The Chesa Boudin Recall
Recently, my son, a straight-A sophomore at Cal, died. If you made a word map of all of the condolences I’ve received, “kind” would be the centerpiece, rising out of “funny, patient, and warm.” He died of an accidental overdose from drugs he purchased on the street in SF. And Chesa Boudin, SF’s District Attorney, isn’t doing anything about these low-level dealers that facilitated his death.
And he shouldn’t.
And fuck the practice of twisting other stories like mine into Chesa’s failure as a DA.
Chesa Boudin is a goddamn national treasure. If you read a story that started off similar to mine but ended in why we should recall Chesa and you were so naïve or lazy that you were able to be manipulated by it, then you don’t deserve nice things, the city he’s helping us grow into, or ice cream.
I have lived in SF all my life. I see SF residents flock off to burning man, buy and sell psychedelics to have “transcendent” experiences, rant on Facebook about the flaws of capitalism. Some of you might even remember Occupy Wall Street. Beautiful progressives, the lot of you. But the second your Tesla’s back window gets smashed-in and your precious Blu-Ray of Titanic gets stolen out of the back seat, your transformation to a Recall-Our-District-Attorney-Republican is swift.
Let’s chant “Defund the police but only if my car isn’t broken into!” at the next rally, m’kay?
His first day in office, Chesa Boudin decriminalized sex work. Why would a DA do this? I want to pretend I live in a place where I don’t have to explain this but here goes: in order to properly prosecute sex trafficking, domestic violence (DV,) rape, and other crimes, Boudin wanted sex workers to be able to safely report without being prosecuted themselves. (Also, it’s just the right thing to do. The commodification of sex and women’s bodies has existed in our society for millennia, but keeping them out of the income loop is somehow the moral and legally right thing to do? Nope, it’s not.)
When police used DNA obtained from a victim’s rape kit to identify her as a suspect in a robbery, Chesa threw the case out and banned the practice. (Spoiler alert! Police were pissed.)
Felony DV prosecutions are down 29%, you’ve heard from the anti-Chesa brigade? Well, yes they are! Some of this will come down to police participation, more on that below, but also, prosecution of literally every-fucking-thing across the entire nation is down — dramatically. Acutally, the national average is 30%. See: pandemic’s effects on, oh, everything.) But notice these stories started popping up in far-right-wing national media immediately after Chesa prosecuted a cop for felony domestic violence when the Republican DA in the cop’s home town of Sacramento wouldn’t. Also, Chesa is prosecuting more misdemeanors, as they have a much likelier chance of conviction, and more importantly, they rely less on the victim to cooperate. Which, if you grew up in a home with Domestic Violence, you’d know they rarely do. (For many reasons including fear of reprisal, shame, denial and other PTSD effects, and, of course, good old-fashioned financial hostaging.) Once someone is in the system for a misdemeanor, future felony convictions are easier. Chesa is thinking ahead, he's thinking critically -he is a Rhodes Scholar, after all.
Seventy-five percent (2015 data) of police in SF don’t live in SF. Recent data suggest that the number is now eighty percent that do not live in the seven surrounding Bay Area counties. This means they don’t have any connection to the community and likely some or most don't have any desire to improve the city. Maybe SF’s lowest-level of unsolved crime has less to do with cases that come to his office and more to do with an unofficial police boycott? If you were a cop maybe you’d just “throw away” drugs and let low-level dealers free if you wanted to keep crime high and the anti-Chesa narrative alive? Chesa has arrested three of these police officers already, one for stealing evidence and two for destroying it. One police officer brought a goddam machine gun home (in Napa, shocker) that he stole from the evidence locker. I can just hear the cries of But George Gascon let us have machine guns! (Former Republican, former police officer, former SF district attorney 2011–2019.) The police union spent SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS trying to prevent Chesa from being elected, and even more on this recall. They’ve boycotted doing work, and news outlets have run with the “crime-is-out-of-control-and-Chesa-isn’t-doing-anything-about-it” narrative.
This is where a lot of that $700k went — your google ads, your Facebook feed, your tik-tok vids that show people shoplifting at an SF Walgreens and “tOTalLy gETtInG aWAy WiTh iT bUt PoLicE caN’T dO anYThiNg aBOut iT bECauSE thE diStRicT AttORneY iS a cOmMie!” The money was spent on you, of course. (And Zuckerburg. Mark need Yacht.)
I’m tired, and I’m hurting. I can’t get out of bed most days, and really I just want my son back. I feel like there is a car parked on my chest, the pain is so great. Recalling Chesa isn’t going to bring him back. Pulling all the dealers off the streets will replace them with bigger risk-takers. (How’s the war on drugs faring, btw?) Not having Chesa two years ago wouldn’t have kept my son alive. In fact, more kids might have suffered or died if we got real, real, real tough on Brown people… err… drugs. I know you want your car’s rear window not to be broken, too, and I can only imagine the pain of replacing that Titanic DVD. Really, I can only imagine.
So go recall your District Attorney, a man who will likely have buildings named after him in a few decades, which is probably about the amount of time for everyone to figure out that he led real change. Enough time for your progressive grandkids, your first actually progressive family members, to have learned about the past and remind you for the seventh Thanksgiving in a row that grandpa was on the wrong side of history cuz he wanted those darned kids off his lawn and out of his Tesla.
