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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