Joshua B. Hoe interviews Chesa Boudin about his time as District Attorney of SF and about his recall from that office.
Full Episode
My Guest- Chesa Boudin
Chesa Boudin was elected District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco in November 2019. He ran on a platform centered on protecting crime survivors; reducing unnecessary incarceration; and addressing the root causes of crime. During his time in office, both violent and non-violent crime fell by double digits.
While running the District Attorney’s office, Boudin was put up against a 9 million dollar propaganda campaign funded by right-wing billionaires, and in June 2022 the recall was ultimately approved by 55% of San Francisco voters. In the end, he received more votes in the recall election than he had in the 2019 general election, but not enough to finish his first term in office. Boudin remains steadfast in his commitment to creating a more just and equitable criminal legal system and ensuring equal enforcement of the law.
Watch the Interview on YouTube
Watch episode 134 of the Decarceration Nation Podcast on our YouTube channel.
Notes From Episode 134 – Chesa Boudin
There are a lot of good articles about the recall of Chesa Boudin, here is one about astroturfing, here is a good one about the real motivations behind the recall, and here is a good one from John Pfaff about what lessons we should (and should not) take from the recall.
The books that Chesa recommended were:
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr.
Presumed Guilty by Erwin Chemerinsky
Lockdown America by Christian Parenti
Prison Writing in 20th Century America by Bruce Franklin
Full Transcript
Joshua Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 134 of the Decarceration Nation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system.
I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Chesa Boudin about his time as the District Attorney of San Francisco, about his recall from that office, and about how the reform prosecutor movement can better address the backlash, astroturfing operations, and even technology-based attacks from tough-on-crime opposition.
Chesa Boudin was elected District Attorney for the city and county of San Francisco in November of 2019. He ran on a platform centered on protecting crime survivors, reducing unnecessary incarceration, and addressing the root causes of crime. During his time in office, both violent and nonviolent crime fell by double digits. While running the District Attorney’s Office, Boudin was put up against a $9 million propaganda campaign funded by right-wing billionaires, and in June of 2022, the recall was ultimately approved by 55% of San Francisco voters. And in the end, he received more votes in the recall election than he had in the 2019 general election, but not enough to finish his first term in office. Boudin remains steady and steadfast in his commitment to creating a more just and equitable criminal legal system and ensuring equal enforcement of law. Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast, Chesa Boudin.
Chesa Boudin
Great to be with you Joshua, appreciate your work.
Josh Hoe
Thank you so much. Appreciate your work, too. I always ask the same first question. I and many people probably know a little bit about your story. But here’s another opportunity for those that don’t. And that question is: how did you get from wherever you started in life to where you were elected Prosecuting Attorney in San Francisco, California?
Chesa Boudin
Well, I was born in New York City. And when I was about a year old, my parents left me at the babysitter, and they never came back to get me that day. And while I was playing, they were driving a getaway car, technically a switch car in an armed robbery, and the robbery went terribly wrong. And even though my parents weren’t themselves armed, two police officers were killed, a security guard was killed and my parents were both arrested that day, along with many others. My mother ended up getting sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, my father received a 75-year to life prison sentence for the same conduct. I don’t remember that day, I don’t remember when the judge handed down those sentences. But my earliest memories are as a child, waiting in lines outside prison gates and going through metal detectors just to be able to see my parents just to be able to touch them and give them a hug. And it was that experience of spending years, now decades, of my life, visiting jails and prison, both personally to see my parents and then professionally when I spent five years or so as a Deputy Public Defender in San Francisco County, that really taught me some profound lessons about the failings of our country’s approach to public safety and to justice. I learned the hard way. I noticed even before I understood what politics were, that our system was profoundly racist, because I saw those lines at the prison gates were mostly black and brown women and children. I also realized, because I saw what was happening and what was not happening in so many jails and prisons, that our system is not meaningfully rehabilitating anybody, that instead, we’re setting people up to fail and creating a cycle, a revolving door. I also realized that victims of crime have far too little to show for all the money we spend on building jails, prisons, and incarceration, we’re not investing seriously in the . . . . And finally, I learned that the resources going to punishment and incarceration were starving local governments that really desperately needed money to invest in things that actually prevent crime and build safe, strong, vibrant communities, things like health care and housing and education and employment. And it was that life experience and life’s work that led me, in the context of the national progressive prosecutors [movement] back in 2019, to decide to run for San Francisco District Attorney.
Josh Hoe
And could you talk about that election process? Like what did you learn? And for people who are thinking about maybe entering into that arena, what can you tell people who are considering running for public office?
Chesa Boudin
Get a helmet? Look, it’s no secret that politics is something of a blood sport in San Francisco in particular, and I think we’ve seen Donald Trump both as a symptom and as an accelerant of some really vile tendencies in public office, in public politics. We now have entire second segments of the political apparatus that have normalized lying to the press, lying to the public, that normalize corruption of all kinds. And sadly, being the kind of elected official, the kind of candidate who has integrity and who’s honest, and who plays by the rules doesn’t always pay off, it’s not always rewarded the way that you would think it should be. And so I think one thing to recognize is we need optimists. And we need idealists in office. But we also need people who have thick enough skin to play a game that is a really hard ball game. And it’s, it’s definitely not for everybody. And you’re going to find people you work with and who you rely on in some instance, are people who simply don’t have the kind of moral grounding or the kind of ethical framework that we all would hope people in public life have. That’s a sad reality, whatever party you’re in, and whatever part of the country you are in. And yet, it can’t lead us to cynicism, it cannot allow us to give up on our values or to start playing dirty. I’m really proud, as I look back, that I governed and I ran my races with integrity, and with principle, and with consistency. It may not have worked out the way we hoped, or the billionaires who financed the recall against me may have succeeded in misleading a lot of people about what was actually happening in San Francisco. But I’m proud of the record. And I’m proud of the way that we held ourselves up even in the face of tremendous attack. So I think you want to stay grounded, and you want to make sure that you’re going into public office, not to advance yourself for your own career, but rather, because of principles and values that you want to fight to advance. If you’re willing to compromise your principles and your values to advance your career, then you’ll make those compromises early and often.
Josh Hoe
So you decide you’re going to run, you’re kind of going through the selection process. What did you present to the public as your campaign platform? When people say that you ran as a progressive or reform prosecutor? What exactly does that mean to you? Because there’s a lot of different kinds of definitions about this. And I’m sorry for the multi-question. But what was your version of what that all meant to you?
Chesa Boudin
Absolutely. I totally agree, I think that the term progressive prosecutor or reform, criminal justice reform, has been really watered down, to give one concrete example close to home. The folks who bankrolled the recall against me using millions of dollars in contributions from Republicans claimed, however dishonestly, that they believed in reform and that they were progressive. So I think you’re right, we need to drill down. And we need to identify very concrete specific policies and pledges. That’s exactly what I did as a candidate in 2019. I wanted to be as honest and as specific and as detailed with San Francisco voters as possible for a couple of reasons. One is I believe in transparency and accountability. And I knew I couldn’t be held accountable if I wasn’t transparent about what I planned to do. And second of all, I didn’t want people to act surprised when I followed through on my campaign platform. And finally, I did it because I believe we need to create political space. And we need to use elections and public office, at least in part, as a public education tool. So we can advance the conversation we’re having in complex, nuanced areas of policy, like what goes on inside a criminal courtroom. So here are the three core platforms that I ran. The first one was that jails and prisons, incarceration should be a last resort, not a first response to the array of social problems that get dumped on the criminal. The second one was that we should invest the savings from decarceration in significant expansion of victim services. The third one was that we should enforce laws equally, that nobody should be above the law, no matter what color their skin is, no matter how much money they have in their bank, or how much power [or] political influence. Those are the three core platforms of what I ran on. And obviously, we were really specific about what some of the policies would look like: ending cash bail, making sure that survivors of sexual assault have their rape kits tested and their DNA privacy protected. We made a commitment that we would take police accountability seriously, we made a commitment that we would create a worker protection unit that would go after companies that steal from their employees. Those kinds of specific policies were part of our platform in 2019. And they were the work that we did every single day I was in office.
Josh Hoe
And so you announced the platform, then you get elected, you’re starting to implement that platform. How did you choose to implement that platform?
Chesa Boudin
Well, I tried to do everything we promised voters and I tried to do it as quickly as we could do it successfully. Obviously, we didn’t predict the COVID pandemic. I was sworn into office in January of 2020. So I really only had two months in office where I could actually go in and see my staff and build relationships with constituents and stakeholders face to face. There were a whole series of things that we then had to respond to a budget crisis and COVID in our jails and courtroom, things that we never anticipated. So part of the answer to your question is, you do as much as you can as fast as you can. And within that, you have to make strategic decisions. Some of that is a question of what do you have the staff to do? You know, in the beginning, we didn’t have a team in my unit that was set up to investigate police use of force or police misconduct, we didn’t have a team that was experienced in trying cases, for example. And so that meant that you know, for me, as you know, as DA, I couldn’t personally investigate those cases myself, I had to build a team. And then before we started filing cases against police officers or making decisions not to file cases against police officers, I had to build the team. Other areas, we already had a team in place that was capable of doing the work. So it was really like, it was that kind of a triage process saying, What can we do quickly? What is the office ready for in terms of the ability to successfully implement? And then what are the things that are the highest priorities for me? So the first policy we implemented, the very first one, was a policy that had been made possible thanks to a new state law that took effect just before I was sworn in. And it created a statutory diversion program called primary caregiver diversion. It was an issue close to my own heart, because of my lived experience, visiting my parents behind bars. And because of my recognition that we can build safety more effectively, if we take nonviolent offenders who are parents, and we find ways to get them connected to services, and keep them engaged and focused on their families, rather than going to a jail cell or ….. criminals. And so we created a primary caregiver diversion program, my first week in office. And within a month, we implemented a policy that prohibited my Assistant District Attorneys from seeking cash bail, because I believe pretrial detention and people who are presumed innocent should be based on risk, not on wealth. You know, those are the kinds of things we lead with and other things took more time to build out infrastructure, hire staff, etc.
Josh Hoe
That’s interesting. I want to follow up a little bit there because one of the things that some people who’ve been evaluating the reform prosecutor movement have said is that there might be a difference between people who come in having already been on the inside of the prosecutor’s office, and people who come in as outsiders. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Chesa Boudin
Well, you know, I think it’s funny if you think about the kind of trajectory of careers and it’s really common and normal and kind of uncontroversial. It’s accepted that people who spend much of their careers as prosecutors would then switch sides and go into private practice defending really wealthy criminal defendants and white-collar practices in the law firms. I guess for some people, it seems less normal or less acceptable that you would have people come from a criminal defense or civil rights background, and go be prosecutors. The truth is that, in any sport, in any profession, in any activity, where you regularly go up against an opponent, as in an adversarial legal system, it is really, really useful to have people who know how the other side thinks. And anytime I was being asked about a new murder filing, for example, we had to make decisions about whether or not a case was provable. And whether we have probable cause to believe we couldn’t prove a case to a jury. You know, one of the first questions was, what are the likely defenses? And how are we going to charge this case? How are we going to negate those possible defenses? And if you don’t have anybody in your team who’s ever really looked at a case critically from the other side, or who understands what the likely next steps are going to be in litigation, you’re at a real disadvantage. So, you know, I was, I was happy to have a team that included career prosecutors, my chief assistant district attorney had been in the San Francisco district attorney’s office his entire career, since well before I was a lawyer. And I was also happy to have people on my team who had spent much of their career either in private practice or working as public defenders, people who could bring to the conversations a critical lens. And also, you know, it’s a little bit like chess in litigation, you want to anticipate the other side’s next move. And having people who’ve been on the other side who have worn that hat, who have relationships with people on the other side makes a huge difference in your ability to think strategically and make the right decision.
Josh Hoe
And what about the relationship with police – which seems to be one of the toughest – since prosecutor’s offices do have to work hand in hand with police and also police are often the people who are pushing back the most against reform prosecutors.
Chesa Boudin
Definitely, you know, the relationship with police is a challenge and you know, I want to be clear, this isn’t unique to me or to my policies. The San Francisco Police Department and the Police Officers Association has attacked and undermined district attorneys in this city going back decades. You know, they attacked Terrence Hallinan because he was a former defense attorney. They viciously attacked our vice president when she was San Francisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris because she refused to seek the death penalty. George Gascon, who preceded me, had been Chief of Police prior to being appointed by now Governor Gavin Newsom to be the DA, and the police union attacked him and undermined him, and said he was difficult to work with. There’s a clear pattern of police unions in this city in particular, but across the country, being unwilling to work with anybody who doesn’t serve as a spokesperson. You think about how often you see a district attorney’s press conference after a police shooting, for example. And it’s simply parroting and echoing information that police have given the DA. It’s not critically evaluating and it’s not bringing an independent lens or analysis or investigation to that information. Now, DA offices and police have to work hand in glove, the reality is 99% of the cases that DAs prosecute rely on the investigation and the testimony of police officers in order to prove those cases. And so it gets awkward when the DA is also holding police accountable. That’s why my office had a totally independent unit, a team of lawyers who were essentially in their own part of the office separated from the rest of the lawyers and who were hired specifically under my administration for that job, people who didn’t depend on calling officers as witnesses day in, day out, in their run of the mill cases, the robberies, and the drug sales and the assaults, firearms possessions that make up the vast majority of cases [we prosecuted]. But it turns out that the firewall on our side didn’t matter that much to the police, they were determined to undermine and attack me and my office across the board to protect a few of the folks in their ranks, who were on video shooting and killing unarmed black men in ways that were totally unjustified.
Josh Hoe
Is there any way you can see to bridge that gap after going through the experience? You know how at some level our goal is to try to have more reform-minded prosecutors and the response to the reform-minded prosecutors is always going to be no from the police, obfuscation from the police. Do you see a potential bridge of any kind after your experience?
Chesa Boudin
Well, potentially, I mean, I think part of the problem is we need you know, we need a change in culture. It’s true that in DAs offices across the country, we need to move towards a culture that is not a conviction at all costs culture, but rather a doing justice culture and within police departments. Similarly, we need to move away from a culture of impunity, where police officers have been taught since the academy that they can lie, cheat, steal, even steal, with no consequences. Sadly, you know, in San Francisco, we have some of the lowest clearance rates, meaning our police solve crimes at lower rates than almost any other big city in the country for things like shoplifting and auto burglaries. People who commit those crimes have a 98% chance of getting away with it, even if the crime gets reported. And yet police get raises year after year after year. So there’s a real culture of corruption and impunity …. You know, we need police officers and we need police unions to really want and believe in weeding out bad apples amongst their ranks. We need them to want to restore integrity and public trust by making sure that people who commit crimes, perjury, and falsify police reports using excessive force are not above the law. I think that would do a tremendous amount of good for the relationship between communities and police who have sworn to serve and protect those communities. But we need to change the culture because right now there’s a deeply entrenched resistance.
Josh Hoe
And one of the obviously very different things in your city – well, I’m sure it happens at some level in almost all campaigns – but particularly in your situation, is that there were people raising money to unseat you almost, Well, literally from the day you got elected. Can you talk about trying to operate in that unique environment that you experienced? And about astroturfing in general?
Chesa Boudin
Yeah, I think it’s a new normal. And I think we’re seeing this with, you know, they’re trying to impeach Larry Krasner. You know, and they just, Governor DeSantis in Florida, just removed State’s Attorney Andrew Warren. I mean, these are instances of people doing exactly what they promised voters to do, they are instances, you know, both, if you take my example in San Francisco and many others where crime rates have actually fallen significantly under our leadership, not that that’s the best metric for the short term success of the DA or of a particular policy. But there really is no credible, honest argument in favor of these overtly political maneuvers. But what we see is a playbook across the country, recall efforts legislatively or through executive action, to strip reformers of their powers in a concerted effort orchestrated by police unions, Republican operatives, Fox News, and its various networks online to really undermine not just public trust in individual elected officials, but also in the policies that they’re championing that make our community safer. We saw that play out in San Francisco from day one. And there’s just no question, it makes the job more difficult. It makes the job more difficult and it’s designed to make the job more difficult. It means that instead of being able to positively message the policies you’re implementing or the impact of having the initiatives, you’re taking the partnerships you’re building, you’re often on the defensive, correcting blatant lies and misinformation that all too often get published – maybe in quotes, and I suppose some reporters or some editors think it’s okay to publish lies if they’re attributing it to somebody else, without fact checking or a greater sense of responsibility. We were dealing with that every day. And it’s frustrating. And in my case, at least in the short term, it was effective. It succeeded in making San Franciscans think that their feelings of the city being on the decline or crime being on the rise, were attributable to me and my policies. In reality, crime fell 20% when I was in office, compared to the same two-and-a-half year period prior to my administration, and in reality, any criminologist, any data scientist will tell you that no District Attorney, no policy implemented at that level can have immediate short term impact on crime trends anyway, it’s something that you have to evaluate over a longer period, which is probably why we have four-year terms.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, and one of the interesting things about that is that you know, we see this all over the country where, in many ways, there was a spike in crime, but it was pretty much universally felt that was certainly as high and sometimes higher in GOP cities and tough on crime prosecution areas, as it was in places, the few places, where there were reform prosecutors. But there’s this narrative of almost like, you know, you’re living in the second, the first circle of hell, you know, in all the places where there are reform prosecutors. And so part of it seems to be a political game. Would you attribute the reason why this happens exclusively to politics? Or do you see another motive for why the pushback is so strong, even though the facts clearly don’t back those things, those suppositions up,
Chesa Boudin
It seems to me really similar to the broader attacks on the legitimacy of the election, of the presidential election, for example, or elections across the country. I think what we’re seeing is, in essence, the rise of authoritarian or even fascist tendencies in this country. And they’re playing out in lots of different ways at the local, state, and federal level. And one of the ways is powerful groups like the police unions. And you know, the Republican Party in places like Philadelphia, where they’re not going to win an election, fair and square, are resorting to really dishonest, dirty tricks to try and take power. And also to try and make sure that if they can’t take power, the other side, the side that was actually elected, democratically can’t implement their agenda. I think it is politics. But I think it’s politics in a context that has really high stakes and really real consequences. Police unions want to continue to offer their ranks and their members impunity, they want to be above the law. I suppose who wouldn’t on some level? Billionaires in their boardrooms, who make money stealing from their employees with business models that are all based on wage theft, or corrupt politicians in our City Hall here in San Francisco, these are folks who want to be able to continue the status quo, it benefits them, they get away with it. And so when someone comes in, like myself, who is independent of them, who has a transformational vision for how the criminal legal system should work, and it’s one based on holding even those in power accountable, not just using the force of our punitive, carceral state to target poor people of color, that is really, really scary to people in power, people who’ve been getting away with crime, or whose colleagues and associates have been getting away with breaking the rules. And so there’s a political reality about wanting to take power, and it is also a tremendous motivating force for those with money and resources, who see themselves potentially being prosecuted for the same crimes that they want to throw the book at people for. When there’s a viral video at Walgreens or some other lower-level theft, they’re all too happy to see people go to prison. But if it’s them, or somebody who they play golf with, who’s written the law, they want to be above it.
Josh Hoe
So there are a few general arguments that opponents generally make against reform prosecutors. The first we’ve talked about a little bit already, which is that as a result of reform policies, violent crime goes up, and victims’ rights are ignored. Obvious. A lot of times they actually even say you’re putting the rights of criminals in front of the rights of victims. We’ve talked a little bit about how crime actually went down under your watch, but how generally, do you think it’s best to respond to these kinds of attacks?
Chesa Boudin
Just with facts. I mean, it’s just you know, and we’ve heard these kinds of lies come out of the mayor in San Francisco, London Breed, who repeated these tropes to attack me and support the recall regularly. And it’s, you know, it’s disappointing to see elected officials, whether it’s Trump or whether it’s democratic elected officials engage in the kind of dishonest fear-mongering that so undermines reforms that actually empower communities that have represented our base and the people who are accountable to for so long. Look, just look at the facts, we expanded the victim services division in the DHS office by historic proportions. San Francisco’s biggest language minority group is Chinese speakers. When I took office, we had one person in the entire Victim Services Division who spoke Chinese. I appointed the first-ever Chinese-speaking head of our victim services, and we increased the number of Chinese language staff by over 500%. We created a whole series of model policies to expand and ensure language access to victims of crime and their families. But we didn’t stop there. We partnered with Airbnb and with other government agencies to ensure that survivors of domestic violence had a safe place to shelter in place during the early days of the pandemic. We also worked with Lyft to ensure that survivors of sexual assault could get free and discreet transportation away from an abuser into a hospital for evidence-gathering purposes when we learned that the police department was illegally and dishonestly using survivors of sexual assault DNA for investigating crimes totally unrelated to the sexual assault that the survivor had courageously come forward to report. We didn’t sweep it under the rug or look the other way. We called it out. And we helped ensure that San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution prohibiting that conduct. And now the California State Legislature has passed similar legislation that would prevent law enforcement agencies anywhere in the state from violating victims’ rights and privacy interests in the way that the San Francisco Police Department was doing secretly. Those are just a few examples of the ways in which we’ve expanded victim services. I’ll give you a couple of others. You know, when I took office, we didn’t have a single victim advocate who worked on property crimes. And property crimes are by far the most . . . ., they’re the crimes that affect the most people. And yet, the DA’S office prior to my administration didn’t have the resources or didn’t prioritize providing any kind of services to people whose homes have been broken into, people whose cars have been broken into, to business owners who had had their storefronts vandalized. Every single budget that I submitted during my time, every single one asked for more resources for Victim Services, and the mayor never once gave us $1 for it. Instead, we had to fight tooth and nail to write grants, we got the biggest grant in the office’s history to expand victim services. That’s the work that I was doing day in and day out. It’s the work that I prioritized. And to see the folks who criticized us for not doing enough, turn around and on day one demote the wildly successful and popular head of my Victim Services, that was really the epitome of hypocrisy.
Josh Hoe
So I guess the other thing that people kind of lobbed I think, sadly, fairly effectively, was this notion that your office was responsible for an increase in retail crimes, shoplifting in particular. In retrospect, do you have any thoughts about how – obviously, this is another instance where data contradicts the kind of anecdotal narratives they throw out – but these anecdotal narratives still seem to end up carrying a lot of weight? So have you thought any about how to thread the needle between the data and these explosive anecdotes?
Chesa Boudin
Definitely. I mean, one thing did go up for certain during my time in office when it comes to shoplifting, and auto burglaries, and retail. And that was the number of videos we all saw. We all saw far more videos of brazen property crime in San Francisco during my two years in office than people saw before; that doesn’t mean that those crimes were more common. In fact, they were down by about 20% overall during my tenure, but we all saw far more videos. Why? Well, a couple of reasons. One, there’s a proliferation of video cameras everywhere, crimes are more likely to be recorded today than they were five or 10 years ago. Second reason that I think it was more common is that people were stuck at home during the pandemic and spending a lot more time on their screens and [there was] a lot more potential for videos to go viral. And then the third one is that it became really popular, it became kind of a meme of its own to talk about crime going up under me and under reform DAs in ways that had everything to do with anecdotal videos and nothing to do with data. How do you thread that needle? Well, I think there’s a couple things that are true. One is that elected District Attorneys are exactly the wrong people to go to constituents who are upset about property, crime, who have experienced it, or who are scared of it impacting their neighborhood, or their community, or their business quarter, and try to talk about what the data shows. Because if you’ve been a victim of crime, or somebody you care about has been a victim of crime, you don’t really care what the data shows, you’ve experienced something that’s really scary and harmful, and you want something done about it. And so I think it speaks to the need to have the media really play a role that many of our founders conceived it playing, which is as a fourth branch of government, keeping the public educated and informed by what the facts are. I think we saw a real abdication of that visibility over the last several years, at every level of society. And I think we also need to have proxies, independent voices, whether they write OpEds or whether they be professors or, you know, pundits who can actually remind the public of what the real facts are, whatever they happen to be. Maybe crime is up in . . . and maybe it’s down in others, but it’s not fair and it’s not successful to ask elected district attorneys to go to angry constituents who have themselves experienced crime and say, Hey, but actually, it’s down by 5%. It’s just not a good, productive conversation to have. And I think, probably I would have done better if I had stopped talking about the data earlier, because A, people didn’t really listen anyway, didn’t believe it coming from me. And as I said, if people are scared, the numbers don’t really matter. But it also leads, I think that that question of yours leads to this other point I want to make, which is that no matter how many professors or pundits or talking heads or elected officials you have pointing out what data shows, you’re going to have just as many people on the other side lying about that, cherry-picking it, manipulating it, picking one neighborhood or rigging the data, so that they can get a data dashboard to show something scary; picking one category of crime and ignoring all the others. And so I think it speaks to the broader need for community organizing, for deep, long-term community engagement. And also again, you know, for the media to play a neutral and critical role in educating people because if the media, and I’m including Twitter and Facebook, but if social media and mainstream media start significantly increasing coverage of crime, people are going to think that crime is significantly up, simply because it’s on TV and showing up on their Twitter feed more than it used to, and that can be totally divorced from what the statistics say. They couldn’t even put in an article at the bottom [that says] by the way, crime is down 20%. But when you have those videos, playing on repeat, and rewind and repeat, and rewind and repeat, it’s kind of impossible for people to walk away with any other conclusion than that crime is out of control.
Josh Hoe
The second general argument that people make against reform prosecutors is that reform prosecutors, for lack of a better term, usurped the role of state legislators, violating the separation of powers between the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judiciary. Do you have any thoughts here?
Chesa Boudin
Well, look, I mean, prosecutors and their discretion are deeply enshrined in this country’s constitutional practice. Prosecutors are supposed to have discretion, and we’re elected to have discretion. That’s the whole point. And that’s why it matters who you elect, because you can elect somebody who in their discretion seeks the death penalty, or you can elect somebody who, like me, in their discretion, promises never to seek [the death penalty]. That’s not usurping the power of another branch of government, that’s exercising your discretion within the framework created by those …right? We can’t, for example, say in California, you know, if somebody’s convicted of a robbery, there’s this very specific punishment that’s set out by the legislature, right? Two, three, five years in prison. We can make a recommendation, it’s the judge’s decision to implement and impose that sentence. Each part of the government has discretion subject to checks and balances by other branches of government. That’s how our government works and how it was designed to work. So to say, Well, I’m an elected district attorney. And, I promised my voters that I would not use my limited resources to enforce laws that criminalize abortion, as Andrew Warren did, and as I did, and as many dozens of other elected attorneys around the country did, is not usurping the power of anybody. It is a reflection of the democratic process and the democratic will of the people who elected you. And if they choose to unelect you or to elect someone to replace you because of that, then that’s how the democratic process should work. I can’t imagine the same right-wing attacks being levied against a district attorney who were to publicly say, and they don’t say this part publicly, they don’t say the quiet part out loud, but imagine if one of these Republican district attorneys in Oklahoma said, there are laws that criminalize political corruption. But I’m not going to enforce it because I’m friends with these guys. And say there are laws that criminalize wage theft, but I’m not going to enforce them, because the people who are stealing from their employees look like me. You wouldn’t see the same backlash, you wouldn’t see the same. The reality is, there are 1000s and 1000s of crimes that don’t go investigated by police, that don’t get prosecuted by state’s attorneys, or district attorneys for all kinds of reasons, involving and including discretion. So to politicize and weaponize the exercise of that discretion in a way that’s transparent, rather than quiet, under the radar, behind the scenes is really damaging to democracy. And it’s really undermining the independence of elected officials who are following through on the promises they made to their constituents.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I find that to be one of the most disingenuous and problematic parts of the entire thing. I think they are really relying on the ignorance of a lot of people to suggest that. I mean, even the most tough-on-crime prosecutor in the United States utilizes this discretion in every possible way. Every single day, you know, everything from plea bargains to non-prosecution to what they choose to prosecute. And this notion that only the people who don’t prosecute the things that we don’t like are the ones that should be, that somehow that it’d be a lot of these same people who exercise discretion every day are the ones out there, screaming about how it’s not okay for people to do this. Am I crazy here?
Chesa Boudin
Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. I mean, it’s the definition of hypocrisy. And if it weren’t so common, you know, it’d be newsworthy, it’d be outrageous, but it’s just become really normalized in our system. There’s a double standard. And, and, you know, it’s, it’s frustrating that the folks who are honest and transparent in the way they exercise their discretion, you know, telling voters, this is how we’re going to do it, we have limited resources, we are not going to prioritize non-violent crime, we’re gonna prioritize violent crime, we are going to dedicate resources to these areas that police will not investigate, like wage theft, or political corruption, get penalized for it. And it’s really, it’s not just short-term gain for the Republicans and their allies. It’s also long-term pain for the democratic process because they are disincentivizing transparency and honesty in ways that are really damaging.
Josh Hoe
And I think you just a couple of minutes ago or a minute ago, suggested something else, which is, you know if there are examples . . . well, there’s a distinction the opposition often makes here about the difference between discretion in one case, and declaring a blanket non-prosecution policy. That seems like a made-up distinction to me.
Chesa Boudin
I think you can say, there’s a distinction where, we’re going to take, for example, you can imagine an elected district attorney saying, you know, I’m not a supporter of the death penalty, but I’m open to the possibility that we would seek it in extreme cases, we’ll leave that door open, and we’re going to evaluate case by case. And then potentially, in their discretion, in every single case that gets presented during their tenure, they choose not to seek the death penalty. So I can see that being one version of exercising discretion, maybe that’s more palatable to some people than saying across the board, I will never seek the death penalty. I don’t know that. You know, that we as liberal Democrats, people who believe in democracy should have a preference for one versus the other. I mean, I think if you are someone who knows that you will never seek that out, why not be transparent about that, and if voters in your jurisdiction disagree, and they want to have a district attorney who will seek [the death penalty], elect one. I mean, it seems to me we are all better off when we have transparency and honesty from our elected officials. That being said, I can imagine some policies or some areas where you might want to have room for discretion or carve-outs, I can imagine some situations where you might say, this is a presumption, and we did this in my office, frankly, we had a lot of policies where we said there is a presumption against charging prior strikes status. Now, we have the presumption that if we can convict you of the crime that we’re charging you with, then the sentence the law allows is adequate. And in some limited cases, we’ll make an exception to that presumption. And we’ll add a prior strike if we think we need to, to protect public safety. There were very few circumstances where we felt the need to make exceptions. You know, I can see the benefit of having that flexibility. But I also think certain cases, like the death penalty, are like prosecuting reproductive choices. There’s value in having bright lines that we don’t cross and I’m telling our constituents that these are bright lines and this is where we stand as a community these days. We have limited resources, they are not going to be spent investigating or prosecuting people for exercising their reproductive choices. That to me is a bright line, I will be very proud and I was proud to commit not to cross, I would way rather use those same resources, those same courtrooms, those same person-hours for my staff investigators and lawyers to work up a murder case or rape case. And I just think that’s an exercise of discretion, frankly, that is within the heartland of what we elected district attorneys.
Josh Hoe
You’re making a very good case, a case for transparency being important to democracy. But you’ve also, I think, inadvertently made some arguments for why it might be better not to talk about it, because essentially, what prosecutors do now, the non-reform prosecutors, is they have their policies, they just don’t talk about them. Some of them might even be systemic policies. And they don’t ever get called on the carpet because they aren’t making them public. And they aren’t transparent about them. But in the instance of most reform prosecutors, they start out saying, here’s what we’re going to do and then trying to do it, which then they get called on the carpet for. Does that make sense?
Chesa Boudin
Absolutely. I’ll give you another example. Most DAs, the person who replaced me, for example, she will never prosecute police. It doesn’t matter what police do, it doesn’t matter what the case is, in fact, she’s planning to dismiss all the cases I filed involving police excessive use of force, but she would never say that, instead, she will lie. And she’ll say we’re evaluating them on a case-by-case basis, we believe in police accountability, right, say all the right things, and then try to quietly do the status quo, dismiss the cases I filed, not file new cases, make excuses on a case-by-case basis. And it may be that the reality, the political reality is that there’s more of a political cost to pay to taking on the powerful, challenging the status quo, even if you do so honestly, and transparently than there is to being a liar and defending this devil. I mean, I think that’s one of the sad lessons that people may learn from, from my recall, and from some of the other similar attacks we see. But you’re absolutely right. It is common, it is normal for politicians to say one thing and do another. It’s one of the reasons why so many people are cynical about politics. And yet, when you have folks like myself who come in and say this is my policy platform, these are my values framework that I’m going to bring to the job, that transparency is used as a sword to attack us by the other side.
Josh Hoe
One argument, you know, that people make in defense of reform prosecutors in this separation of powers area, is that there are available legislative remedies, legislators can preempt the powers of a particular reform prosecutor, preempt their non-prosecution policies, or even you know, allow other prosecutors to maybe prosecute different jurisdictions that they weren’t elected for. But at the same time, there are real costs, like, for instance, what you talked about in Florida with Andrew Warren, who was elected democratically and still got preempted, because, for some reason, Florida allows the governor to randomly preempt elected prosecutors. What do you make of the tension here? And how might you resolve it?
Chesa Boudin
A part of the problem is that we’re seeing, our entire system is built on checks and balances, checks between branches of government, checks between federal, state, and local government, checks between the voters and the people that they elect to serve, checks between imbalances between your elected officials and appointed officials and those that are career bureaucrats. That’s how our government was designed and has evolved. So that’s a normal part of government. What we’re seeing that’s different in cases like the impeachment efforts against Larry Krasner, the suspension of Andrew Warren, the recall efforts against me and DA Gascon in LA and recall efforts against many of the reform prosecutors in Virginia. The efforts to make recalls possible against Kim Fox in Chicago and on and on, is that they’re taking these really outlier extreme remedies that have almost never been used before. And if they have been used they’ve been used in cases of really blatant corruption or crimes when in office, the kinds of things you might consider impeaching the president for, and they’re using those tools, not because we did something wrong or lied about what we’re going to do, but precisely because we’re following through on the promises that got us elected. And it is tremendously damaging to the democratic process to have these tools which may be democratic or they may be enshrined in the Constitution. For whatever reason, you may be able to make a case for why a governor suspends a rogue, elected local official, you may be able to make the case for why we should have recalls, but they certainly should not be used in the kinds of cases we’re seeing them used in all too often. They should be reserved for, I don’t know, we had a mayor in California last year who was charged with a whole series of sexual assaults, and he had refused he had initially refused to step down. We have cases where we have people in office and in San Francisco, we’ve had, I think, six department heads indicted by the Feds in the last two and a half years. If those folks refuse to step down, we should have a remedy. But it shouldn’t be used simply because one side lost an election or disagrees with the policy that the winner of the election promised voters they would have.
Josh Hoe
We’ve determined I think, or you said earlier that it was the new normal that there will always be a backlash coming. Whenever a new, maybe any prosecutor but at least reform prosecutors are elected, what should newly elected prosecutors or reform prosecutors be thinking about? In particular, in the first few weeks after they enter the office? I’m thinking in the context of what happened with Alvin Bragg in New York, where he’d put out a memo in the first two weeks, he just got totally inundated with attacks. And having gone through this, do you have any advice for him?
Chesa Boudin
I mean, it’s, it’s tempting to say, you know, I’ve heard some folks say, they just tend to say you should never have any bright-line rule policies, you should always have a carve-out, you should always have an exception, you shouldn’t communicate clearly and publicly and transparently [about] what you’re doing, you should just do it quietly. I think, as tempting as it is to say that, I think those are really slippery slopes and it’s dangerous. I believe that elected officials have a duty not only to represent the people that elect them but also to lead. Part of leadership means public education, public communication, it means helping to educate folks about how the system works and doesn’t work and why these policies are necessary and helpful. So I think we have to find ways to be transparent, to continue to communicate, honestly, what we’re doing. And I think in some instances, like the death penalty, bright-line rules are entirely appropriate. So, you know, I think, sadly, some of the lessons being learned around the country might be to move away from transparency and communication. I think, a better lesson learned, one that I hope people will take is that just because you win a race doesn’t mean that you’re entitled to actually do the job you were elected to do and that you have to treat every single day in office like it’s precious. You have to have the urgency of the opportunity that you’ve been given by voters, and that you need to continue to campaign and to build community support for the work you’re doing. Winning an election is one thing. But every time you implement a new policy, every time you take on the status quo, or the powers that be, you need those same communities, or you need that same community engagement. And so you’ve got to stay in campaign mode, as exhausting, and as tiring, and as distracting as that can be. It’s the only way to really build support for the changes that you’re elected to implement.
Josh Hoe
I think you talked earlier about how DAs are maybe not the right people to be providing the data, and there might be other people who would be better to do so; how would you change [that] if you had to do it over again? How might you address communications differently? And you know, I think at times people maybe accused the office of lacking a bit of empathy. And that’s what you were talking about earlier. So I guess I’m repeating myself, how would you have changed the communications end of your work?
Chesa Boudin
Well, first of all, I think we needed to be much more proactive about communicating what we were doing and why it was important, and why it promoted safety and victims’ rights. Second of all, I think we needed to worry less about fact correction and error correction because the volume of misinformation was far greater than anything we were ever going to be able to fully correct. And then finally, I think it’s critical, we needed to develop and cultivate other trusted voices in the community, independent of us, but who could speak with authority and with knowledge about what was happening and what was normal and what was abnormal. And, you know, I just think it would have been far better for people in San Francisco to hear about crime trends from somebody other than me or my office. And we didn’t have enough people who could credibly play that role in the criminal justice ecosystem.
Josh Hoe
It’s interesting because I think most people when they hear San Francisco say, Well, you know, that’s the perfect environment. I think people have a perception that San Francisco is a very liberal area, with tendencies toward the things you were trying to do. Obviously, there’s some mismatch between what we and other states think and what was happening there. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Chesa Boudin
San Francisco is a, you know, is a strongly democratic city. And it’s a favorite punching bag for pundits on Fox News who want to, you know, paint a picture of failed progressive policies, [but] the reality is much more complicated. San Francisco, first of all, is not a failed city. It’s one of the best cities in the world to live in. And, you know, I think people who spend time here see how beautiful it is and how much it has to offer. Second of all, the fact that we are 90%, you know, Democrats doesn’t mean that we don’t have very serious divisions along political lines; here, the two parties are basically called the moderates and the progressives. And there’s really awful, dishonest infighting between those two parties the same way we see at the national level between the Democrats and Republicans. You know, I think one of the challenges is just recognizing that you know, it is a progressive place, but it’s far less progressive than its national identity is. And that’s particularly true as over the last 10-15 years, the tech industry and other trends have contributed to massive rapid gentrification, and a dramatic increase in the cost of living and the wealth that average voters in San Francisco have. Let’s be clear, you know, most people who are harmed by and directly impacted by both crime and the response to crime are people of color. And in San Francisco, we have about three to 4% of our voters [who are] black, three to 4%, we have only about 10% of our voters [who are] Latinx. And so when you look at the demographics of the city, it’s not a surprise at all that there was a backlash to Criminal Justice.
Josh Hoe
Another element that is kind of unique, I think, in your situation, one of the things you’ve referred to a few times is this mismatch between resources in your office or your former office and resources on the attack side. But one thing I noticed more than anywhere else that I’ve tried to write messages about, or respond to, or anything, it’s the amount of bots that would respond to any comments about your campaign or your recall or anything like that. I would often get 100 to 200 messages that said one of two things: they’d either say, you don’t really, you would know how bad crime was if you lived here. And the other one was, you’re from Michigan, what do you know? And they’d all say that one of those two things, but there’d be hundreds of them. Anytime I wrote a message about anything. So it seems like another thing that people need to start thinking about is how technology is going to play into these kinds of attacks – recall and other kinds of reactionary campaigns. Do you have any thoughts about that, having gone through it?
Chesa Boudin
Yeah, it was, it was brutal. You know you want to be able to communicate. And one of the nice things about Twitter or some of these other social media platforms is you can quickly and directly communicate with the public. You know, the problem with them is that they really have been taken over by bots. And we saw that, as you say, with every single thing I put up, we were just inundated. And we knew they were bots, we knew they weren’t real people. And yet local rules prohibited me as an elected official from blocking other accounts. And so we sort of had to let these anonymous, non-human, computer programs that we still don’t know who set up, really take away from us the ability to communicate, and they also shape the media narrative. Reporters look at activity on Twitter, and they see all these comments and they see all these hateful attacks. Supporters, you know, folks, as you described, who weigh in or make a comment with simple facts or information got inundated with hate and with threatening messages. And so it really was, I’m sorry to say this, but it was an effective way to silence allies and to shape the perception in the public and in the traditional media, about what we’re doing and what reactions to it were. And I think that’s just something that folks need to be aware of, and we need to watch for it when we’re looking at what’s coming in our feeds, what’s coming across our phone screens, we need to remember that these mediums are really, really easily manipulated. And we should beware anonymous accounts or even the kind of aggregated data of how many people comment on thing versus when we like it, all of that stuff is so easily manipulated, and frankly, often so are we, individually, when we are trying to take informational shortcuts and doing research about an issue.
Josh Hoe
You talked earlier about trying to stay optimistic, and so aside from what we’ve already discussed, you’ve been through this long, to some extent ordeal, but you probably had some moments you are really proud of throughout the whole thing too. You know, I just want to open some space before we go on to closing questions. Is there anything else you’d like to say? You haven’t done a lot of press or talking that I’ve seen since it happened. So, where are you at? What are you thinking? What would you like to say?
Chesa Boudin
I’m just tremendously humbled that I had the opportunity to try to lead the DAs office during a time of crisis. I mean, my tenure was really defined by the COVID pandemic. For most of my two and a half years in office, I couldn’t go into my office. And we faced challenges we never could have anticipated and had to make adjustments and adaptations, the Black Lives Matter movement, the COVID pandemic were things that so defined my first year in office, and then we had to spend my entire second year and a half in office, fending off not one recall, but two recalls. The first one failed, the second one succeeded. I’m proud of the team that dealt with the work we did. It was an immensely productive period in my life, I learned a lot. We saved a lot of lives, we contributed meaningful resources, and supported a huge number of people. And we actually followed through on promises in ways that I hope will serve as an example to jurisdictions and to elected officials around the country for what is possible and what can be done in ways that actually are consistent with falling crime rates, with saving resources for other areas of government, putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to supporting victims. I look back on the two and a half years I was in office with pride, with humility. It was a tremendous opportunity. And I’m really, really proud of the team that in my office over zoom and under historically challenging circumstances, managed to make a really big difference and build out alternative pathways for holding people at times accountable, and uplifting those who have been harmed.
Josh Hoe
A friend of mine, Amanda Alexander always talks about the power of dreaming big and encourages people to have freedom dreams. During this season, I’ve been asking people about their freedom dreams. Can you share any big dreams that you might have?
Chesa Boudin
I’m a new father. And maybe this is . . . Yeah, my son just turned a year old. So it still kind of dominates our daily life. Maybe it always will. But I dream big for him. I want him to grow up in a community, in a city, in a world where freedom isn’t just a political slogan, but it’s something that we take seriously and our values and our allocation of resources, and the way we interact with other human beings.
Josh Hoe
I always like to ask people also if there are any criminal justice-related books that they like. You can see behind me on the shelf that I like a few and might recommend to our listeners. Do you have any favorite books?
Chesa Boudin
Oh, gosh, I mean, I can go back, I spent so much of my life reading about criminal justice and criminal justice reform issues. I mean, I go back and forth. Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander. You know, I think there’s James Forman’s book Locking Up Our Own, another really valuable, of course, Pulitzer Prize winner. You know, a book a little more academic, by the Dean of Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky called Presumed Guilty about how the Supreme Court has empowered the police and undermined and subverted civil rights is another great read. One from way back, I think I read this book when I was in college, but Christian Parenti, Lockdown America, I believe, is the name of the book. And then another one, in a totally different vein that my late mother was published in as part of an edited volume, H. Bruce Franklin put together a collection of prison writing from 20th-century America. It includes a poem that my mom wrote, it includes work Malcolm X did, and it has some really famous, well-known authors, as well as people you’ve never heard of, who have really, really compelling things to say about the world and their experience with incarceration, and all the contributors to that volume were themselves at one point incarcerated. So there’s a few for you, and I’m sure we can come up with more; you’ve got some good ones on the shelf behind you. I’m seeing Emily Bazelon, Charged, there’s a good one.
Josh Hoe
I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What questions should I have asked, but did not?
Chesa Boudin
I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. I wish I had clearer answers to some of them. You know, I think we’re grappling with this really dynamic situation in this country and in this movement. And, you know, we’ve got to continue to be creative and proactive about fighting for the communities we represent and for the values that we believe in, and we have to be prepared for constant relentless attacks on our efforts to bring about that change.
Josh Hoe
Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate getting to talk to you.
Chesa Boudin
Thank you. Pleasure to speak with you and look forward to next time.
Josh Hoe
Absolutely. Thanks again.
And now my take.
This is my final episode of Season Five of the DecarcerationNation podcast. I want to thank all of my guests: Eric Reinhardt, Elliot Young, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Hannah Riley, Scott Hechinger, Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell, Michael Deegan McCree, Eliza Orlins, Patrice Sulton, M. Chris Fabricant, Ashish Prashar, Kristin Henning, JJ Prescott, and Wayne Logan, Keri Blakinger, Hugh Ryan, Dana Sussman – and of course Chesa Boudin.
Finally, a very special and large thank you to our listeners. I certainly never imagined when I started this five years ago, that I would still be releasing episodes. All this time later, we will be back for Season Six starting on Martin Luther King Day, January 16, of 2023. Now that I think of it, I also should give a very special thank you to my team, Andrew Stein, Ann Espo, and Alex Mayo. None of this would have been possible without these folks, or without our previous assistants, Kate Summers and Robert Alvarez.
As always, you can find the show notes or leave us a comment at decarcerationnation.com. If you want to support the podcast directly, you can do so from patreon.com/decarceration nation. For those of you who prefer to make a one-time donation, you can now go to our website and make a one-time donation. Thanks to all of you who have joined us from Patreon or have given a donation. You can also support us in non-monetary ways by leaving a five-star review from iTunes or add us on Stitcher, Spotify or from your favorite podcast app. Make sure and add us on social media and share our posts across your networks. Also, thanks to my employer, Safe and Just Michigan for helping to support the DecarcerationNation podcast. Remember, it takes a village to promote a podcast. Thanks so much for listening to the DecarcerationNation podcast tonight and throughout this entire year. See you next time.
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