Across the country, candidates for DA may think twice before occupying the progressive lane that Boudin so proudly sought. A new DA could seek to reinstitute cash bail, curtail diversionary programs, and shy away from aggressively prosecuting police officers who abuse civilians.
The recall vote in San Francisco was a remarkable rebuke of Boudin - 60 percent voted to pull him from office - and could derail efforts his office had undertaken that, just a few years ago, enjoyed wide support from liberals. But the national rise in crime unsettled both cities, with a spike in burglaries and homicides repeatedly seizing headlines and rampant homelessness and drug use that have come to define Los Angeles and San Francisco alike. Boudin was elected in 2019 and his predecessor, fellow progressive George Gascón, moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to defeat a more conservative incumbent. Los Angeles and San Francisco, Democrat-dominated cities, were at the vanguard of such efforts. In Los Angeles, on the same night, billionaire Rick Caruso won a plurality of votes with a tough-on-crime platform in the mayoral election, heading to a runoff with Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass.īoth low-turnout elections played on complex local dynamics but were clear rejections of a certain strain of liberalism that buoyed reform-oriented prosecutors across the country and sought to defund the police. San Francisco voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive district attorney, potentially dealing an enormous blow to a once ascendant criminal-justice-reform movement. Chesa Boudin speaks to supporters after being recalled by voters.
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