San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was elected in 2019 on campaign promises to end mass incarceration and attack the root causes of crime, is fighting to hold on to his job in a recall vote Tuesday.
He, along with George Gascón, Boudin’s predecessor in San Francisco and Los Angeles County’s current district attorney, who is also facing a second recall attempt in two years, has been affected by the national backlash against the criminal justice reform agenda that got both elected, Bloomberg and other media outlets report.
The recall campaign against Boudin has raised more than $7 million, with funding from a mix of interests including California Republican donor Bill Oberndorf and Paypal co-founder David Sacks.
In a poll of likely voters conducted in March, 64 percent of registered Democrats surveyed in San Francisco said that they would vote yes on the recall.
Boudin has become the face of visible crime and homelessness in San Francisco, despite the DA’s limited ability to cause immediate shifts in crime, the Los Angeles Times reports.
In their Notice of Intent filing the recall, supporters of the recall wrote that Boudin had failed to address a number of specific criminal justice crises while in office.
“We all agree that we need real criminal justice reform and police accountability now,” one pro-recall voter was quoted as saying. “Chesa Boudin isn’t delivering either priority — and since he took office, burglaries, car break-ins, homicides and overdose-related deaths are at a crisis level. Boudin is not keeping San Francisco safe.”
Like many cities in the U.S, San Francisco did see an uptick in crime between 2020 and 2021 collected by the city’s Compstat program, but overall property and violent crime in the city has continued a downward trend since before the pandemic, SFGate reports.
San Francisco saw a significant increase in burglaries and murders in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic rates, but police department data from this year so far shows fewer burglaries in 2022 for the same time period and rape and robberies in 2021 were at their lowest reported rates since 2014.
A recent study from the nonpartisan Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that violent crime rates in Sacramento, where DA Anne Schubert adopted “tough-on-crime” policies in contrast to San Francisco’s approach, have increased as San Francisco’s rate continues a nearly 30 percent fall since 2014.
San Francisco’s incarceration, homicide, and property crime rates all dropped faster than Sacramento’s, too.
“Exploiting recalls for political purposes is an abuse of the process – it disrespects the will of the voters, and costs taxpayers millions of dollars,” Boudin wrote in his statement of defense to the recall.
Boudin’s recall is the second one in San Francisco this year. In February, voters recalled three members of the San Francisco Unified School District, rebuking their handling of K-12 schools during the pandemic shutdown, KQED reports.
Before them, the last San Francisco recall election was in 1983 – an unsuccessful bid to remove then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein from office. Polls in the recall vote will close at 8pm PDT on Tuesday, June 7.