DID PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN CALIFORNIA LOSE LAST TUESDAY?

Some media outlets and political pundits declared even before the votes were counted that the recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin demonstrated a national backlash against progressive politicians and policy. Not so fast, you over-paid, over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployables of the corporate Press Corpse:

Boudin, elected San Francisco DA in 2019, definitely espoused progressive ideas: reform the criminal justice system, stop prosecution of minors as adults, end cash bail, lower jail populations during the COVID-19 pandemic, and filing homicide charges against city police officers where the evidence supported the charge. About 60% of San Francisco voters supported the recall (called Proposition H), which by any measure is a landslide rejection of Boudin.

Interestingly, the recall had absolutely nothing to do with the success or failure of Boudin’s policies, since the campaign to get rid of him began THREE DAYS AFTER HE TOOK OFFICE - financed by Tech and Real Estate billionaires. The otherwise-unemployables didn’t tell you that, did they?

Is Boudin’s recall a warning to other Democrats to tamp down progressive approaches to crime, homelessness, housing, poverty, and other issues?

Across the bay in Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland where the homicide rate is four times that in San Francisco, civil rights attorney Pamela Price led the field of four candidates for the vacant District Attorney job. Price, whose policy ideas are not much different than Boudin’s, received 40% of the vote. Since no one received more than half of all votes, she will face Terry Wiley in November. He’s an assistant DA who only got 31% of the vote despite being supported by the Oakland Police Department, whose contributions outspent Price.

Voters in nearby Contra Costa County gave a strong vote of confidence to incumbent District Attorney Diana Becton, a progressive former judge who was first elected DA in 2018. Becton won outright, avoiding a November run-off, because she won 57% of the vote to 43% for Mary Knox, a career prosecutor who ran on a conservative law-and-order platform and was backed by many local and national law enforcement groups. Becton made headlines last year when she won a conviction against Andrew Hall, a former Sheriff’s Deputy, in the fatal shooting of Laudemer Arboleda.

On election night when her victory was confirmed, Becton said, “Contra Costa County voters have spoken clearly to indicate that they really want a criminal justice system that is about safety, but that is always also about fairness and equality for everyone. We’ve adopted new and innovative approaches that move us beyond a singular reliance on incarceration.”

Becton, and - if she wins in November - Price are part of a growing wave a progressive district attorneys who have won election, and re-election, in cities and counties across the country.

Although most voters don’t want to “defund the police,” they’ve expressed growing concern over racial profiling and other forms of police misconduct, mass incarceration of people of color and the racial disparities stemming from the War on Drugs.

Larry Krasner, a civil rights lawyer, was elected Philadelphia’s district attorney in 2017, signaling the start of what became recognized as a movement toward progressive DAs. He quickly shook up his office by firing attorneys who were considered too close to the police and by exonerating prisoners’ wrongful convictions based on the misconduct of police and prosecutors that mostly targeted people of color.

He was re-elected last year.

Progressive prosecutors have also been elected or re-elected in Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Orlando, Tucson, Westchester County, Austin and Corpus Christi, Jefferson, Larimer, and Jackson counties in Colorado (which I can assure you are no hotbeds of liberal activism), and Oakland and Washetnaw counties in Michigan. Among them was Keith Higgins who in 2020 ousted incumbent Jackie Johnson, the DA who gained national media attention for her mishandling of the murder of the Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.

Also in 2020, Gary Tyack, a former judge, told the Columbus Dispatch that he decided to run for Franklin County, Ohio, prosecutor because “I frankly have seen too many situations where people of color have been shot by police officers and nothing has come of it.” He won the seat with 53% of the vote, ousting Ron O’Brien, a Republican who served in that post for 24 years and was known for aggressively pursuing the death penalty.

Also in 2020 voters in Los Angeles County elected George Gascon District Attorney. Embraced by Black Lives Matter, the former LAPD cop and San Francisco DA beat incumbent Jackie Lacey, who was heavily supported by police unions, with 53.6% of the vote. Soon after taking office in December 2020, he began implementing progressive reforms such as not seeking cash bail or the death penalty and not prosecuting children as adults. The LAPD and LASD police unions, billionaire developers like Beverly Hills real estate baron Geoffrey Palmer, mayoral candidate Rick Caruso (Mister Mallworld) and Hollywood moguls quickly began a campaign to recall him. So far it has been unsuccessful in collecting enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot. I have seen people in Porter Ranch in the northern San Fernando Valley - the hotbed of Republicanism in the valley - walk past the professional petition signature gatherers outside the Walmart Supercenter in the Porter Ranch mall, ignoring pleas to sign the Gascon recall. His opponents have sought to blame him for a surge of crime, even though crime in cities with progressive prosecutors has not increased more than in cities with conservative law-and-order district attorneys.

I’ve watched the Los Angeles Police Department prove itself unreformable five times in the past 50 years; I was lucky enough to be involved in their first “police riot” - at Century City Plaza demonstrating against an appearance by LBJ in June 1967 - and have personally gotten off jury duty here three times for telling the ADA questioning me that “I wouldn’t believe a member of the LAPD if they told me it was (the day I was in court).” I wouldn’t give the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department that much credence; the prison guards turned “street cops” even have their own jail gangs operating on the outside. I was once arrested at a demonstration here 30 years ago, and when it came time for us to be released without charges (for having not committed a crime), we were individually harassed by one of the jail deputies, who was hoping to get a response from someone that would allow the deputies to make an arrest before we could get out of the Van Nuys Jail. Even “Hollywood Bill” Bratton didn’t reform the LAPD in any lasting way. Of all the parts of Los Angeles government that don’t work, the police don’t work the worst. We’re not at “We Own This City” levels, but it’s close.

The San Francisco recall campaign against Boudin outspent his defenders by a 3-to-1 margin. It was orchestrated by conservative billionaires and the San Francisco Police and Sheriff’s police unions, who raised at least $7.2 million to oust Boudin a year and half before his term ended. The largest donor was a political action committee, Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which contributed close to $2 million. Its biggest donor, San Francisco-based hedge fund manager William Oberndorf, gave at least $600,000. He has been a major supporter of charter schools and a big Republican booster who’s given $1.5 million to Senator McConnell’s GOP Leadership Fund in 2020. Other major contributors to Neighbors for a Better San Francisco include the Shorenstein realty empire (owners of the Fairmount Hotel and the St. Francis), venture capitalists Steven Merrill and Jason Moment, and investment banker Paul Holden Spaht, Jr.

Boudin won election in 2019 under San Francisco’s non-partisan ranked-choice voting system, coming in first in a four-person race, but he won only 35.7% of the first-choice votes. Boudin won in the third round by a margin of only 2,825 votes, or 1.66 percentage points. As a result, he did not have a strong mandate for his progressive agenda and his hold on the office was always tenuous, particularly since he was subject to attacks by the police and prosecutors in the DA’s office from the moment he arrived, most of which were echoed by the local media.

Moreover, the recall effort was not a typical election campaign. He did not have an opponent to run against. As Boudin acknowledged after conceding defeat, “Voters were not asked to choose between criminal justice reform and something else. They were given an opportunity to voice their frustration and their outrage, and they took that opportunity.”

Boudin’s opponents blamed him for San Francisco’s severe homelessness crisis, caused primarily by the city’s housing shortage, rising rents (they were high when I lived there 50 years ago - now they are literally the highest in the nation), the proliferation of low-wage jobs, and the lack of mental health services. The District Attorney’s office did not cause and had little control over those problems, but he became a lightning rod for these concerns.

Several high-profile incidents, including assaults against Asian Americans seniors, also raised fears about crime. In fact, rapes, robberies and assaults actually fell significantly during Boudin’s first two years in office, although some crime categories including burglaries and motor vehicle theft, slightly increased. The number of homicides increased from 41 in 2019, to 48 in 2020, to 56 in 2021. San Francisco’s crime rates are comparable or lower than that of most other big cities. People who sleep on the streets or in shelters are not responsible for most crimes, but Boudin’s critics conflated the two issues – crime and homelessness – and played on voters’ fears about safety, fueled by the well-funded campaign that scapegoated him for being soft on crime and disorder.

Polls showed that Boudin’s policy prescriptions: ending cash bail, not prosecuting children as adults, and creating a workers’ protection unit in his office, were popular with voters. He prosecuted an on-duty police officer for manslaughter.

Back when I lived there, the SFPD was actually worse than the LAPD. I was involved in three of their “police riots” back in the sixties. In 1970, I spent four months covering the trial of Los Siete de la Raza, seven Latino youths accused of murdering a well-respected SFPD gang officer. In the end, the defense portrayed his partner, a notorious drunk, as being the guy whose gun was the murder weapon when it went off during a struggle with one of the kids, who he was assaulting (according to the testimony of the woman inside the house in front of which all this took place). They were found not guilty, but over the next two years, the harassment by the SFPD led three of them to return to El Salvador where they were from (having arrived as legal immigrants, BTW), while two disappeared, and two were arrested for charges they were obviously innocent of, but were convicted anyway. At the time, I knew a member of the SFPD’s Internal Affairs Division, who told me stories that could still curl one’s hair about cases he had investigated against cops.

Even Boudin’s supporters acknowledge that while he was a smart policy wonk, he was not a very adept politician, unable to sell his ideas for criminal justice reform. As a result, the recall was essentially a referendum on whether voters were happy with the status quo, not only homeless encampments and crime, but also broader frustrations over the restrictions impose by public officials during the pandemic and skyrocketing rents. And I’ll remind you again that the campaign against him began THREE DAYS AFTER HE TOOK OFFICE.

)Trust me, I am writing this about Boudin despite the fact I knew his parents “back in the day” when they became urban terrorists, and I am of the opinion they should never get out of the slammer.)

The unusual circumstances of the Boudin recall suggest that Democrats should not take the outcome as a warning that voters have turned their backs on liberal and progressive policies, as the DA elections in Alameda and Contra Costa countries demonstrate. And as the sputtering campaign against DA George Gascon here shows.

In our recent primary here in LA “Mister MallWorld,” Rick Caruso, lifetime Republican who only became a “Democrat” when he changed his registration three weeks before declaring his candidacy, the guy whose malls have managed to destroy more nice, interesting shopping districts in Los Angeles than any of the other real estate scum looking to get themselves memorialized on street signs the way the original real estate robbers who created this place did (Believe me, “Chinatown” and “LA Confidential” are documentaries), ran for Mayor as “I alone can fix this” (where did we hear another real estate pig say that before?). He spent $40 million of his own money, in addition to $4 million spent by the LAPD Police Union, campaigning against Congresswoman Karen Bass, who spent a total of $3.1 million raised from actual supporters. And he only managed to come in 1.4% ahead of her, and that number’s still fungible while they’re counting late-arriving mail-in ballots.

I can understand where people are coming from about the problems facing urban America. Just yesterday, I stopped for gas at the local cheap gas station ($6.25/gal for “Regular”) and the local threatening, crazy, likely schizophrenic, homeless guy who stands by the front door to the station verbally assaulting people as they walk past, was there doing his thing - he gets arrested every few weeks, sometimes put in psychiatric hold for the three days it’s allowable to do so, then he gets released and he’s right back there. That’s frustrating as hell, not to mention the guy is big and black with the craziest eyes I’ve ever seen and scares everybody. But it wasn’t George Gascon who put him there. It was Sainted Ray Gun 45 years ago, who took up the liberal campaign to close the mental hospitals - without ponying up the money for community treatment centers - that started it all. It was the pinstriped pimps like Mister MallWorld and the yuppiescum at Zillow who go into a neighborhood, buy three houses for more than the asking price, then come back two months later and buy two more for $100,000 more than the first three, “raising property values” and giving themselves $300K profit, raising rents to where I am paying 50% of my income and consider it cheap compared to the alternative (one of the reasons why I ask you free subscribers to consider upgrading to paid supporter).

Those are the people to be pissed off at, but the over-paid, over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable white yuppies of the corporate Press Corpse want you to believe that progressive political reform is dead in America, that even “San Francisco lib’ruls” don’t support it any more.

Bull. Shit.

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