Liberal law enforcement fails San Francisco

 Kaylee McGhee White:

On Tuesday, a broad coalition of minority voters from across the economic spectrum voted to oust San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office. The reason was simple: He failed to make the city a safer place.

In fact, his refusal to prosecute the vast majority of theft and drug-related offenses had the exact opposite effect. Vehicle break-ins are up between 100% and 750% in different parts of the city. Retail burglaries are up by at least 52% . More than 700 people have fatally overdosed in the past year. For comparison, in 2016, the number of people who overdosed in the city was 88 . In total, San Francisco has twice the crime rate of Compton, a notoriously violent city known for its drug-gang turf wars.

Boudin promised “radical change” when he was elected in 2019, and that’s exactly what San Francisco’s residents got. But now, the experiment in progressive non-enforcement is over. Boudin has been recalled by a 60%-40% margin, and voters seem to have realized that social justice in practice is not nearly as great as it sounds in theory. (Whether they’ll remember this lesson during the next election is another question entirely. This is California, after all).

There are several lessons for Democrats in all of this. The first is that they can and will lose even their most hardcore supporters if the policies they pursue undermine residents’ basic rights. San Francisco voters sent this message to Democrats once before this past February, when they recalled several school board members who had fought to keep the city’s public schools shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. These were members that the majority of San Francisco parents probably agree with politically. But because they denied students the access to education that they so desperately needed, parents decided that they’d had enough.

The same goes for Boudin. I’d bet most of the voters who supported his ouster this week agree with Boudin that our criminal justice system should be geared toward rehabilitation rather than mass incarceration. That’s exactly why they elected him in the first place. But the moment he began turning re-offenders loose, ignoring open-air drug markets, and allowing homeless encampments to run amok, he lost the city’s support. No one wants to live in fear of becoming the next statistic — not even for the sake of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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The liberal approach was to make the city safe for criminals instead of the general public.   It was a disaster that should have been obvious from the beginning.  Turning criminals loose on the streets had what to most people would be the obvious effect, more crime.