me — they spit at
me on elevators, on the streets,”
said Henry Wong, 74, who once
worked for the late comedian
Robin Williams and calls Boudin
“the worst district attorney the
city has ever had.”
“These are crimes,” said Wong,
a lifelong San Franciscan who
has already voted for the recall.
“And he doesn’t care. It’s just so
easy to break the law.”
But there are also voters who
want Boudin to get more of a
chance, and do not believe he has
during the dark years of the
pandemic. Walking his two Shar-
Pei dogs on the lawn in front of
City Hall, Terence Greiner, home-
less until two years ago, said he
thinks “anyone elected into office
should be allowed to finish their
term.”
“Otherwise why elect them in
the first place?” said Greiner, who
is 53 and currently on disability.
“And it seems to me there was
just as much crime before he took
office as there is now.”
Peter Milewicz, 74, walks with
a cane, as he did on this recent
afternoon along Mission Street.
He shook Boudin’s hand.
“I’m pulling for you,” said Mile-
wicz, who worked with young
psychiatric patients before retir-
ing. “And I want this garbage to
go away.”
He has lived in the city for 30
years and has already cast his
vote against the recall.
“I have hope he can survive
this, but I wouldn’t bet the farm,”
Milewicz said. “It takes a lot more
than a couple years to undo
something as unfair as our jus-
tice system.”three times in the past two years,
his wife’s car on another more
recent occasion.
“The problem with car break-
ins in San Francisco has existed
for many, many years,” Boudin
said. “We have seen them fall, but
not fast enough.”
The two shook hands. Asked if
he planned to support Boudin,
Ak, a three-decade San Francisco
resident, said he did. “He can’t do
everything himself,” Ak said.
It is easy to find merchants
who have experienced crime in
recent years. Nahil Hanhan, 64,
owns Oxford Street Designer
Menswear on Market Street.
Three times thieves have drilled
through her steel door, taking
about $10,000 in merchandise in
all.
“They are getting away with it,”
said Hanhan, who has already
cast her mail-in vote for the
recall. “That’s the problem. When
they get away with it they just
come back.”eral alleged crimes in the previ-
ous months. Boudin said he had
referred those cases to the parole
board for consideration. But the
killings helped galvanize opposi-
tion to his tenure.
“This is about San Franciscans
wanting a district attorney who’s
actually dedicated to prioritizing
public safety,” Jenkins said. “Peo-
ple’s issue with Chesa is that he
has been tone deaf to their pleas
for accountability. They think
things have gone a bit too far
with crime and they don’t feel as
though he is setting the right
tone.”
If Boudin is recalled, Mayor
London Breed (D), with whom he
shares a strained relationship,
will appoint his replacement un-
til next year’s election when he
would have been on the ballot.
Asked if she is a contender to
replace Boudin, Jenkins replied:
“I trust the mayor to make the
right choice.”
The turnout for the recall is
projected to be very low, a mix of
recall fatigue and the fact that
the top-of-the-ticket races for
governor and U.S. Senate are
lightly contested. Early voting
patterns have shown that more
conservative neighborhoods
have participated more heavily
so far, but Boudin won his first
race with a heavy election-day
turnout.
What Boudin is doing now, as
much as time allows, is spending
his days on the streets. As he
walked along Mission Street last
week, Boudin waved as a few
people shouted his name in sup-
port. A Prius honked a horn in his
favor. The scent of weed, carried
on a brisk wind from an open-air
crafts market, joined a few “we’re
with you” calls from vendors.
This is a neighborhood that must
vote heavily for Boudin if he is to
have a chance.
Outside La Coroneta Taqueria,
Tommy Ak, a 49-year-old taxi
driver, wanted a word with Boud-
in. His car has been broken intoFrancisco.
Boudin may be able to spend
only half that amount in seeking
to keep his job, although McDan-
iel, the political science profes-
sor, noted that given the atten-
tion the race has received and the
apparent gap in the polls “money
is not going to determine the
outcome of this race.”
Among the leaders of the pri-
mary recall group is Brooke Jen-
kins, a homicide prosecutor in
Boudin’s office until last fall
when she left over a dispute
involving whether to allow a man
convicted of murdering his
mother to argue insanity during
sentencing.
Jenkins contended that he
should not be allowed to do so,
worrying it would lead to a far
earlier release for someone she
believes was very dangerous.
Boudin, she said, eventually told
her to allow the insanity argu-
ment in sentencing.
Jenkins said much of the en-
ergy behind the recall derives
from a sense that Boudin does
not hold himself accountable for
the crime experienced every day
by residents , including a fright-
ened and vulnerable Asian Amer-
ican community that has long
viewed this city as a sanctuary.
There have also been major
incidents — such as a coordinat-
ed smash-and-grab theft ring
that struck tourist-rich Union
Square late last year — that have
dominated the debate over
crime.
One case involved Troy McAl-
ister, then 45, who on New Year’s
Eve of 2020 ran a red light and
killed two women crossing a
street in downtown San Francis-
co. Police at the time said McAlis-
ter, who fled the scene, was
armed and had alcohol and
methamphetamine in his system.
Law enforcement records
showed that McAlister was on
parole at the time, and that
Boudin’s office had declined to
file charges against him for sev-leased from the Shawangunk
Correctional Facility late last
year.
Boudin was raised by Bernar-
dine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who
co-founded the Weather Under-
ground organization in the
1960s.
Chesa Boudin, a former public
defender in San Francisco, fol-
lowed another liberal prosecutor
into the job: George Gascon, a
former Los Angeles police officer
now serving amid similar contro-
versies as the district attorney
there.
Like Boudin, who is 41, Gascon
faces resistance within his office,
much of it from front-line pros-
ecutors who believe new charg-
ing rules are too lenient. But
Boudin’s predicament is more
dire, according to recent polls.
Boudin has made the recall
itself part of the message, argu-
ing that it is a distraction from
solving the city’s most pressing
social problems.
“My primary argument isn’t
that this is unfair to me, but that
it will do nothing to make us
safer,” he said. “What is happen-
ing is undermining democracy
and undermining public safety.”
Boudin’s opposition took
shape about a year into his
tenure when a sputtering Repub-
lican-led effort to recall him gave
way to another led by Democrats,
who account for 63 percent of the
electorate in the city. The main
organization is called San Fran-
ciscans for Public Safety, which
by late May had spent $3.8 mil-
lion on the “Yes on H” campaign,
as the recall effort is officially
known.
Other groups that have raised
money in favor of the recall will
push total spending against Bou-
din to more than $4 million.
The money is coming from
venture capitalists, some of them
Republican, doctors and lawyers,
and many real estate developers
and associations. About 80 per-
cent of its donors are from Sanhold onto his office looks like for
Boudin. He was elected in 2019 as
a “progressive prosecutor,” the
term given to about a dozen or so
district attorneys across the
country who have sought to re-
duce what they view as overly
punitive sentencing and overall
incarceration rates, which have
affected people of color dispro-
portionately.
The recall campaign has re-
vealed a city debating the nature
of crime, how to measure its dips
and spikes, and who to blame for
perceptions of danger. Other pri-
mary contests statewide are turn-
ing on similar questions, as Cali-
fornia again attempts to find the
balance between deterrence and
fairness, a twisting course that
has charted its politics for dec-
ades.
After pioneering so-called
“three-strikes” laws in the 1990s
that toughened sentencing, state
voters, facing drastically over-
crowded prisons, agreed in 2014
to soften some sentences and
recategorize some felony crimes
as misdemeanors.
Like most big U.S. cities, San
Francisco has seen a rise in
homicides during the pandemic,
although rates remain far below
those of past decades, and other
cities have experienced bigger
per capita jumps. Overall violent
crime here remains at some of
the lowest levels it has been in
four decades.
Property crime, which deep-
ened during the pandemic as
stay-at-home workers left the city
largely empty, is declining gradu-
ally to pre-covid levels. Residen-
tial burglaries remain higher
than pre-pandemic levels — and
terrifyingly, often happen when
residents are at home. The nature
of those break-ins adds to a
prevailing sense here that the
city’s law enforcement agencies
have only a loose handle on the
overall problem.
The state of the streets, includ-
ing many of the major commer-
cial ones, remains heartbreaking,
an open-air stage of human mis-
ery defined by homelessness,
mental illness and drugs. In
2020, twice as many people died
here of drug overdoses than died
of covid-19. All of that has sharply
altered the political environ-
ment.
“The themes that were salient
to voters when Boudin was elect-
ed — criminal justice reform,
over-incarceration, police con-
duct — are not the same issues
salient with voters now,” said
Jason McDaniel, an associate
professor of political science at
San Francisco State University.
“What’s most salient now is this
feeling that things are just not
going well, whether it’s with
covid, the economy, homeless-
ness, or other issues. That’s a
shift.”
The in-or-out verdict on Boud-
in has also prompted a fresh
argument about the use of the
recall, a time-tested method of
civic democracy in this state that
was first envisioned as a way to
rid the government of corruption
and limit the influence of big-
money special interests. No cause
is needed to mount one.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom
(D) easily defeated a recall effort
against him. Boudin’s contest is
the second recall effort in this
city alone this year, the first
successfully removing three
members of the San Francisco
school board.
“This says a lot more about the
playbook that police unions and
Republican operatives are using
these days than it does about my
policies,” Boudin said in an inter-
view, conducted between vote-
seeking stops in the city’s Mission
District.
“There’s going to be a back-
lash,” he said. “They can’t win
elections so they are relying on
recalls and other measures to
strip those we have elected of
power.”
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 the Weather Under-
ground, a violent anti-imperialist
group characterized by the FBI as
a domestic terrorist organiza-
tion.
When Boudin was a little more
than a year old, his parents
participated in the 1981 robbery
of a Brink’s truck in a suburb
about 35 miles north of New York
City. The failed effort left the
armed guard and two police
officers dead.
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 re-
RECALL FROM A
Recall vote puts a liberal DA on the ropes in San Francisco
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin speaks during a May news conference i n San Francisco. He faces a recall election Tuesday,
a little more than halfway into his first term, one shaped by the pandemic and a sense among the city’s often fearful, always frustrated residents that his approach to
prosecution is too lax for the times. V olunteers with signs stand along the city’s 1 9th Avenue urging motorists to recall Boudin i n May. Weather Underground member
Katherine Boudin, the mother of Chesa Boudin, is led from the Rockland County Courthouse in New York City in 1981.“This says a lot moreabout the playbook thatpolice unions andRepublican operativesare using these daysthan it does about mypolicies. ... They can’twin elections so they arerelying on recalls andother measures to stripthose we have elected ofpower.”
San Francisco District Attorney
Chesa BoudinHAVEN DALEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS DAVID HANDSCHUH/ASSOCIATED PRESS