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      As Crime Surges, Roll Back of Tough-on-Crime Policies Faces Resistance

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      With violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s.Four years ago, progressive prosecutors were in the sweet spot of Democratic politics. Aligned with the growing Black Lives Matter movement but pragmatic enough to draw establishment support, they racked up wins in cities across the country.Today, a political backlash is brewing. With violent crime rates rising in some cities and elections looming, their attempts to roll back the tough-on-crime policies of the 1990s are increasingly under attack — from familiar critics on the right, but also from onetime allies within the Democratic Party.In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin is facing a recall vote in June, stoked by criticism from the city’s Democratic mayor. In Los Angeles, the county district attorney, George Gascón, is trying to fend off a recall effort as some elected officials complain about new guidelines eliminating the death penalty and the prosecution of juveniles as adults. Manhattan’s new district attorney, Alvin Bragg, quickly ran afoul of the new Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, and his new police commissioner over policies that critics branded too lenient.The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less — forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren’t rushing to their aid, with some saying they’ve soured on the officials they once backed.“I think that whole honeymoon period lasts about five or six hours,” said Wesley Bell, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County in Missouri, who is seeking re-election this fall.St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, center, surrounded by area police chiefs before a news conference about a police officer who was shot and killed in 2019.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Bell, a former city councilman in Ferguson, Mo., is part of the group of prosecutors elected on a promise to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Most support eliminating the death penalty and cash bail, limiting prosecutions for low-level, nonviolent offenses and scaling back sentences.In a show of political strength, progressive prosecutors in Chicago and Philadelphia handily defeated challengers in recent years. Mr. Bell’s re-election bid in November is one of several races being watched for signs that voters’ views have shifted on those policies as violent crime has risen and racial justice protests have fallen out of the headlines.Homicide rates spiked in 2020 and continued to rise last year, albeit less slowly, hitting levels not seen since the 1990s. Other violent crimes also are up. Both increases have occurred nationally, in cities with progressive prosecutors and in cities without.That’s left no clear evidence linking progressive policies to these trends, but critics have been quick to make the connection, suggesting that prosecutors have let offenders walk and created an expectation that low-level offenses won’t be charged. Those arguments have landed on voters and city leaders already grappling with a scourge of pandemic-related ills — including mental health care needs and housing shortages, rising drug use, even traffic deaths.Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters in New York City found that 74 percent of respondents considered crime a “very serious” problem — the largest share since the survey began asking the question in 1999 and more than 20 percentage points greater than the previous high, which was recorded in January 2016.Politicians are heeding those concerns. In New York, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, has promised to crack down on crime, and his police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, slammed Mr. Bragg’s proposals as threatening the safety of police officers and the public. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has become an outspoken critic of Mr. Boudin’s approach, which emphasizes social services over policing.“This is not working,” Ms. Breed said recently on The New York Times podcast “Sway.” “We’ve added all these additional resources — the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the services, the buildings we purchase, the hotels we purchase, the resources. We’ve added all these things to deal with food insecurity. All these things. Yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”The criticisms from two prominent Black mayors are particularly biting. In their liberal cities, the leaders’ nuanced complaints have far more influence with voters than familiar attacks from Republicans or police unions. Both mayors have argued that the minority communities that want racism rooted from the justice system also want more robust policing and prosecutions.President Biden, who was one of the architects of the tough-on-crime criminal justice overhaul of the 1990s, recently spoke highly of Mr. Adams’s focus on crime prevention. Some prosecutors and their allies took that as sign that the Democratic establishment is digging in on a centrist approach to criminal justice reform.Mr. Biden’s comments came as the Democratic Party worried about retaining the support of moderate suburban voters in midterm elections this year. Many Democratic lawmakers and strategists believe that protest slogans like “defund the police” hurt the party in the 2020 elections — particularly in Congressional swing districts and in Senate races. Republican candidates, eager to retake control of Congress in November, already have run advertisements casting Democrats as soft on crime.Most progressive prosecutors oppose the calls to gut police department budgets, but that is a nuance often missed. At one liberal philanthropic group, some newer givers have said they will not donate to any criminal justice groups — or to the campaigns of progressive prosecutors — because they don’t want to endorse defunding the police, according to a person who connects donors to criminal justice causes, and who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist who has been involved in several organizations pushing progressive prosecutors, said prosecutors hadn’t been as forceful as law enforcement unions in selling their solutions to rising violence in cities.“Police are spending a lot of money convincing people the appropriate response to that is more policing and incarceration,” he said. “I think that individual cities and counties are having to push back against that narrative. But I think they’re struggling to do that right now.”In San Francisco, Mr. Boudin argued that the effort to recall him was fueled by politics, not voters’ worries about crime. He pointed to the Republican megadonors who have funded the recall efforts and said Ms. Breed has a political incentive to see him ousted — he beat her preferred candidate for district attorney.San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this week. He faces an effort to recall him.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images“These are Republican talking points,” Mr. Boudin said. “And it’s tremendously destructive to the Democratic Party and the long-term progress that the party is making at the local and national level around public safety and criminal justice to allow a few folks dissatisfied with a local election to undermine that progress.”Mary Jung, a Democratic activist leading the recall campaign, said those who painted the efforts as fueled by conservatives or moderates were missing the point. Many of their supporters, she said, are lifelong liberal Democrats.Those voters, she said, don’t view the effort to recall Mr. Boudin, who was elected in 2019, as a broad shift away from progressive policies, but as a local response in a community that feels unsafe. She cited several attacks against Asian immigrants and incidents of shoplifting as the sort of crimes that have rattled residents, regardless of political ideology.In another sign of Democrats’ discontent, San Francisco voters ousted three progressive members of the Board of Education in a recall election driven by pandemic angst.“Over 80,000 San Franciscans signed our petition and we only needed 53,000 signatures,” Ms. Jung said. “There’s only 33,000 registered Republicans in the city. So, you know, you do the math.”Some progressives warn against ignoring people’s fears. Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, which includes Chicago and some of the country’s most violence-plagued communities, said that any dismissive rhetoric could make prosecutors risk looking out of touch.“You can’t dismiss people,” Ms. Foxx said. “I live in Chicago, where we hit 800 murders last year, and that represents 800 immediate families and thousands of people who are impacted.”Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, right, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police First Deputy Supt. Eric Carter announcing charges last month in a fatal shooting.Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressMs. Foxx faced a well-funded opponent and won re-election in 2020, as did Philadelphia’s district attorney, Larry Krasner, the following year. Those victories show the resilient support for progressive ideas, Mr. Krasner said, warning the Democratic Party not to abandon them.“Put criminal justice reform on the ballot in every election in almost every jurisdiction, and what you’re going to see is a surge in turnout,” Mr. Krasner said. “And that turnout will overwhelmingly be unlikely voters, reluctant voters, brand-new voters, people who are not connected to what they see as governmental dysfunction between the parties — but they are connected to an issue that has affected their communities.”But there are signs that attitudes about overhauling the criminal justice system are changing even among progressives. Many activists have shifted their focus away from electoral politics and toward policies they think address root of the problem, such as reducing the number of police and abolishing prisons.That “makes it very difficult to even defend or support particular prosecutors, because at the end of the day, they’re still putting people in jail,” Mr. Sinyangwe said.In 2020, Mr. Bell, the St. Louis prosecutor, faced the ire of the same progressive activists who had helped elect him. That July, he announced that his renewed investigation into the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown Jr., a young Black man, which ignited weeks of protests, had delivered the same results: no charges for the officer who killed him.Mr. Brown’s mother denounced Mr. Bell’s investigation. Speaking to reporters then, Mr. Bell said the announcement was “one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official.”Asked to discuss the incident and the investigation, Mr. Bell declined.Josie Duffy Rice, the former president of The Appeal, a news outlet focused on criminal justice, said that in some ways the voters were learning the limitations of the progressive prosecutor’s role.“Prosecutors have the power to cause a lot of problems,” Ms. Duffy Rice said. “But not enough power to solve problems.” More

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      San Francisco Recall Vote Fueled by Asian Voters’ Ire

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      The landslide vote to remove three school board members cut across ethnicities and income levels. But Chinese American voters and volunteers were crucial to victory, organizers say.SAN FRANCISCO — As Election Day approached, a flurry of messages flashed across the phones of San Francisco’s Chinese American community. “Remember to vote,” said one message in Chinese from a campaign organizer, Selena Chu. “And throw out the commissioners who are discriminating against us and disrespecting our community.”The lopsided victory in a recall election on Tuesday that ousted three members of the San Francisco school board shook the city’s liberal establishment and was a resounding alarm of parental anger over the way the public school system handled the coronavirus pandemic.Parents of varying ethnicities and income levels who had coalesced last year while San Francisco schools remained closed — they stayed shut for much longer than those in other large cities — organized themselves through Facebook groups and vowed to push out Board of Education members for what they saw as incompetence. They kept their promise: The three commissioners were removed by as much as 79 percent of voters, an unequivocal rejection in a city renowned for fractious politics.For many Asian Americans in the city, especially the large Chinese American community, the results were an affirmation of the group’s voting power, coming with a high degree of organizing, turnout and intensity not seen in many years. In an election where every registered voter received a ballot, overall turnout was relatively low at 26 percent; turnout among the 30,000 people who requested Chinese-language ballots was significantly higher at 37 percent.In an overwhelmingly liberal city, Asian American voters have sided with Democrats for decades. But in recent years, a growing number of Chinese residents, many of them born in mainland China, have become a moderating political force. Most Chinese residents in the city are registered as independents and, as Tuesday’s election appeared to show, they are not afraid to buck some of the more liberal elements of the Democratic Party. It is a pattern that has emerged in other cities, like New York, that are largely Democratic with significant Asian American populations.“They are absolutely up for grabs,” David Lee, a political science lecturer at San Francisco State University, said of Asian American voters in the city.In Tuesday’s election, two issues in particular motivated Chinese American voters. The Board of Education had voted to put in place a lottery admission system at the highly selective Lowell High School, replacing an admission process that primarily selected students with the highest grades and test scores. Lowell, whose long list of notable alumni includes Justice Stephen G. Breyer, for decades had represented what one community member described as the “gateway to the American dream.” The introduction of the lottery system has reduced the number of Asian and white ninth graders at Lowell by around one-quarter and increased Black and Latino ninth graders by more than 40 percent.Chinese voters were also upset by tweets by Alison Collins, one of the recalled school board members, that were unearthed during the campaign. Ms. Collins said Asian Americans used “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” She went on to compare Asian Americans to slaves who had the advantage of working inside a slave owner’s home instead of doing more grueling labor in the fields, using asterisks to mask an anti-Black racial slur. The tweets reinforced a sentiment among many Chinese voters of being taken for granted, underrepresented and insulted, people involved in the recall campaign said.Asian American voters also said they were motivated by issues beyond the actions of the board: The number of high-profile attacks against Asian Americans, many of them older, has traumatized the community. And many Chinese-owned businesses were suffering the effects of pandemic closures, especially in Chinatown.“We are losing faith in government,” said Bayard Fong, president of the Chinese American Democratic Club.Asian Americans make up about 36 percent of San Francisco’s population, one of the largest such communities in a major city, but they are an incredibly diverse group that includes Filipinos, Indians, Vietnamese and Thais and features different economic, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. Chinese Americans are by far the largest Asian group, making up 23 percent of San Francisco’s population. Forty percent of the population is white, 15 percent Latino and 6 percent Black.The ouster of the three board members will elevate the only Chinese American member of the seven-person board to the position of president. And it puts Mayor London Breed in the delicate position of appointing three replacement members who will be acceptable to the parents now closely watching the process. Recall campaigners say they hope more Asian Americans will be appointed to the board.Autumn Looijen, who with her partner, Siva Raj, organized signature gathering and initiated the recall campaign, described the Chinese American community as crucial to the recall’s success.“They were the backbone of our volunteer efforts,” Ms. Looijen said. “They have been really powering this campaign from the beginning.”During the campaign, organizers used WeChat, the Chinese-language messaging app, to offer everything from detailed instructions on how to fill out a ballot to organizing the deployment of volunteers in Chinatown, where lion dances and drumming exhorted residents to vote.“We shall be silent no more,” said a flier in English and Chinese handed out by the Chinese American Democratic Club.Parents who campaigned for the recall described an awakening in the Chinese American community by people who had been largely apolitical until now.Ms. Chu, the woman who sent the WeChat message urging people to vote, said she grew up with parents who advised her to remain quiet if she felt she was being treated unfairly. Many first-generation immigrants still feel that way, she said.Now a mother of two children in the San Francisco public school system, Ms. Chu felt compelled, for the first time, to become actively involved in an election. Her hands hurt, she said, from texting so much on WeChat during the campaign.She was motivated by a sense of being punished and pilloried for working hard and striving.“This year a lot of parents are telling me, ‘We are done with being scapegoats,’” Ms. Chu said.“We are still being looked at as foreigners,” she said. “We are Americans. You have to give us respect.”She called the recall election a milestone for the Asian American community.“They finally understand the power of their vote,” she said.Crucial to the organizing efforts was Ann Hsu, a Beijing-born entrepreneur with decades of experience in starting up and managing companies in both China and the United States.Parents are watching to see if Mayor London Breed of San Francisco will appoint any Asian American members to the school board.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMs. Hsu used her management experience to organize volunteers and set campaign strategies. She ignored the English-language media and instead focused tightly on Chinese-language newspapers, YouTube channels and advertising. She and her volunteers distributed thousands of yellow shopping bags emblazoned with recall messages and gave them out to older Chinese residents. She set up a task force that registered 560 residents, almost all of them Asian Americans, to vote.Using WeChat to organize her operations had the added advantage of breaking a language barrier: She speaks Mandarin while other residents are more comfortable in Cantonese. The written messages could be understood by all.Ms. Hsu’s voice fills with emotion when she discusses the issue of Lowell, which she said was the primary motivation for jumping into politics.“When you came for Lowell, you came for the Asians,” she said in an interview on Wednesday. “We are going to stand up and say no more, no!”The future admissions process at Lowell remains unclear — the lottery system will remain in place for students entering in the fall, but the board has not made a decision for admissions beyond next year.Ms. Hsu says Lowell is not directly personal for her. Her two teenage boys are at another school in the San Francisco public school district.But she saw in the board’s decisions a deep sense that the aspirations of Asian American residents were being ignored.The debate over admission to elite public high schools has galvanized Asian parents in other cities, notably New York. In both San Francisco and New York, the issue cleaves liberal voters who are torn between a desire to maintain a system that has traditionally benefited high-achieving students from poorer, often immigrant, backgrounds but at the same time left behind Black and Latino students.In New York, where Black and Latino students are disproportionately underrepresented in the elite public high schools, the issue of school segregation rose to the fore during New York’s mayoral election last year. Left-leaning candidates called for a fundamental overhaul of the admissions standards while centrist candidates called for its retention. Among those who promised to keep the test was Eric Adams, the current mayor.Ms. Collins, the board member who was criticized for her tweets, said during the campaign that she had “desegregated” Lowell.In the wake of the lopsided recall, political analysts are weighing whether the energy and fervor of the campaign will carry over into other elections both in the city and nationally.Mike Chen, a board member of the Edwin M. Lee Asian Pacific Democratic Club, said the results were remarkable — “nobody in the city can agree 80 percent on anything.” But he said he would “heavily caution” making predictions about other campaigns based off a single election with relatively low turnout. San Francisco had a very particular set of issues that pushed parents over the edge, he said.“People have been trying to make extrapolations: What does this mean for school board elections in Ohio or Virginia?” he said.“We had this very particular instance,” he continued. “We had very visible examples of incompetence, bad governance and malfeasance. Most people could objectively observe the decisions that were happening last year and think, ‘This is really messed up.’”Dana Rubinstein More

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      San Francisco Voters Recall 3 Board of Education Members

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      The recall, which galvanized Asian Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic.In a recall election fueled by pandemic angst and anger, San Francisco voters ousted three members of the Board of Education on Tuesday, closing a bitter chapter in the city’s politics that was rife with infighting, accusations of racism and a flurry of lawsuits.More than 70 percent of voters supported the recall of each member when initial results were released just before 9 p.m. Pacific time, and one of the board members conceded defeat. Those votes made up about one-quarter of registered voters in the city, and turnout was not expected to be considerably higher.The vote stripped the members, Alison Collins, Gabriela López and Faauuga Moliga, of their positions on the seven-person board, which Ms. Lopez served as president. They will be replaced by members chosen by Mayor London Breed.“It’s the people rising up in revolt in San Francisco and saying it’s unacceptable to abandon your responsibility to educate our children,” said Siva Raj, a San Francisco parent of public school students who helped lead the signature campaign to put the recall election on the ballot.The recall was a victory for parents who were angered that the district spent time deciding whether to rename a third of its schools last year instead of focusing on reopening them. It also appeared to be a demonstration of Asian American electoral power, a galvanizing moment for Chinese voters in particular who turned out in unusually large numbers for the election.In echoes of debates in other cities, many Chinese voters were incensed when the school board introduced a lottery admission system for Lowell High School, the district’s most prestigious institution, abolishing requirements primarily based on grades and test scores. A judge last year ruled that the board had violated procedures in making the change.“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message,” Ms. Breed, who supported the recall, said in a statement on Tuesday night.The landslide result is already being analyzed for its implications for the city’s upcoming elections.District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a progressive prosecutor, faces a recall election in June fueled by moderate San Franciscans worried about a spike in property crimes and hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic. Ms. Breed is running for re-election next year.On Tuesday, one of the ousted board members, Mr. Moliga, posted on social media that it had been an honor to serve the city. “It appears we were unsuccessful at defeating my recall,” he wrote. “We fought hard and ran a great campaign.”“There are many more fights ahead of us,” he added.In a city with more dogs than children, school board elections in San Francisco have for decades been obscure sideshows to the more high-profile political contests.That changed with the pandemic — data released by the district suggests that remote learning increased racial achievement gaps — and the profusion of controversies that plagued the board.The district captured national headlines last year for its botched and in some cases historically inaccurate effort to rename 44 public schools.The targeted schools carry the names of a range of historical figures including Abraham Lincoln and the three other presidents chiseled into Mount Rushmore; Spanish conquerors such as Vasco Núñez de Balboa; John Muir, the naturalist and author; and Paul Revere, the Revolutionary War figure.After a barrage of criticism, including from Ms. Breed, the board put the renaming process on hold. A judge ruled that the board had violated a California law on open meetings in its proceedings.Criticism of the board grew stronger, while signature gathering for the recall effort was already underway, when controversial tweets written by Ms. Collins, the board’s vice president, were discovered. In them, she said Asian Americans were like slaves who benefited from working inside a slave owner’s house — a comparison that Asian American groups and many city leaders called racist.The board voted to strip Ms. Collins of her vice presidency, which prompted her to sue members of the board and the district for $87 million. A judge dismissed the case.David Lee, a political science lecturer at San Francisco State University, said the combination of the tweets and the changes to the admission policies at Lowell had empowered Asian American voters.“It’s been an opportunity for the Chinese community to flex its muscles,” Mr. Lee said. “The community is reasserting itself.”Asian American voters had punched below their weight in San Francisco in recent years, making up about 18 percent of active voters in recent elections — well below their 34 percent share in the city overall. But supporters of Tuesday’s recall election say Asian Americans played an outsize role.Mr. Raj, the San Francisco parent, pointed to strong turnout in neighborhoods with large Asian populations as well as a relatively high return rate among people who requested a Chinese-language ballot.Ann Hsu, a San Francisco resident with two high school students in the public school system, helped register more than 500 Chinese residents in the months before the election. Education, she said, was a powerful issue.“That’s been ingrained in Chinese culture for thousands and thousands of years,” she said.Ms. Hsu said she had observed some of the inner workings of the district in her role as a P.T.A. president of a high school as well as the chair of a Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee, a body that oversees the district’s use of money raised through bonds. The oversight committee was formed last year after a whistle-blower notified the city attorney’s office that the school district had failed to create the board, which is required by law.“The board is incompetent,” Ms. Hsu said.Meredith W. Dodson, the executive director of the San Francisco Parent Coalition, a group formed during the pandemic to pressure the district to reopen schools, called the recall campaign a powerful demonstration of parental activism.“We can never go back to the previous world where parents weren’t organized and weren’t lifting up their concerns together,” she said. More

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      Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s Top Prosecutor, Faces Recall

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      Voters will decide in June whether Chesa Boudin should remain in office, a test of the national movement to elect prosecutors who have promised to dismantle mass incarceration.Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco, will face a recall election next year after a backlash in one of America’s most liberal cities to his policies aimed at reducing the number of people in jails and prisons.Elections officials in San Francisco certified this week that recall supporters had gathered enough signatures to force an election in June, when Californians will vote in a statewide primary for governor and congressional seats. The district attorney contest will serve as a test of how far liberal prosecutors can go in changing the justice system at a time of rising concerns about crime.Mr. Boudin, a former public defender whose story of growing up a son of incarcerated parents was central to his campaign two years ago, is among a number of liberal prosecutors who have recently been elected on promises of reducing incarceration and tackling racial bias within the criminal justice system.But Mr. Boudin, like other liberal prosecutors in places such as Philadelphia and Los Angeles, has faced sharp pushback from conservative activists, as well as other residents concerned about public safety, who say that he is not taking a hard enough line on crime and that his policies have made San Francisco less safe.Mr. Boudin has also faced opposition from within his own office, which has seen high rates of turnover, with some prosecutors resigning in protest of the department’s policies.One homicide prosecutor in the office, Brooke Jenkins, who said she supported Mr. Boudin’s efforts to reduce prison sentences and address racial biases and said she identified as a progressive, recently resigned and has supported the recall effort, citing mismanagement and low morale.“It’s my perception that Chesa lacks a desire to actually and effectively prosecute crime, in any fashion,” Ms. Jenkins said. “While he ran on a platform of being progressive and reform focused, his methodology to achieving that is simply to release individuals early or to offer very lenient plea deals.”In his time in office, Mr. Boudin has become a polarizing figure in San Francisco, a place where many voters have embraced the notion of transforming the criminal justice system by locking away fewer people but at the same time have grown weary of petty crime and scenes of despair on city streets.Fears of growing crime have divided the city, even though it has not faced the type of surge in homicides and gun violence that other major cities have experienced since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Unlike Oakland across the Bay, which is facing a sharp rise in homicides, the primary concerns in San Francisco are property crimes like theft and burglary, and quality-of-life issues like open-air drug dealing and the proliferation of homeless encampments.“Everybody’s like, why doesn’t the D.A.’s office just scoop these people up and throw them in jail so I don’t have to look at them anymore,” said Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law who is a supporter of Mr. Boudin. “That’s not how the law works. It is not a crime to be homeless.”Mr. Boudin framed the recall effort as driven by traditional law-and-order conservatives who want to roll back his efforts, such as not asking judges for cash bail, seeking more lenient sentences and sending fewer juveniles to prison.“This is clearly about criminal justice reform,” he said. “This is a question of whether we’re going to go forward and continue to implement data-driven policies that center crime victims, that invest in communities impacted by crime, and that use empirical evidence to address root causes of crime in our communities — if we’re going to go back to the failed policies of Reagan and Trump.”While fears about crime have fueled the recall effort, the data tells a more nuanced story: Major crimes were down 23 percent overall last year, according to the San Francisco Police Department, even as burglaries and auto thefts rose.Part of the problem, Mr. Boudin said, is that the police are arresting fewer people — an issue that he blames in part on the pandemic because many perpetrators, wearing masks to protect them from the virus, are difficult to identify.On Tuesday evening, Mr. Boudin was walking out of an event at a local university when a man came up to him and said, “When are you going to start making arrests?”“I said to him, I’m not going to start making arrests,” he recounted. “That’s not what the D.A. does. We don’t make arrests.”While some of the big money behind the recall effort comes from conservative donors — the largest donor toward an earlier effort was David Sacks, a conservative venture capitalist and former PayPal executive — the coalition lining up against Mr. Boudin also includes Democrats and others like Ms. Jenkins who identify as progressive but believe that Mr. Boudin’s policies are too radical.This recall effort comes on the heels of the failed attempt to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, which was fueled largely by conservative anger over the policies and business shutdowns that the governor used to contain the virus.George Gascón, Mr. Boudin’s predecessor as district attorney of San Francisco, has faced similar efforts to recall him from office since being elected as the top prosecutor in Los Angeles on a similar promise of reducing imprisonment. A first signature-gathering campaign failed, but a new effort to recall him is underway. More

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      California Has a Lot of Recall Attempts, and Not Just for Governors

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      While all eyes were on Gov. Gavin Newsom, a developer in Sonoma County was charging forward with an effort to recall the district attorney who had sued his company.All around California, other officials were facing recall campaigns, too. A member of the Fallbrook Union High School District board of trustees. A councilwoman in Kingsburg. A councilman in Morgan Hill. The mayors of Huntington Beach and Placerville, council members in Huntington Beach and Placerville, school board or board of education members in Chico, Santa Monica, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Elk Grove and oh my goodness, are you tired yet?Recalls are a dime a dozen in California, and to read through the rationales for them is to confront a deluge of grievances, some serious and others remarkably petty.The recall efforts are because she voted against resuming full-time in-person schooling. Because of zoning disputes. Because she “has demonstrated a Marxist/socialist agenda.” Because of his homelessness policies. Because she declined to prosecute a police brutality case. Because he ostensibly “lacks mental competence.” Because she was convicted of welfare fraud several years before she was elected.If history is a guide, most of these campaigns will never come to a vote. But two, in addition to Mr. Newsom’s, will be on the ballot on Tuesday.The first is in wine country north of San Francisco, and its target is Jill Ravitch, the Sonoma County district attorney. The campaign is led by a local developer, Bill Gallaher, whose company was sued by her office in connection with the abandonment of residents of an assisted-living facility during a 2017 wildfire. (The case was ultimately settled.) Mr. Gallaher, who has said the recall is in service of “steady, competent leadership overseeing public safety in our county,” has bankrolled the campaign himself.The second is a convoluted saga concerning William Davis and Melissa Ybarra, who are on the City Council in Vernon and had backed a successful recall campaign this year against two other council members who had supported a solar and wind energy project whose developer was involved in an embezzlement investigation.Now those recalled council members, Diana Gonzales and Carol Menke, are supporting the new recall campaign, alleging — according to The Los Angeles Daily News — that Ms. Ybarra engaged in nepotism as the city’s housing commissioner and that Mr. Davis is mentally incompetent. Ms. Ybarra and Mr. Davis say the campaign is just retaliation.Before this year of two recall elections, Vernon — a city just southeast of Los Angeles that has a mere 108 residents — had never had one. More

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      How Kamala Harris Rose — and Rose

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Kamala Harris Rose — and RoseKamala Harris, October 2003Credit…Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Feb. 1, 2021, 2:00 p.m. ETKAMALA’S WAYAn American LifeBy Dan MorainThe daughter of a Jamaica-born father and India-born mother who met in the turbulent world of ’60s Bay Area political activism, Kamala Harris has a social justice lineage that runs deep. In her 2020 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech as Joe Biden’s running mate, she proudly recalled having “a stroller’s eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’” Her maternal grandfather served as a prominent senior government official in the tumultuous politics of postcolonial India. Dan Morain, for decades a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, recounts stories like these in “Kamala’s Way,” and his insider’s view provides a revealing portrait of the people and events surrounding Harris’s rise to political stardom. Morain paints Bay Area Democratic politics as a swampy world where schmoozing with potential billionaire funders and sitting on the right boards were essential to climbing the rungs. He details Harris’s liaison with the self-described “Ayatollah of the Assembly” and former San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown. Harris dated Brown in 1994 and 1995, splitting with him after his election as mayor. He was 30 years her senior. But the numerous stories about Brown feel misplaced, distracting from what should have been a tighter focus on Harris herself.Harris’s career took off during the 1990s in an era of bipartisan calls for tough-on-crime measures. As the Alameda County deputy district attorney, Harris spent years as a courtroom prosecutor before she was recruited to a supervisory position with the San Francisco district attorney’s office and then the city attorney’s office. She was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, and attorney general of California in 2010, a position she held until she was elected senator in 2016.Harris’s long tenure as a prosecutor in California, a harsh, punitive state, has drawn criticism. In her run for San Francisco district attorney in 2003, Harris called for improving conviction rates and prosecuting serious drug cases to clean up the streets. (The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her candidacy under the headline “Harris, for Law and Order.”) But once elected, she took positions that cost her police support and came out strongly in favor of criminal justice reform. Her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” called for education, drug treatment and rehabilitation. As attorney general, she instituted first-in-the-nation programs to bolster police accountability. Undoubtedly, the most consistent through-line in her career is her unfailing championship of victims of sexual abuse, child trafficking and domestic violence.These actions, and Morain’s admiration for Harris’s “skill and charisma, her intelligence and grit, and her willingness to fight hard,” are tempered by Morain’s view that Harris’s ambition and national sights led her to “be both innovative and cautious,” sometimes acting as a trailblazer and other times holding her fire: “She took strong stands or she stood mute on the important criminal justice issues of her day.” Though balancing both sides, he seems to agree with the critics he cites who viewed her as “overly cautious.”Morain paints Harris as a pragmatic, ambitious politician who “took positions when she needed to and when those stands might help her politically,” but who was also “adept at not taking stands when doing so was not politically necessary.” Despite his inclusion of stories that show Harris’s warmth outside the limelight, his biography is not fawning. Nor is it very personal. Morain was not able to interview Harris or her family, but says he relied on “dozens of sources” with “firsthand knowledge.”This book is unlikely to satisfy readers enamored of the nation’s barrier-breaking vice president, who may find Morain’s judgments at times unduly critical, and his use of phrases like “brusque and antagonistic style” and “brash confidence” as distinctly gendered. At the same time, “Kamala’s Way” could appeal to aficionados of California politics who want a better understanding of the high-powered political world where Harris’s national star rose.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More