Editor’s note: The following is a speech by Chesa Boudin, the progressive and visionary San Francisco District Attorney who was recalled in a vicious campaign funded by right-wing billionaires.
I see a few cameras here. I think we must be part of a pretty important movement. What do you all say? When this recall started, my wife Valerie said to me, ‘I know we’re going to win.’ And she’s right. She’s always right. And the reason I knew, and I know today that she was right, is because this was never about one vote counts. It was never about one election night party. It was never about specifically which person gets to be in the office of the District Attorney. This is a movement, not a moment in history.
And I want to be really, really clear about the work that all of you, everybody here, and so many who can’t be here today, have done to get us to this moment. To get us to where we are today and where we’re going to continue to go in the weeks and the months and the years ahead.
The coalition that we built that’s represented in this space tonight, it is broad. It is diverse. It is strong. And it is a coalition that is deeply committed to justice. People come to this movement for different reasons, right? Our nurses fighting for healthcare to save lives, our teachers and our educators fighting to make sure we can break the school-to-prison pipeline. All of our retired judges who dedicated their lives to administering the laws on the books and making sure justice is served. The labor movement that recognizes that until we enforce laws equally, including against billionaires in their boardrooms, who systematically steal from working people, we can never have a true justice system.
I grew up with two sets of parents. I grew up in two different worlds, right? One immersed in all of the opportunities of privilege,e and another shackled to a existence mired in degradation and humiliation. One known to far too many Americans because of our addiction to caging human beings. And one of the things that I’ve seen over the course of this campaign, over the course of all the years that I’ve spent working in San Francisco’s justice system, is that we have two cities. We have two systems of justice, right? We have one for the wealthy and the well-connected and a different one for everybody else.
And that’s exactly what we are fighting to change. Over the course of the last 18 hours in 18 days and 18 months, I’ve been everywhere in San Francisco. We made more than 10 different stops today, alone. I don’t know how our campaign team squeezed them all in, but they did.
And no matter whether I was in the projects in Double Rock at Balboa Bart Station in the inner Sunset, in the Mission district, in the Castro, all across our great city, I heard a righteous outrage from people who are frustrated with two years of pandemic, who are frustrated with corruption in City Hall, with people who are sick and tired of living their lives in masks and behind closed doors and having a city that fails to deliver on some of its core promises.
And people are right to be frustrated. There’s so much room for improvement. People should hold all of us to a higher standard. We must continue to do better for people. Whether it’s the mother who was outraged because her son had been murdered years ago and she was still waiting for justice. Whether it was the lady I met living out of her car who asked me if I could help her get housing. She begged me for housing. Where is the housing? Whether it was the man on the street on Third and Palou, who said he dedicated his life to fighting for environmental justice in Bayview Hunter’s Point, and he was still waiting for answers as to why so many of his neighbors were dying of cancer.
People are angry. They’re frustrated. And I want to be very clear about what happened tonight. The right-wing billionaires outspent us three to one. They exploited an environment in which people are appropriately upset. And they created an electoral dynamic where we were literally shadow boxing. Voters were not asked to choose between criminal justice reform and something else. They were given an opportunity to voice their frustration and their outrage. And they took that opportunity.
We’ve made mistakes. We’ve learned a lot. And I am so unbelievably appreciative of everybody in this crowd, of everybody in this movement. And I want to start by thanking the folks on our campaign team. Can we give it up for them? Everybody who joined our team, some of them quit their jobs to do it. Some of them volunteered countless hours. Some of them spent unthinkable amounts of time away from family and friends, sleeping in a campaign office, sacrificing their own health, losing weight, gaining weight. In some cases — we’re not naming names. Don’t worry. These folks, some of them, young idealists, activists, some of them grizzled ancient hippies. They joined our team. Not because they thought there was an easy path to victory. Not because they thought we were going to raise the billions when it came to fundraising. Not because they thought there was another candidate we were running against who was worse. They joined our team because they believed in fighting for justice. Now I was really privileged over the course of these last several months to win the support of so many different groups and people. I could not possibly name and thank them all.
Some of them were behind us because they really believed in the specific policies we were fighting for. Others were in this fight because they recognized the dangers of recalls and the ways in which they undermine our democracy and take power and choice away from voters. Others were in this movement simply because they believed in the work that my team was doing around victim services and around protecting small businesses and increasing language access and standing for our immigrant communities.
But I want to reflect for one moment on a person I spent far more time with in the last few days than I’ve spent in the last 20 years, a man named Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson was visiting San Francisco. This past weekend I had the opportunity to meet with him to have breakfast. Reverend Jackson is someone who obviously needs no introduction, whose legacy will last through the generations. But one of the things he said was ‘no on H. No on Hell.’ And Reverend Jesse Jackson has a custom, has a habit. When he speaks of asking people to repeat after him three times, he asks you to say what he said, and then he says it again. And then he says it again. Let’s do it.
And so I want to ask all of you in his spirit, in his honor. I want to ask all of you to repeat after me for a minute. We are not afraid. We are not afraid. We’re not afraid. We are not afraid. We’re Not Afraid. We are not afraid. Justice, justice, justice, justice, justice is on our side. It’s on our side. It’s on our side. Our cause is righteous. Our cause is righteous. Our cause is righteous.
And we have already won, and we have already won, and we have already won, and we have already won, and we have already won, and we have already won. Now, let me tell you why we’ve already won, folks. Let me tell you why we’ve already won.
We have already won because we are part of a national movement that recognizes we can never incarcerate our way out of poverty. We have already won because we have shown San Francisco and the world that we do not need to rely on fear mongering or exploitation of tragedy to build safety. We have already won because even as our juvenile incarceration population fell by 50% and our adult jail population fell by 40%. And our state prison population out of San Francisco County fell by 30%, our crime rates stayed flat or declined.
We have already won because instead of resorting to mass incarceration, we resorted to mass referrals to drug treatment programming and mental health services. We have already won because we recognize the importance of making sure that every single person who is a victim of crime, no matter what language they speak, no matter what country they were born in, no matter how old they are, no matter what kinds of injuries they suffered, deserves services and care and support and love.
We have already won because we recognize that to build safety, we must think about what happens after someone’s sentence is served. We must have reentry planning. We have already won because we have redefined the way that people think about the role of the District Attorney’s Office. We represent the people.
When we stand up in court, when we fight for justice, it is not just about protecting the rich and powerful. It is about protecting everybody in this great city of St. Francis. And that is something that we are all going to continue to fight for. Am I right? I can’t hear you. I still can’t hear you. That’s what I’m talking about.
We know that people were writing the obituary of this election before our campaign even started, but we are just getting started. We are just getting started because we knew that fixing a system that has systematically failed us, not just for decades, but for generations, for centuries, was not the work of one year or one term. It’s certainly not the work of one man or woman or one office. It is work that requires a sustained social movement.
The movement that got us elected in 2019 is alive and well. We see the results in Contra Costa County, in Alameda County tonight. We see the results from coast to coast, from north to south. And it is alive and well right here at the ramp tonight.
We have two San Francisco’s. We have one that billionaires want to be a playground for the rich and powerful. And we have another one that is the history we are all proud of. That is why tourists from around the world come to visit our city. Why I married my wife here in golden gate park. Why our son was born at UCSF. Why so many of us have chosen to make this place our home. And we’re going to keep fighting for that San Francisco.
I want to thank you all for the work. I want to thank you for the energy. I want to thank you for the courage. I want to thank you for the inspiration. And most of all, I want to thank you for the work that is still ahead of us. Thank you.
