Bid to recall San Francisco DA could be bellwether for progressive prosecutors

[cbabe]

2. Boudin/democracy now: the rest of the story

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/6/3/chesa_boudin_recall_san_francisco

“We Can’t Jail Our Way Out of Poverty”: San Fran. DA Chesa Boudin Defends Record Ahead of Recall Vote

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He now faces a recall campaign, with opponents blaming rising crime rates on his policies, even though sources like the San Francisco Chronicle report that crime rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Boudin says the recall campaign is spearheaded by wealthy donors, the real estate industry and Republicans who desire a conservative DA who will not hold police and other powerful actors accountable. Opponents who attack Boudin’s social justice reform without any of their own proposals “are a scourge to democracy,” says Boudin. “We don’t need to jail our way out of poverty or other social programs.”

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During his time in the office, Boudin has taken many historic actions, from charging an officer for manslaughter to creating a wrongful conviction unit that recently led to the freedom of a man wrongfully imprisoned for 32 years. Chesa Boudin has also cut the juvenile jail population in half.

But his efforts to reform the system have faced a backlash, funded in part by the real estate industry and ultra-wealthy donors. Key backers of the recall include the billionaire Republican donor William Oberndorf; former PayPal executive David Sacks; Ron Conway, an early Doordash investor; and Garry Tan, an investor in Instacart.

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And the folks who are behind them, as we saw with the attempted recall of Governor Gavin Newsom, are Republicans and police union operatives and ultra-right-wing groups that have learned the hard way that they cannot win at the ballot box if they put their candidates or their ideas to voters. In other words, their only path to winning is not to actually tell voters what their policies or principles or values or even their candidates are, but rather to attack those of us that have won elections democratically.

As you mentioned, the primary individual donor of the recall against me is a man named William Oberndorf. And to be clear about who he is and what his values are, he has given over $6 million to the PAC controlled by one-time Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he helped Mitch McConnell, “Moscow Mitch,” as they called him, pack the U.S. Supreme Court. His values include eradicating gun control laws, taking away women’s right to control their own bodies and attacking the right to vote. These are not San Francisco values. But he would never be able to win with his chosen candidate.

And so, instead, they’ve spent the incredible sum of $7 million in a local election without putting forward a single concrete proposal for addressing the problems that San Franciscans face every day, without building a homeless shelter or helping to support our underfunded school teachers, without even advancing one iota of concrete policy proposals or evidence for how we can do better than what we are doing every day.

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