On Sweeping Change And The Importance of Trains

Chesa Boudin was supposed to be the visionary DA who helped usher in a new way of thinking about Criminal Justice. Here’s an excerpt from a glowing article from January 2020, back when his coming tenure was still full of promise:

A reformer who has promised to shake up the broken criminal justice system was sworn into office Thursday, with a promise to end cash bail, end “three-strikes” sentencing, and create a restorative-justice program that starts with alternatives to incarceration.

Chesa Boudin took the oath of office in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd that filled the Herbst Theater.

It was the culmination of an unlikely campaign that took the career public defender into the political realm for the first time – and showed that San Franciscans are sick of the criminal-justice crisis.

“We are about to inaugurate a DA who is like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC and the Squad,” Sup. Hillary Ronen told the crowd. “He is a big thinker who will turn ideas into reality.”

Read the whole story, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice this part as well:

The TV reporters shined their lights and cameras at Boudin, and in a way that I could have scripted in advance asked the same questions:

If we look for alternatives to incarceration, won’t the “criminals be emboldened?” (Yes, that’s what Channel 5 asked.) What about property crime? Aren’t you being (again, these were exact words) “soft on crime?”

Boudin did a good job – at one point, he told the cameras that “poverty is not a crime, and we will not prosecute people for being poor.”

He talked about better approaches to car thefts and his plan to do more outreach to crime victims.

“We will not prosecute people for being poor.”

That seems like such a lovely sentiment, doesn’t it?

Part of the problem is that San Francisco had less than an ideal experience with Chesa’s big ideas *AS THEY WERE PRACTICED*.

His “more outreach to crime victims”, sadly, did not translate well to a mass audience (or did so in such a way that it seemed that there was a disconnect as to who he considered the victim in a particular handful of crimes).

Antoine Watson allegedly attacked Vichar Ratanapakdee in an attack that resulted in Ratanapakdee’s death. After knocking him to the ground, Antoine allegedly returned to his car, got his phone, and took a picture of Ratanapakdee on the ground. Chesa Boudin described the alleged attacker’s motivations thusly: “It appears that the defendant was in some sort of a temper tantrum.” After this was publicized, Chesa pointed out:

Some media outlets are intentionally taking my words out of context to suggest that I am minimizing a horrific crime.

Let me be clear, as I was in my NYT interview: This was a heinous crime and my heart goes out to the victim’s family. pic.twitter.com/ZTWQ1oXF9c

— Vote NO on H!!!! – Chesa Boudin 博徹思 (@chesaboudin) March 2, 2021

Chesa Boudin’s clarification to his out-of-context statements didn’t get the same level of publicity as the “temper tantrum” thing, though.

That’s a particularly egregious example, one that shows up a lot in why the Asian-American community in San Francisco supported Chesa Boudin’s recall. There were, sadly, other examples of Boudin’s Restorative Justice In Practice. In 2021, Chesa Boudin’s had a grand total of three convictions for drug dealing in 2021, none of which were for fentanyl during a year in which 500 people died of opioid overdoses. The convictions for fentanyl-adjacent crimes generally got pled down to “accessory after the fact”. If there weren’t a whole lot of deaths involved, it’s easily argued that drug dealing is, at worst, a nuisance (and, hey, those people aren’t paying sales taxes!). But if there are deaths involved? Sentences of “time served” seem like ignoring the problem rather than dealing with it. It becomes catch and release rather than actually dealing with the problem.

Okay, so even if we dismiss both the Ratanapakdee case (with the whole issue of how it’s muddied by whether or not it counts as a hate crime in addition to wrongful death) as well as the open-air drug market thing (which, seriously, you can’t divorce from the homelessness issue). What about other murders?

The Marina Times (a paper very much against Boudin) ran a story about the murders of Emma Hunt, Latanette McDaniel, and Ronisha Cook. There is a *LOT* of editorializing in the story but the fact that does not seem to be in dispute is that the two people involved in Emma Hunt’s shooting and death were not charged with murder but with a firearms charge.

On top of that, over 75% of felony firearms cases were dismissed, discharged, or diverted under SFDA Chesa Boudin.

Instead of an improved Justice, the experience looked like swapping the old for a new but different Injustice. People responded to the new but different Injustice as if it were worse.

Now this may seem unfair. Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change and Chesa tried to change things for the better!, I could see someone arguing. Yes, I suppose that that’s true, but it seems to fail to take into account that, for a lot of government positions, the important output involves a lot more than intention and ideology. At the end of the day, the trains have to keep running.

Chesa was in a situation where anti-Asian hate crimes were going up more than 500%. This happening in a time where the Asian-American community in San Francisco was feeling unheard was not going to be addressed by stuff like pointing out that half of those crimes were due to one person.

An analogy, if I may. Back in 1998, James Byrd Jr. was a black man who was horrifically killed by three white men. George W. Bush, former governor of Texas, was accused of condoning that sort of thing because he opposed hate crimes laws. Bush pointed out, over and over again, that two of the three murderers were sentenced to death and the third murderer was sentenced to life in prison. From his point of view, he didn’t think that hate crime laws were necessary. What would a hate crime law have accomplished for this particular case? Three death sentences instead of merely two? But the argument for the existence of hate crime laws are about more than heaping additional punishments on top of regular horrible crimes. They’re about the society explicitly pushing back against a set of attitudes that make already horrible crimes even more horrible.

And, through that lens, Chesa’s response to the Asian-American hate crimes was similar to George Bush’s. I think that that is what Chesa was trying to do when he categorized Antoine Watson’s heinous attack as a “temper tantrum”. It wasn’t that the crime wasn’t horrible. It’s that he wanted to deflect away from it being *HATE*. Unfortunately, the facts of the case were such that the Asian-American community in San Francisco felt like the DA was not working for them. His “more outreach to crime victims” didn’t result in outreach to the Asian-American community, but to attempt to turn the hateful horrible crime into a merely horrible crime. The outreach was not to them, but to Antoine Watson.

If you are going to make a bold sweeping change in how stuff is done without making sure the trains also run on time, then you can look forward to not being re-elected if not recalled.

I suppose a counter-argument could be made that, hey, crime is going up in Republican-led cities as well so, therefore, those DA’s shouldn’t be re-elected. That doesn’t seem to take into account the issue of “bold sweeping change” heralding the trains not running on time.

To compound the problems, one of Chesa’s first acts was to call for the prosecution of a handful of police. Some were cases that had been dropped by the previous DA, George Gascon. There were a few that he couldn’t prosecute due to too much time having passed and them being insufficiently investigated at the time. He announced that he wouldn’t be prosecuting but he made it very clear that this shouldn’t be interpreted as sanctioning the actions of the cops in question.

One of the things the Chief of Police did was issue a press release of his own where he, of course, took the side of the cops. Shortly thereafter, the police in San Francisco engaged in an unofficial work slowdown. They refused to show up to shoplifting incidents saying “the DA won’t prosecute”. There is video evidence of the police sitting and watching crimes being committed.

And, in this case, the guys working on the railroad had a vote as to whether the trains would get to the station on time. They did what they could to make sure the trains didn’t.

In the thread dedicated to the Recall vote itself, LeeEsq had a really insightful comment:

I think the basic problem that Chessa Boudin and other progressive DAs and activists have is that a lot of people do not like visible disorder and their approach to criminal justice reform requires voters putting up with a lot of visible disorder. in San Francisco, you really can’t avoid seeing the sort of visible disorder created by homelessness and its related issues. These tend to be especially focused in the Tenderloin and SOMA neighborhoods. Other parts of the Bay Area like Oakland can also have a lot of visible disorder but it tends to be rarer. SF is really the focus of it in the Bay Area.

I think this is something that European social democrats get a lot more than the Anglophone Left. They know that you need to maintain a basic look of peace and order to get most citizens to go along with the program. The Anglophone left tends to be too much in love with the spirit of rebellion (TM) and believes that having the homeless and other people at the margins of life be in your face to the comfortable will drive the comfortable to have “there but for the grace of God go I” rather than drive them to the right despite all historical evidence to the contrary.

A progressive society needs to be a lawful and orderly society. People find shoplifters and turn style jumpers annoying enough. They aren’t going to like the more obnoxious forms of visible disorder. So if you want people to take transit rather than drive than transit needs to be free of people blasting music, having drag out fights, or making a scene of themselves in other ways.

Part of the issue, at the base, with Chesa’s reforms is that they were accompanied by an increase in visible disorder.

Was all of this disorder Chesa’s fault? Of course not! But no one is arguing that all of the disorder was his fault. Was *ANY* of it his fault? Well… part of the problem with the argument that none of it was goes back to Channel 5’s question at his inauguration party:

If we look for alternatives to incarceration, won’t the “criminals be emboldened?” (Yes, that’s what Channel 5 asked.) What about property crime? Aren’t you being (again, these were exact words) “soft on crime?”

And, in the months that followed, the numbers for crime went up in 2021 for San Francisco. Not every single crime, of course. But murder went up. Car break-ins went up. Aggravated assaults went up. Thefts went up. (Burglaries went down as did auto thefts.)

Were criminals emboldened? Well, who can say? Even those who believe that Chesa did nothing wrong have to admit that the timing of the crimes going up was pretty bad. The police not being on board with his reforms resulted in a work slowdown that did a good job of nipping Chesa’s reforms in the bud.

And, let’s face it, his gaffes when it came to a handful of the hate crimes that allegedly took place were bad to the point where I’m curious as to whether he was engaging in self-sabotage.

Now London Breed will pick his replacement. At the end of the press conference in which the 2021 crime stats were revealed, she said:

“Statistics really don’t matter when you’re a victim,” Breed said. “At the end of the day, regardless of a statistic, when it happens to you and you used to feel comfortable safe walking around San Francisco and all of sudden, you’re randomly attacked and you’re traumatized and you can’t even walk you kids to school, that’s a problem. So, from my perspective, this city has to do more.”

That seems to be an indicator that she’s got a focus on crime victims. Her most likely potential picks?

The people most frequently being identified as candidates to become interim district attorney include Supervisor Catherine Stefani, a former county clerk and vocal supporter of law enforcement; Nancy Tung, an Alameda County prosecutor and expected candidate for the job in November; former San Francisco prosecutor and recall spokesperson Brooke Jenkins; San Francisco Superior Court judge Victor Hwang; Eric Fleming, also a judge in San Francisco who previously served in the DA’s Office under Kamala Harris; Department of Police Accountability head Paul Henderson; Suzy Loftus, who was interim DA before Boudin’s election; and civil rights attorney Joe Alioto Veronese, who announced his run for DA earlier this year.

If the visible disorder recedes following the new DA, Chesa’s revolutionary new way to think about crime prevention will require more hypotheticals to defend them than they do now and we can expect his fans to point out how the trains still aren’t on time. We’ll see what happens, of course. There are a lot of crimes out there and not all of them go down with increased policing. But if the old way of thinking about Criminal Justice results in trains that are merely less late then that will have an impact on future experiments.

Indeed, the recall seems to indicate that that’s already happening. Governor Gavin Newsome has said that the recall of Chesa was “so predictable“:

But the governor, who served as San Francisco’s mayor from 2004 to 2011, said he understood why Boudin was decisively voted out of office in Tuesday’s recall election.

“I think the issue in San Francisco, in particular, is people want the streets cleaned up — period. Full stop. Enough,” Newsom told Elex Michaelson, the host of the political podcast and television show “The Issue Is.” “They want the streets cleaned up. They want a sense of order from the disorder they’re feeling on the streets.”

If you want to remake society, you’ve still gotta make the trains run something close to “on time”. If you don’t do that, it won’t look like you’re improving what you had before. You’re just picking different victims.