Too Much Anger, Too Little Clarity
The Misguided Push to Recall Chesa Boudin
Today, voters in San Francisco go to the polls to decide whether to recall their District Attorney, Chesa Boudin. Boudin ascended to the post in 2019 on an ambitious progressive platform, vowing not to prosecute quality of life crimes—public urination, camping, drug use, prostitution—which are ubiquitous in the city by the Bay. He also pledged to reduce the jail population, and did, by 73 percent. Once in office, he made further pledges: his office would not bring charges based on contraband found during pretext stops, nor would it charge status enhancements such as gang membership or “third strikes.” Cash bail was eliminated.
Even by San Francisco’s standards, these were big reforms. Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascón (now the District Attorney for Los Angeles and facing his own recall effort), was and is a progressive prosecutor, but held up against Boudin’s record, Gascón’s looks unimpeachably moderate. And now, if the polls are on the mark, San Francisco voters are eager to be done with Boudin’s reforms.
The national media being what it is, plenty of ink is being spilled over what this means for progressive criminal justice politics. The usual suspects have lined up against Boudin, and even The Economist weighed in, opining that the recall election is “anything but” a “provincial spat.” It’s a tempting story. Crime in America has been rising, and reminding people that it was worse in the nineties doesn’t help (nor should it: voters shouldn’t be asked to treat nineties crime rates as some kind of ceiling below which everything is fine). But as John Pfaff notes, there is too much idiosyncratic about San Francisco, and too little research on the politics of District Attorney elections, to plausibly extrapolate from today’s result.
That said, the result—assuming Boudin loses—will clearly say something. Pfaff’s claim that we have “NO real idea what drives” District Attorney elections is far too strong. We don’t need rigorous, statistically driven analyses to conclude San Francisco voters have soured on Boudin (again, assuming they recall him), and we don’t need Sherlock Holmes on the case to make a pretty good guess as to why. The bottom line is simple: San Francisco, and to a lesser extent the whole Bay Area, feels quite a bit more lawless than other places in America, and voters think Boudin’s approach is partly to blame.
I recently moved to the Bay from New York and can attest to the difference between the two places. New York is not a crime-free city by any stretch of the imagination, but I have only once been the victim of a crime there: I left a backpack under a table at a bar, stepped out for a smoke, and when I returned the backpack was gone. I have never felt physically threatened while walking down the street, and for the length of time, collectively, my friends have spent in the city, I can think of very few times when they have, either.
In the Bay Area, things are different. Some friends recently moved back to Brooklyn in part (though in relatively small part) because they felt unsafe in their San Francisco neighborhood: muggings and other violent crime. Another friend left his dog tied up outside a restaurant in the Mission; someone stole the dog and (essentially) ransomed it back to him for a thousand dollars. A third friend was walking through the Mission on a sunny afternoon when he heard glass breaking: a man stood up from where he had smashed a car window and assured passersby everything was fine. Hanging out in Dolores Park, I heard a loud boom: some kids had stolen a truck and gone joyriding until they crashed into three cars (all parked and, mercifully, unoccupied).
Oakland is not San Francisco (more on that later), but it’s a straight shot across the Bay, about ten minutes in good traffic or when BART is running, and things here, too, feel different from New York. An East Bay friend was mugged a few weeks ago: some kids pulled her to the ground by her ponytail and demanded her phone. While looking at apartments in downtown Oakland, my partner and I left our car (with our dog in it!) parked on the street; someone smashed a back window—at four p.m. A month or so after that, another friend had his bike stolen from outside our new place in Lakeside. Around the same time, I got dinner with an out-of-town friend at a Temescal restaurant, and when we got back to his rental car, the window had been smashed and his suitcase ransacked.
All of this has happened since March—a truly astonishing pace, and unlike anywhere else I’ve ever lived. (Not recent enough to make the cut: the same friend who witnessed the daytime car break-in in the Mission had his own car stolen from where he’d parked in Bernal Heights. Also omitted are quality-of-life offenses, from public defecation to heroin use, which occur with disturbing frequency in San Francisco. I don’t care so much about these, but many voters, and especially many business owners, care a lot.) San Francisco feels a lot more lawless than most other places in the country, and voters, understandably, do not like that.
Less understandably, they are poised to take out their frustration on Boudin. While the intuition supporting his ouster holds a naïve appeal, virtually no evidence backs it up. Instead, most evidence points elsewhere than Boudin for the causes of the city’s plight.
To begin with, San Francisco is far from alone in seeing crime rates rise during Covid. Auto thefts, burglaries, and homicides may be up during Boudin’s term, but crime is up across the country, and San Francisco is not an outlier in the magnitude of its trend. Although correlation usually hints at some sort of causation, the comparison to other American cities strongly suggests that Boudin simply happened to take office at a time when crime was going to spike anyway.
Insofar as the San Francisco feels less law-abiding than the rest of the country, an honest appraisal should lay to rest the notion that Boudin bears any responsibility for that. As mentioned earlier, crime is common in the East Bay as well, away from Boudin’s jurisdiction; it is the Bay Area, not just San Francisco, that feels different from New York and most other American cities. Factors other than the local prosecutor’s policies, it seems, drive the problem.
One of those factors might be culture. Persuasive evidence supports a connection between cultural factors and crime rates in other places. (Louisiana’s high murder rate, for instance, can probably be traced in part to cultural norms around honor. It’s also worth noting, especially when we consider questions about how Boudin’s anti-carceral philosophy has affected crime, that Louisiana has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country.) Perhaps the socially permissive, anti-authority legacy of the sixties shines through in today’s car break-in rates. But this is pure theory; I have no hard evidence.
A more thoroughly documented explanation is the truly wild inequality the Bay Area’s ostensibly liberal policymakers have chosen to create by limiting who can afford housing in the region. Rent for a one-bedroom in San Francisco averages somewhere around $3,000 per month—either the highest or the second-highest in the country, depending on your source. (Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, and the rest of the Bay also make a strong showing in the contest for priciest city in America.) Unsurprisingly, such expensive rents drive up evictions and homelessness. Coupled with the Bay’s poor public transportation that makes it more difficult for people to live farther from the urban core than in other high-cost cities, and relatively few shelter beds (about 1,000 beds in San Francisco for a homeless population eight times that), and you have a recipe for large numbers of people living on the street.
I don’t know that a larger unsheltered population leads to higher crime rates, but voters in San Francisco certainly think it does. And whether or not it leads to more violent or property crime, a larger unsheltered population necessarily means a more visible unsheltered population. It also, obviously, means your average voter will see more public urination and drug use. These are problems that voters are prepared to punish Boudin for. They may not be willing to say publicly that they want homeless people thrown into jail for public drug use, having nowhere but the sidewalk to go to the bathroom, or just generally being unpleasant to walk by, but many voters, I am sure, would not protest too much if they awakened to a world where everyone too poor to rent a room in San Francisco were somehow gotten rid of. Again, though, San Francisco’s street homelessness is not Boudin’s fault (except to the extent that he’s unwilling to just throw the unhoused in jail).
I could say more. I have a whole tangent about how the police bear as much responsibility for crime rates as Boudin but somehow escape the same public ire. (Clearance rates in San Francisco are abysmally low, likely the result of a generation of cops’ being trained to focus on busting Black kids for dealing drugs rather than investigating actual crimes.) But I think that’s enough for now. Crime in San Francisco is a real problem, and it’s understandable that voters are frustrated. Ousting Boudin, however, is unlikely to help.