Chesa Boudin Must Go

The California Globe has generally resisted endorsing candidates or initiatives. Our sense is that trust in the media is so low that declaring our opinion on one page and then covering the news straight on the next naturally gives rise to the impression of bias. Our country is suffering a crisis of confidence in its news providers right now and we don’t want to pour $6 gasoline on that dangerous fire.

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That’s why when the left-leaning, Soros-adjacent NewsGuard operation showed up last week once again asking probing questions about our objectivity, particularly on matters involving Covid and ballot counting, instead of ignoring them, we spent hours painstakingly providing evidence of our reporting as well as making some adjustments where they had accurately pointed out sloppiness in our work. We don’t care so much about the grade they give us, which essentially serves no other audience except the most important one, Google, which uses those grades as an excuse to reward liberal publications and punish conservative ones. But we do agree with the basic premise, that lack of trust in news is a dangerous phenomenon for any democracy. We will see if NewsGuard spends as much time hassling, for example, Slate, which allowed Hillary Clinton to feed them what we now know from her own campaign manager to be fake news about a server linked to Russia in the Trump campaign, news that was created by the Clinton campaign itself, then leaked to the news, and then cited by the campaign as news.

The Globe has decided to break from its traditional neutrality for the upcoming June 7 recall election of Chesa Boudin. This election is too important to ignore. Chesa Boudin must go. He is a menace, a failure, and he has played the single largest role of any individual in ruining a great city.

Were Boudin standing trial rather than election – the kind of trial his office has been woefully reluctant to perform — the evidence for conviction is overwhelming. Boudin took office in January 2020. Today, burglaries are 40% higher than they were in 2019. Homicide is 20% higher. Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders soared from 9 to 60.

There’s also his weird ideas about victimology. Boudin seems to operate on some sort of hierarchy of victimhood, where the sad lives that may have been endured by, for example, domestic abusers takes precedence over the misery that those abusers inflict upon their mostly female victims. That’s why Brooke Jenkins, a top prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office and a strong progressive who is also Black and Latina, quit the SF DA’s office and endorsed his recall. She is one of at least 51 lawyers at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office who have quit or been fired under Boudin; losing a third of one’s staff in two years is a troubling sign on its own.

But for us, it was a single startling fact, brought to our attention by terrific reporting in the San Francisco Standard, that forced the Globe off the sidelines and created a moral imperative to stand against the continued unraveling of what was once the most beautiful city in America.

There were nearly 500 fentanyl deaths in San Francisco last year. Try to guess the number of successful prosecutions for dealing fentanyl in San Francisco in 2021.

The number is zero. Chesa Boudin prosecuted zero fentanyl dealers last year. In fact, he secured only three felony convictions for “possession with intent to sell” drugs in 2021, again, none for fentanyl.

Just for context, consider that George Gascón, the previous DA of San Francisco, and a fellow woke prosecutor who is facing his own peril now that he has the same role in Los Angeles, obtained more than 90 drug-dealing convictions in San Francisco in 2018.

What transforms this shocking failure from incompetence to something much more sinister is the reason for Boudin’s fail rate. According to the Standard, the reason Boudin has failed so miserably is that most of those who would be eligible for these prosecutions are gang members from Honduras. He is concerned that as convicted felons, they will be deported to Honduras and face an uncertain fate. So instead of prosecuting them for felonies, he uses the much lesser charge of “accessory after the fact,” ensuring their continued residence in the city they are destroying.

The fact that Boudin places the safety of drug dealers who have killed 500 San Franciscans over the lives of the people he was sworn to protect is disqualifying. Repeat: Boudin must go.

The Globe is not of the belief that Boudin is congenitally flawed because of his being born to two convicted terrorists. We believe in redemption. We watched his campaign and his clever exploitation of the then novel strategy of being the second choice of many communities in what was the first run of ranked-choice voting. The Globe is generally friendly with and admiring of some of Boudin’s biggest supporters, and believes that they simply want what’s best for the city that they love as much as we do.

But it’s been a disastrous two years. He has failed. There is zero indication of the sort of humility or reconsideration of mistakes that would give even stalwart fans any rational basis for hope. Meanwhile, the crisis deepens every day. The city has become a national laughingstock, its videos of lawlessness and shoplifting and the accompanying store closures serve as worldwide examples of how not to run a city. Its police demoralized to the point of duty dereliction, and no one who has seen the way the DA supports criminals could reasonably blame them.

Third time: Boudin must go. Save this city. On June 7, vote to recall Chesa Boudin.