SAN FRANCISCO — After a fear-based campaign bankrolled by more than one billionaire and various corporate interests and financiers, the recall against San Francisco’s reformer District Attorney Chesa Boudin has been successful, even as he fulfilled campaign promises to bring to justice cops who murder unarmed people, reform the bail system, go after wage theft and other crimes against workers, and decriminalize certain victimless crimes.
“I’m committed to equal enforcement of the law and to a justice system where the outcomes don’t depend on the color of your skin, how much money you have in the bank, or whether you wear a uniform to work,” Boudin said in an interview.
Boudin launched a new Economic Crimes Against Workers Unit that successfully prosecuted wage theft, labor trafficking, immigration-related workplace retaliation, and other crimes by employers against workers – which drew the ire of the corporate owners, with their multi-million dollar settlements, as in the case of wage theft by Burger King and other restaurants. It also threatened the profits made by the ride share, delivery and high-tech industries in their widespread use of workers categorized as ‘independent contractors, rather than employees with rights and benefits.
On Chesa Boudin’s website: ‘He’s prosecuting criminal acts, reforming the justice system, and preventing crimes by attacking root causes such as mental health struggles, substance abuse and addiction, poverty, homelessness, and the prevalence of illegal guns.’ He ‘made history in San Francisco through his track record of holding police accountable when they break the law.’
The Police Officer’s Association (POA), which has been instrumental in protecting police from prosecution, poured money into the campaign to recall Boudin, as did financiers, developers, high tech companies, and other corporate interests. The very people who are profiting from the vast inequities of an economic system that makes them filthy rich while people fall into the streets, in the city with the highest rent in the nation.
“The right-wing billionaires outspent us three-to-one” said Boudin.
In his sort tenure as District Attorney, Boudin has taken down a fencing ring, operating out of a boba restaurant, that specialized in car break-ins and cell phone thefts. (He was forced to rent a U-Haul to take in the stolen good, because the SFPD refused to cooperate.) In response to grassroots organizing and demands, he pledged to, and began to charge police officers who have wantonly murdered unarmed (usually poor, young Black and brown) victims — a shameful festering injustice in the city. He filed first-ever in the city homicide charges against an on-duty officer, and refiled felony charges against Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies who brutally beat an unarmed man in San Francisco.
Cristina Gutierrez, founding member of Mothers on the March, a group that has for years been demonstrating against police brutality and murders, with demands that the POA be abolished, had this to say about the recall:
“The result of the election today where fascism won by recalling District Attorney Chesa Boudin should make all of us realize how dangerously this nation is moving towards the right. This should tell us the importance of putting our egos aside to unite and build a revolutionary movement that will prepare us to fight fascism! We must begin to organize in the defense of the workers, the weak and the vulnerable.”
David Talbot, San Francisco-based historian, activist, writer and journalist for Salon and Mother Jones, wrote in a recent Facebook post:
“The bitter recall election will embolden the violent and racist SFPD. It will fortify the corrupt, corporate regime of Mayor London Breed. It will roll back San Francisco’s brief experiment with criminal justice reform and escalate the punitive approach to social problems — which NEVER works. And it will only increase the city’s deep racial and ideological divisions.”
One of the things those who wanted to end Chesa Boudin’s reforms manipulated was people’s fear of ‘crime.’ Although he was going after the kind of street crime that most affects the ordinary San Francisco resident, they exploited people’s dismay at the fact that everywhere people are being left to die in the streets. The system he was trying to reform in practical and compassionate ways is itself the cause of the crimes of poverty and despair. It is a fact that places with ‘tough on crime’ DA’s and administrations do not have less crime, despair, addiction and people on the streets.
As the abyss between those few royally profiting from the Bay Area’s great wealth and those struggling and falling into the streets gets ever deeper – as little or nothing is done to curb rising rents, job loss, homelessness and worsening inequality and despair, and the mental illnesses and addictions it spawns – the attack on a public servant who actually has a program to get to some of the root causes is a great loss to the people of San Francisco. We deserve better, and need to organize around these basic demands.
The San Francisco mayor gets to appoint the next District Attorney. Voices are calling for the mayor to appoint someone for District Attorney who will carry forward Chesa Boudin’s sane program of reform.
San Francisco poet and organizer Sarah Menefee is a long-time homeless rights activist. She is the Homeless Desk on the People’s Tribune Editorial Board, and a founding member of such organizations as the San Francisco Union of the Homeless, Homes Not Jails and 'First they came for the homeless’. Known for her poetry about the streets, her latest collections are Winter Rose, Sign and Holy Eel.
