SAN FRANCISCO (LifeSiteNews) – The District Attorney for San Francisco has been recalled.
D.A. Chesa Boudin was recalled after over 60 percent of the city’s residents voiced their dissatisfaction with his soft-on-crime approach by voting for his removal.
Richie Greenberg, who helped lead the recall initiative, called its success “bittersweet.” He mourned the loss of businesses and lives due to increased crime in San Francisco under Boudin.
“We shouldn’t be popping champagne bottles,” he said. “People have died under Chesa Boudin’s watch. Lives have been ruined, families broken, businesses shuttered.”
One of the leaders of Black Lives Matter in Los Angeles, Melina Abdullah, praised Boudin as “one of the most committed, visionary DAs in the nation.” He vowed not to let a similar recall take place in LA.
The leader of BLM Los Angeles reacts to the recall of progressive San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. https://t.co/uAxncaT6XV
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) June 8, 2022
Previously a translator under Hugo Chávez in Venezuela’s presidential palace, Boudin was elected San Francisco’s District Attorney in 2019. That year saw a wave of progressive activists take control of big-city district attorney’s offices; they claimed they would reform the criminal justice system from within. Boudin had run on a platform of “decarceration,” decrying the imprisonment of criminals as “the notion that to be free, we must cage others.”
During Boudin’s term, San Francisco became an increasingly unsafe place both to live and to do business. According to the National Review, Boudin “stopped prosecuting so-called quality-of-life crimes — things such as prostitution, public camping, public defecation, and open-air drug use.” As a not unexpected result of this refusal to prosecute, crime rates rose in San Francisco. The National Review reported that “supporters of the recall say that [refusal] sent a message that San Francisco was a consequence-free place to engage in low-level crimes, which simply encouraged more crime in the city generally.”
As a result of the rise in crime, businesses have pulled out of the city, and residents are moving. Even Democrats are unhappy with the state of San Francisco due to Boudin’s refusal to prosecute criminals. The recall indicates the utter failure of the left’s soft-on-crime approach, and the preference of even liberal-leaning San Francisco residents for the prosecution of criminals in order to keep their city safe and livable.