The New Yorker explains Chesa Boudin to us

The East Coast is fascinated by the D.A. Why do they keep getting it wrong?

District Attorney Chesa Boudin has turned out to be the biggest attraction to San Francisco since the Golden Gate Bridge.

East coast media heavyweights have been on a Boudin binge lately. They are parachuting into our mysterious city and opining on us and our progressive D.A.

First it was the Washington Post which tut-tutted us for not giving Boudin his due. And here is my response to that.

Now it is the esteemed New Yorker, checking in with a deep dive about Boudin, San Francisco and what it all means.

The New Yorker premise is pretty direct. The writer, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, says that Boudin was elected in 2019 “by three thousand votes.” (Actually 2,832, but who’s counting?)

And yet, the theory goes, even though San Francisco is one of the most progressive cities in the United States, Boudin is under fire and facing a recall because of his liberal views. It is, the story implies, a mystery.

Eh, not so much.

Let’s begin with that election. Boudin did win, fair and square, but Wallace-Wells fails to mention that there were two moderate candidates running against him. The establishment candidate, backed by Dianne Feinstein and Gavin Newsom, was Suzy Loftus.

Loftus was controversial because when George Gascon resigned as D.A. in 2018 to run for the same office in Los Angeles, Mayor London Breed appointed her to replace him, although it was just 17 days before the election.

Granted, that may have annoyed some voters, but it looks more like typical hardball politics from here. If you have an advantage, you use it.

A bigger factor, unmentioned by Wallace-Wells, was that Nancy Tung was also running. Considered more conservative than Loftus — who was backed by the Police Officers Association — Tung consistently ran third in pre-election polls.

Yet she resisted nudges from City Hall to pull out of the race. The fear was the two moderates would split the vote and leave the field to Boudin.

Which is pretty much what happened. Boudin got 86,682 votes. But if you take Loftus’ 83,850 and combine it with Tung’s 46,608, you have over 130,000 votes for the moderates.

At the very least Loftus and Tung should have formed a partnership. In ranked choice voting, voters make their top three picks. Tung and Loftus could have said “vote for me, but make the other moderate your second choice.”

Instead they created an opening for Boudin. There’s even a school of thought that SF voters supported a moderate with a first choice, but then made Boudin a second choice to maintain their liberal SF cred.

Whatever. Boudin won in a typically messy and confusing San Francisco political moment. But it certainly didn’t look like a mandate.

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Second, I don’t think the city is the flower-power commune outsiders seem to think it is. On social issues this is a proudly liberal city. When it comes to presidential elections, LBGT rights and Black Lives Matter, San Francisco leads the way. Good for us.

But when it comes to good order on the streets, the story changes. The homeless crisis is consistently at the top of every poll of major civic problems. Voters passed a sit/lie ordinance in 2010 in an effort to declutter sidewalks.

And in 1992 the city elected Frank Jordan, a former SF police chief, as mayor. At least part of Jordan’s appeal was a promise to use existing laws to combat homelessness. (It didn’t work. Jordan only served one term.)

When it comes to political offices, San Francisco talks a good progressive game, but that’s not how it votes. A case could be made that the city hasn’t elected a true progressive mayor since Art Agnos in 1988. (He too was a one-term mayor. Unhappiness with his homeless policies led to his defeat, and to the election of the hard-liner Jordan.)

All of which brings us back to Boudin. We know there’s an energetic recall campaign (Two actually, in typical SF eye-rolling cluelessness.)

But I don’t think it is because people are unhappy with his zany liberal initiatives. Frankly, I’m not sure most of us could describe any big change he’s made to the legal system.

But what they do know is that this is a time fraught with worries about crime. The New Yorker story lists some of the stats: burglaries up 40 percent, car thefts up 20 percent in a period between January and July of 2020.

Much of that is not Boudin’s fault. The pandemic has turned life upside down. The edginess of city life during COVID has made tempers short and poverty worse. The bewildering, unprovoked attacks on Asian Americans have freaked everyone out.

And then there are the videos, which not only show criminals in action, they look like they don’t have a care in the world. It’s infuriating.

To which law enforcement, including Boudin, have been responding with stats that show crime isn’t as bad as you think. Basically, it is the old “who are you going to believe, these numbers or your lying eyes?”

It isn’t a winning strategy. And when concerned residents look for a scapegoat, it is easy to point at the guy who said in his victory speech, “It’s time for a radical change in how we envision justice.”

Boudin made himself an easy target with those statements. And it didn’t help that when criticized, he became defensive, blaming the police department for not making arrests and the crime lab for slow processing.

He’s made tone-deaf comments. He said a suspect who pushed down an elderly Asian man, killing him, was having a “temper tantrum.” He also said there was “no evidence” the attack was racially motivated.

And of course the capper is the case of repeat offender Troy McAlister, who stole a car and crashed into two women on a San Francisco street, killing them both. McAlister had been arrested four times prior to the crash, but none of the crimes resulted in charges from Boudin’s office.

A parolee, who should have been in jail, running down and killing two women on a city street is exactly the kind of incident that fuels outrage. And for the D.A.’s office to say, as it did, that they “missed” the terrible spiral of lawlessness and violence while McAlister was on parole, is not going to calm the Boudin critics.

In short, I don’t think it is a mystery why there are a lot of San Franciscans who are upset with Boudin. It isn’t his progressive politics. It is the way he is doing his job. A failing he’s made worse with his tin ear responses to criticism.

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The New Yorker story is worth a read, by the way. If nothing else, there’s the laugh-out-loud moment when a friend offers a description of how engaging Boudin can be.

“He’d talk to a squirrel,” he says.

Naturally the story includes Boudin’s remarkable life story. His mother and father, working with the Black Liberation Army, were convicted of felony murder during the robbery of a Brinks truck.

Boudin’s mother served 20 years in prison. His father is still confined, which Boudin says, in a story I hadn’t heard, is the result of his dad’s decision to defend himself in court.

Boudin was raised by former Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers tells a story that captures the headstrong, determine young Chesa.

A fifth-grader, he organized a fund-raiser where donors pledged to pay participants for every lap swum in a pool. Boudin swam and swam and swam. Ayers says the pool staff wanted to go home, his two kids were waiting for dinner and “the motherfucker was still in the pool.”

Boudin is still there now, head down, churning up the water. He’s determined. He’s taking on his critics. And he’s not giving up.

Unfortunately, at this point a lot of San Franciscans want him to get out of the pool.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Suggestions and compliments gladly accepted. Criticism not so much. Twitter: @cwnevius