San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and other prosecutors advancing progressive measures around the U.S. face electoral challenges
SAN FRANCISCO—District Attorney Chesa Boudin declared his 2019 election victory a call by voters for radical change. He promised to do more than lock up criminals and embarked on a progressive agenda to reduce incarceration rates and scrutinize police misconduct.
On Tuesday, Mr. Boudin faces voters again, in a recall election backed by business owners unhappy with his performance. Polls indicate his ouster is supported by the majority of residents in a famously liberal city that has seen, along with the rest of the nation, a spike in murder and other crimes.
“Crime makes everyone more moderate,” said Albert Chow. He owns a hardware store in a once-placid San Francisco neighborhood hard-hit by home and business burglaries.
A successful recall of Mr. Boudin would mark a significant setback in what has been called the progressive prosecutor movement. Progressive prosecutors include the district attorneys of Los Angeles County; New York County, which encompasses Manhattan; Chicago’s Cook County; and Philadelphia—all places where homicides went up during the pandemic and lockdowns. Homicides in the U.S. jumped nearly 30% in 2020 from 2019, the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
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Progressive prosecutors have pursued such goals as sending nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of jail, sparing juveniles from being prosecuted as adults and spending resources looking at old cases to free wrongfully convicted people from prison.
Worry about crime among Americans is at its highest since 2016, according to a national Gallup Poll in April. Many criminologists say there is little evidence that prosecutors’ policies are to blame for increased crime, but voter concerns are resonating in local politics during this midterm year, including a backlash against the “defund the police” movement.
In just the past three weeks, candidates for district attorney with tough-on-crime messages in smaller counties have defeated progressive rivals in at least five elections in North Carolina, Oregon and Arkansas.
In Pennsylvania, legislation that would effectively bar a third term for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who has declined to file charges against people arrested for drug possession, cleared the Republican-led state House of Representatives in April with votes from several Democrats.
Groups allied with police unions and largely funded by business leaders have gathered tens of thousands of signatures in Los Angeles, Northern Virginia and Colorado to unseat prosecutors changing longstanding practices.
Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón is one recall target. Mr. Gascón, who previously served as San Francisco D.A., will face a recall election if opponents collect the required 566,857 signatures by July 6. The recall campaign reports it is close.
“Crime is going up around the country, which really speaks to the root causes of crime that have nothing to do with reform,” said Mr. Gascón, a former Los Angeles Police Department assistant chief.
In San Francisco, crime overall has fallen since Mr. Boudin took office in January 2020, but burglaries have gone up 45% in the past two years and homicides rose by 37% over the same period. The city’s homicide rate in 2021 climbed to 6.4 per 100,000 residents from 5.4 a year earlier; the national homicide rate in 2020, the most recent available, was 6.5 per 100,000.
Mr. Boudin, a former public defender, said opponents of change are exploiting crime fears without cause. “Every single criminal-justice reform policy we’ve implemented is aimed at making our community safer,” he said.
Prosecutors on all sides see the San Francisco recall election as a gauge of voter support for revamping the justice system.
Steve Wagstaffe, a more traditional district attorney in San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, said Mr. Boudin’s defeat would be “a sign that even in California, it can be taken too far.”
Turning point
Longstanding calls for an overhaul of the criminal-justice system—including by those who see it as stacked against minorities and the poor—intensified after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Mr. Boudin was one of the first prosecutors to respond. He ordered his crime-victims division to aid people harmed by police and filed San Francisco’s first homicide charges against an officer for an on-duty shooting. He also abolished cash bail, seeking what he saw as more evenhanded treatment of suspects who can’t afford to post bail while awaiting trial.
Mr. Boudin, who grew up visiting his parents in prison, has said his childhood set him on a path to become a lawyer and a public defender. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert had been members of the Weather Underground, a violent far-left group, and were arrested 14 months after Mr. Boudin was born. They served lengthy sentences for their roles in the 1981 robbery of Brink’s armored vehicle and the murders of a security guard and two police officers.
A turning point in Mr. Boudin’s term as district attorney came a year after he took office. On New Year’s Eve 2020, a man driving a stolen car hit and killed two women in downtown San Francisco. The alleged driver, Troy McAlister, has pleaded not guilty to vehicular manslaughter and other felony charges.
Mr. McAlister was a parolee with a long rap sheet who had been arrested five times in the previous six months for various crimes including burglary. In each case, Mr. Boudin’s office had declined to file charges that could have sent him back to prison because, prosecutors said, evidence in the five arrests was weak. The case became a high-profile local news story.
Mr. Boudin said his office had referred Mr. McAlister to a parole agent who had the power to revoke his parole. He later instituted a policy allowing his office to seek parole revocations directly with the court.
“Mr. McAlister deserves a fair trial, but the slanted media coverage makes it almost impossible now,” said Scott Grant, the deputy public defender representing him.
In April last year, the former chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party launched a recall campaign casting Mr. Boudin as soft on crime, a theme that resonated with residents fed up with petty theft, drug use and homelessness.
City data show that Mr. Boudin’s office filed criminal charges at a rate similar to his predecessor’s, but the conviction rate fell to 39% in 2021 from 60% in 2019. His office attributed that to an increase in the proportion of defendants diverted to rehabilitation programs, which went to 39% from 18% over that period.
Brooke Jenkins, a homicide prosecutor who worked under both Mr. Gascón and Mr. Boudin, left the district attorney’s office and joined the recall campaign. She had been handling the trial of a 29-year-old man accused of murdering his mother before setting her corpse on fire. Ms. Jenkins won a conviction, but the jury couldn’t decide whether the man was legally sane.
Mr. Boudin intervened, accepting an insanity plea proposed by the man’s public defender. Ms. Jenkins objected and quit. She said Mr. Boudin kept his view as a public defender from his past job, to the detriment of crime victims.
Explaining his decision in the case, Mr. Boudin said most of the victim’s family wanted the man locked away in a mental hospital, and that three of four experts in the case determined he wasn’t sane enough to be found guilty.
‘Staying power’
Progressive district attorneys Kim Foxx in Chicago, Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore and Mr. Krasner in Philadelphia all have survived electoral challenges in recent years, despite growing numbers of homicides in their cities.
“That’s pretty good evidence that this is a movement with staying power,” said David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor and former federal prosecutor. “A broad cross-section of the American public stretching across party lines and across lines of race and ideology believes that we veered too far in the direction of punitiveness in late 1980s and 1990s.”
Progressive prosecutors began gathering donor support after protests over racial inequality and the criminal-justice system were sparked by the 2014 police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown, a Black man, in Ferguson, Mo. A Justice Department investigation later found no grounds to file charges against the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown.
Billionaire George Soros and groups he funded spent more than $40 million on campaign contributions in prosecutors’ races, according to a new report by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit group that defends police officers facing criminal charges. Whitney Tymas, president of the Justice & Public Safety PAC, which Mr. Soros funds, didn’t dispute the figure.
Ms. Tymas said recall efforts won’t slow the progressive prosecutors’ movement. “Voters ultimately understand that justice and safety are not antagonistic,” she said, “but that they’re mutually dependent.”
But more traditional DAs who triumphed in recent weeks say the public is sending a different message. Kevin Barton, an independent in Oregon’s Washington County, recently defended his district attorney seat by painting the aspiring progressive prosecutor running against him as an extremist and promising to keep violence from spilling over from neighboring Portland.
“The central role and mission of any DA is public safety. And it means keeping people safe and making them feel safe,” said Mr. Barton. “What people are realizing right now is that at the end of the day, they need DAs who can actually do the job.”
Campaign money from business and police unions on behalf of law-and-order candidates is catching up.
Alicia Walton, a public defender who ran for an open prosecutor’s seat in Arkansas, received a $321,000 contribution from Mr. Soros to a political-action committee supporting her campaign.
A group of businessmen, including poultry magnate Ron Cameron, put about the same amount into political-action committees backing Ms. Walton’s opponent, Will Jones, a career prosecutor. Mr. Jones prevailed last month, capturing 53% of the vote to become district attorney in Pulaski and Perry counties, a jurisdiction that includes Little Rock, Ark.
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In Los Angeles County, the campaign to oust Mr. Gascón said it has raised more than $4 million from real-estate developers, Hollywood executives and others in the business community.
Mr. Gascón won in a 2020 upset over Jackie Lacey, a longtime incumbent who faced criticism for failing to prosecute police misconduct during the height of Black Lives Matter protests. Mr. Gascón, co-author of a 2014 statewide ballot measure that reduced some felonies to misdemeanors, initiated many changes once in office, including a policy of not trying juveniles as adults.
He, too, was dogged by a high-profile case that drew unflattering attention to his work. A transgender woman convicted of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old in a Denny’s restaurant bathroom at the age of 17 bragged in a recorded jailhouse phone call about getting a light sentence because she was a juvenile.
In the media uproar that followed, Mr. Gascón said that if he had known about her apparent lack of remorse, he would have charged her as an adult. He has since created a committee to review juvenile cases.
“All the things that I was elected on, we’re doing,” Mr. Gascón said. “We just have to navigate this other narrative that somehow I’m soft on crime when the reality is that what I’m trying to do, we’re trying to do collectively, is be tough on crime but smart on people.”
In San Francisco, the recall campaign has more than $7 million compared with Mr. Boudin’s $3 million.
Hedge-fund manager William Oberndorf, a Republican donor, gave more than $600,000 to the political-action committee funding the recall and $49,000 to the campaign. Another big contributor is San Francisco-based real-estate investment firm Shorenstein, which gave $633,000 to the recall PAC.
Brandon Shorenstein, a Democrat and the company’s chief executive, said, “This is a bipartisan issue about making San Francisco a safer place for residents to live, work, raise a family.”
Write to Zusha Elinson at zusha.elinson@wsj.com and Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications