Chesa Boudin Recalled by San Francisco Voters
wsj.com
wsj.com
lol, that's pretty easy to do when you just stop prosecuting people. Same way graduation rates increase if you just stop failing people. Who cares about the actual purpose of institutions or whether goals are being achieved, just make sure the numbers are what we want
He entered office right before Covid hit and there’s a dozen different factors that could have played a role here. Regardless it’s clear property crime is bad and downtown is still a ghost town with every other store deserted and companies don’t want to host conferences here anymore.
I don’t think anyone believes recalling him with magically fix any of these issues. To me I see it as more symbolic and a sort of public venting among voters of being fed up with quality of life issues that rarely seem to be top of mind of politicians anymore, and recalling a progressive DA sends a clear message.
Or the way COVID cases drop when you stop testing!
The once-in-a-century pandemic also had significant effects here, both on the DA office and courts, and on the level/types of crime in the city, making it hard to get a clear causal story about the relation between prosecution decisions vs. crime rates.
What is the “actual purpose” of the DA’s office in your view: to prosecute as many cases as possible, irrespective of circumstances?
Boudin was a public defender, and a pretty good one at that. He carried the public defender mindset into the DA's office, and it didn't work well.
(You edited your comment to add "irrespective of circumstances", which changes the meaning. There will always be gray areas where we rely on the judge or the DA to exercise discretion, but in a healthy system the scope of those areas can't amount to refusing to enforce entire statutes or reinterpreting statutes by executive policy.)
Straight out of a Batman movie, just in real life there is no Batman to save SF.
People had enough and are revolting against this lying lunatic. Good riddance.
It also looks stupid and petty to "take revenge" from the system when the system can expel you before you actually do any significant damage. Wouldn't be more logical to rise to the top and bring it down from there by playing the system?
That crime is going down (but see grand-grand-grand parent's point about less prosecutions).
That these policies actually help the homeless or reduces crime(initial evidence does not look good).
That voters voting for recall are brain-washed by misinformation from Republicans (?!. Ah yes the classic misinformation bogeyman misleading the poor gullible voters).
"Boudin fell in love with David Gilbert in the 1970s and gave birth to their son Chesa in 1980. When her son was 14 months old, she was arrested and subsequently incarcerated for murder and bank robbery. Her son was raised by former Weatherman leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn."
It is not "disingenuous" to attribute his recall to WU. It is common sense.
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/shoplifters-walking-into...
A (ethical) social experiment can be made by looking at siblings later in life (e.g. the Hitchens brothers).
Basketball for example: Say the fans see a player traveling. The referee also sees it, but does nothing. How will the fans react? Value systems. Rules are there to be enforced. People get pissed off when the rules aren't enforced, or enforced inconsistently.
I think it goes without saying that apples occasionally fall far from the tree... occasionally.
Radicals will often see violence and law breaking as a means to an end.
I'm not saying this is the case, I don't know much about Boudin. Just mentioning that sometimes being brought up as a child regarding lawlessness as acceptable can sometimes result in the opposite views as an adult. It's not cut and dry.
This recall seems to be an expression of our basic urge to punish, rather than any real desire to address the problems that lie at the root of most crime.
We’ve tried the “tough on crime” approach for so many years, and all it’s really done is inflate the prison population (with mostly non-white people, at that).
Hopefully someday we can break the cycle and make real changes that will (in time) reduce crime by addressing the sources of the problem in the first place.
"I know people who have got 200 car thefts, 300 car thefts."
Interviewer: "Have you thought about how you would do that time?"
"Shit, you only get 3 weeks. It's a misdemeanor!"
Interviewer: "You only do 3 weeks for stealing a car?"
"Hell ya, it's a misdemeanor."
One of the more interesting possible roots of criminal behavior is lead exposure as a child. It's not entirely clear, of course (socioeconomic status is a confounding factor that is hard to eliminate), but there seems to at least be some strong correlation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
My point isn't that we should be redirecting more resources to lead removal than to recalling a prosecutor (even though I _do_ think lead removal is a wise use of resources). My point is that deterrence and punishment is "cleaning up after the fact," rather than trying to address problems at their source.
The question "what should society do with criminals" implies a belief that criminality _must_ exist in a society. Perhaps to some degree, it is true. But it seems as though redirecting our efforts to prevent criminality in the first place by addressing the underlying root causes would ultimately be a far better use of our resources, and far more effective.
If voters are just unhappy with an elected official, they should follow the normal election process. The SF DA is up for a routine election in November of 2023.
Turning recalls into a routine part of politics, where billionaire-backed activists can try to dump a bunch of money into advertising and redo every election they didn’t like the outcome of, in low-turnout primaries or special elections, ends up costing the city a fortune and distorting the ordinary political process.
The incumbents are generally properly larger but largely apathetic/too busy trying to afford SF rent - unless things go too far in the wrong direction.
I think the recent attempts by the newly installed progressives at renaming schools (while the schools were closed for covid), changing the admissions to the magnet school to be non-test based, etc. - led to some infrastructure being built among the moderate, middle class family democratic voting base - particularly on the western side (Richmond/Sunset) which is mostly Asian.
The fact that the media reported a lot of Anti-Asian crime in SF that Chesa didn't seem to do much about - probably fit well with this newly organized group.
I'm genuinely gobsmacked that a) people are surprised he behaved the way he did as DA and b) that some actually thought it was a good idea to elect a communist as chief law enforcement officer. Maybe don't do that? In any case, this is a rare but good story about democracy's fail safe mechanisms kicking in.
Blame the "tough on crime" crowd for that. They thought he'd be putting everyone in gulags, like any proper communist would.