The People vs. Chesa Boudin
Updated at 9:30 a.m. ET on May 20, 2022.
In December, Richie Greenberg stepped out the front door of his home in a residential, park-filled neighborhood of San Francisco to find a woman he did not recognize on his steps. She yelled at him and tried to block him from going back into his own house, pulling out a small knife and stabbing the air with it. “Walk down the steps!” he shouted at her as he called 911. “Get off of my fucking steps!”
Greenberg made it into his house shaken but safe, and the cops arrived a few minutes later. But too many San Franciscans have experienced similar incidents of late, he told me, and many have suffered worse. “Practically everyone in this city has been a victim or knows a victim,” the political commentator and failed mayoral candidate said. “People are sick and tired of the whole atmosphere of the city. It’s not fun to live here anymore.”
The responsibility for that shift, Greenberg told me, lies in no small part with Chesa Boudin, the city’s district attorney and the national face of the progressive-prosecutors movement. Boudin came into office promising to make the city safer with judicious, rather than punitive, policies: eliminating cash bail, reducing the jail population, focusing on diversion for young and first-time offenders. But Greenberg believes that Boudin has actually made the city less safe by letting criminals off. “San Francisco’s voters have been duped,” he said.
[Read: Why California wants to recall its most progressive prosecutors]
Fed up, Greenberg began collecting signatures for a recall election. Although he failed to gather enough, other activists succeeded, triggering a recall early next month. The effort has a good chance of ousting Boudin, as criminal incidents clog the local news and recall groups blanket the city in flyers and signs. A recent poll found that a solid majority of registered voters support the recall, with seven in 10 disapproving of the D.A.’s job performance.
Boudin is fending off the recall effort’s accusations as he fights for his job. Crime in San Francisco “is
