SAN FRANCISCO — Voters in San Francisco on Tuesday ended one of the country’s most groundbreaking criminal justice reform experiments, which saw the ouster of a prosecutor who abolished cash bail, held police accountable and charged made an effort to reduce the number of people sent to prison .
Chesa Boudin, the progressive prosecutor, was removed from office after two and a half years in office, according to The Associated Press in a vote that will reverberate in Democratic politics across the country as the party tightens its coverage of crime ahead of the midterm elections. threaten to strip Democratic control of Congress.
Early return showed that 60 percent of voters in the city approved the recall.
Ultimately, the election was a contest between progressive Democrats who saw Mr. Boudin as a key leader of a national movement to tackle mass incarceration and a response from more politically moderate San Franciscans — a coalition of Democrats, Independents and Republicans — who became agitated. continued property crime and overt drug use during the pandemic. The resistance has won.
Locally, the resounding recall suggested that many in San Francisco’s Democratic hierarchy are out of step with — and further left than — the city’s voters, some of the most liberal voters in the country.
In February, the Democratic Province Central Committee voted 20-2 to oppose Mr Boudin’s recall, with the two opposing votes coming from candidates who had run against him for the job. In addition, only two members of the 11-member Board of Trustees, the city’s highest legislative body, publicly supported Mr Boudin’s removal; one of them was a former police spokesman and the other would like to have Mr. Boudin’s job.
In a justice system that harbors the hostile tension of prosecutors battling with lawyers, Mr. Boudin is one of the few prosecutors in the country to have crossed the courtroom. Mr Boudin, a former public defender, began his tenure as the city’s top prosecutor in 2020 by aggressively expanding diversion programs as an alternative to prison. He said public safety was his number one priority, but he would work along the way to make the system more equitable and reverse the legacy of mass incarceration.
Mr Boudin’s replacement will be chosen by Mayor London Breed, who has made public safety a cornerstone of her tenure, including her unusual move in December to declare a state of emergency in the Tenderloin borough, the center of the illicit drug trade in the city.
The city has experienced ongoing property crime, most notably car break-ins and burglaries, but police data shows that many other crimes, including homicides, have remained stable or decreased during the pandemic. Both sides of the recall campaign exchanged resentments about the accuracy of the statistics, especially when many crimes go unreported.
Mr Boudin himself admitted that three years before taking office he did not report the burglary of his own car. A clear analysis of Mr Boudin’s two-and-a-half-year tenure was also complicated by the fact that it took place during the pandemic, when a near-total shutdown of the city influenced criminal behavior far more than the policies of a district attorney.
The vote was seen by many as an accumulation of frustration by city residents over filthy street conditions, including illegal drug sales, homeless camps and untreated mental illness. During the campaign, Mr. Boudin repeatedly pointed out that he was not responsible for many of the street conditions that San Francisco residents decry, but he acknowledged that he had become a vessel for their anger.
Shortly after 9 p.m. Tuesday, Mr. Boudin stood on a keg in an outdoor bar on the edge of San Francisco Bay, facing a cold, invigorating breeze.
“We have two cities, we have two legal systems,” he told the crowd who responded by chanting his name. “One for the rich and well-connected and one for everyone else. That is exactly what we are fighting for to change.”
He vowed to continue what he called a “movement, not a moment” and thanked his supporters, some of them young activists, he said, some of them “grey old hippies”.
“We made mistakes, we learned a lot,” said Mr Boudin.
He led the crowd in chant: “Justice! Justice! Is on our side! is on our side!” After he finished, a jazz band discreetly resumed in a corner of the bar.
Tuesday’s vote had echoes of another tectonic election in the city, the impeachment of three school board members in February, a recall that reflected voters’ sour mood during the pandemic and a claim of political power by the city’s Asian Americans.
Many of the volunteers in both recalls were from the Chinese community, members of whom were stabbed by burglaries and shoplifting and who felt particularly vulnerable following a spate of attacks on Asian Americans in the city during the pandemic.
“In San Francisco, you don’t know anyone who’s never had their car broken into,” said Mary Jung, former president of the Democratic Party in San Francisco and head of the campaign to recall Boudin.
In an interview after the recall was declared successful, Ms Jung described the campaign, which pitted Democrats against Democrats, as “very emotional.”
“We feel heard,” she says. “San Francisco needed change and this is just a confirmation of what many of us felt.”
Supporters of the recall gathered at a bar in the Marina district, tightly packed in an indoor space with thumping hits from the early 2010s. The crowd repeatedly erupted in chants of “Recall! Remember!” and a woman crowdsurfed over supporters’ heads. Men outside celebrated with cigars.
The organizers of the recall say they have received much of their support from harassed residents. But criticism of Mr Boudin also came from those who worked with him. Shirin Oloumi, a lawyer who specialized in prosecuting car break-ins before leaving the district attorney’s office last August, described a workplace in turmoil with a stream of departing experienced lawyers.
David Lee, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, said the two recalls in San Francisco — members of the Board of Education in February and Mr. Boudin on Tuesday — were a clarion call from a surly electorate.
“There is anger at the government’s failure, City Hall’s failure to address pressing issues,” said Mr. Lee. On the precipice of a generational change of guard in San Francisco — two iconic San Franciscans, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, find themselves in the twilight of their careers — voters send a message of frustration and yearning change, said Mr. Lee. This was especially true for Asian-American voters, he believes.
“In San Francisco, a third of the population is Asian and they don’t feel like anyone is listening to them — city hall or the Democratic establishment,” he said.
At the same time, many political analysts warned against reading too much into the result, as it reflected the dynamics of a recall election: When Mr Boudin was elected in 2019, he received just 36 percent of the vote in the first ballot. In the third round of that election, according to the city’s ranked electoral system, he ended up moving several thousand votes ahead of his main rival for the job, Suzy Loftus.
“You run into yourself in a recall election,” said Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco. Mr Brown said he had voted to keep Mr Boudin in office as a protest against the recall process. But he also criticized Mr Boudin, whom he described as “a warrior for the oppressed.”
“He is,” said Mr. Brown. “He is certainly not a prosecutor.”
Holly Secon reporting contributed.