The Chesa Boudin Recall, and What It Means for Los Angeles

Two recent articles tell you what you need to know.

Above: Chesa Boudin. He will not be missed.

The other day, the lovely Mrs. P. sent me a link to an Atlantic article that she said I really needed to read. I thought this was unusual. Mrs. P. is not generally an avid follower of politics, or one who likes to discuss issues of public policy at great length. But she was insistent. We were soon to embark on a long drive to pick up our son from college, and she said that if I hadn’t read it by the time we started driving, she would read it to me on the way. It was that good.

So I read it. And she was right.

The article was about San Francisco and its relatively recent descent into the status of a failed city. But it was about much more: the frustration of the city’s denizens with the ultra-wokeness of the city’s leadership. It was about providing homeless drug addicts with a safe place to shoot up, at the expense of the surrounding neighborhood; about the recall of school board officials who cared more about closing schools with racist names like “Abraham Lincoln” than about reopening schools . . . and it was about crime. A lot about crime. And about the policies of the D.A., Chesa Boudin, who made crime easy, fun, and profitable. And about the effort — spurred by people on the left, mind you, not the six Republicans in San Francisco — to recall Boudin.

I’ve been meaning to talk about that article and its implications for several days now. And then, an article about the effort to recall George Gascón in Los Angeles came out on Bari Weiss’s Substack. And now, I must discuss both articles, which are must-reads for anyone who wishes to understand these two cities and what soft-on-crime policies have done to them — especially their poorest and most disadvantaged members.

Let’s start with San Francisco.

San Francisco

The thing that is most striking about the Atlantic article, to me, is that it is written by someone (Nellie Bowles) who appears to be an avowed leftist, and always has been. The article opens with a paean to the glory days of the city’s hippies. Bowles, a lesbian woman happily married to her wife, describes naked people wandering the streets of San Francisco during her childhood, and seems fine with it. Sure, a homeless man once grabbed her and lifted her up by her hair, but her dad stopped it quickly — and hey, this is the price you pay for quirkiness, and the city was hilly and pretty. At least that seems to be her attitude. So this is not a piece written by some right-wing reactionary. Far from it.

Bowles describes an open-air safe space on Market Street dedicated to the care and “safe” drugging of addicts. Syringes are distributed to a zombie population of doped-up hoboes, in an area where tourists used to enjoy being sightseers. Nowadays, if some homeless (sorry, I mean “unhoused”) guy ends up bleeding on the sidewalk and an ambulance is called, advocacy groups stand by to advise the would-be patient that he doesn’t have to submit to treatment. He can stay right there in his druggie Shangri-La and die on the streets next month if he prefers. Many take the advice.

Meanwhile, people leave their cars empty and unlocked, leaving signs saying “Nothing’s in the car. Don't smash the windows.” Bowles describes having a jacket torn off her back and deciding not to call for help, in part because she felt that doing so might be vaguely “racist.” And that is how we learn that the thief was black.

And this brings us to the recall of Chesa Boudin. The first thing to understand about it — which is why I have been at pains to describe Bowles’s lefty ideology — is that the Boudin recall was not the work of Trumpists. As Bowles explains:

Residents had hoped Boudin would reform the criminal-justice system and treat low-level offenders more humanely. Instead, critics argued that his policies victimized victims, allowed criminals to go free to reoffend, and did nothing to help the city’s most vulnerable. To understand just how noteworthy Boudin’s defenestration is, please keep in mind that San Francisco has only a tiny number of Republicans. This fight is about leftists versus liberals. It’s about idealists who think a perfect world is within reach—it’ll only take a little more time, a little more commitment, a little more funding, forever—and those who are fed up.

What does the proliferation of homelessness and addiction have to do with the identity of the District Attorney? Not everything, certainly; much of it is a function of state laws and of the identity of the mayor. But the D.A. plays his part:

In addition to the supervised drug-use facility in the plaza, San Francisco has a specially sanctioned and city-maintained slum a block from City Hall, where food, medical care, and counseling are free, and every tent costs taxpayers roughly $60,000 a year. People addicted to fentanyl come, too, because buying and doing drugs here is so easy. In 2014, Proposition 47, a state law, downgraded drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, and one that Boudin said he wouldn’t devote resources to prosecuting.

. . . .

In 2019, someone posted a picture in a Facebook group called B.A.R.T. Rants & Raves, where people complain about the state of the regional transportation system. The photo was of a young man, slumped over on a train. People were chiming in about how gross the city was.

A woman named Jacqui Berlinn wrote in the comments, simply: “That’s my son.”

His name is Corey Sylvester and he’s 31 years old. She posted a photo of him when he was sober: “May he return there soon.”

Berlinn has five children, and is also raising Sylvester’s daughter. Since she posted that comment, she’s become an activist, calling on the city to crack down on drug sales, put dealers in jail, and arrest her son so he’s forced to become sober in jail, which she sees as the only way to save his life. She told me that she feels San Francisco has failed people like him: “Nothing that is being done is improving the situation.” Her work is nonpartisan, she said, but “I’d be lying if I didn’t say I really want to see Boudin recalled.”

The issues in San Francisco are not limited to drug use, but extend to shoplifting and theft. Boudin certainly had an effect on that, and the downhill spiral of the city on those issues is undeniable:

You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

The head of CVS Health’s organized-crime division has called San Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime.” Thefts in San Francisco’s Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.

Again, as the author notes, this upsets the left as well as the right. Because “it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell.” Boudin also refused to enhance criminals’ sentences due to past convictions, or treat gun possession seriously (which we will discuss more below in the part about Los Angeles). Boudin would blame cops for not arresting people, pretending not to understand that (as Bowles notes) cops tend not to make arrests when they know the D.A. won’t file charges. Bowles gives an example to illustrate just how absurd Boudin’s policies got: “Last month a man who had been convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019 was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those charges were dismissed and he was released on probation.”

The piece is not limited to discussing Boudin. There is a great discussion of the school board recall election and the incredibly woke-yet-hostile attitude of the school board members who were recalled. All I can say is: it’s a must-read article. But the parts of the article that interest me the most are the parts discussing Boudin and his recall — precisely because I think that what happened in San Francisco has a message for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles

Which brings me to my second piece of recommended reading for the day: this amazing article about the effort to recall Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón. I’d like to say a few words about the article and about the recall effort in general.