Recalled SF DA Chesa Boudin on What Went Right — and Wrong — During His Tenure

You've reemerged in the news recently talking really about homelessness in San Francisco. Besides the pending U.S. Supreme Court case, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, why did you feel compelled to discuss this particular topic right now?

Chesa Boudin: It's totally consistent with the issues that I campaigned on in 2019 and with the broader frustration that I and so many of us here in San Francisco feel with the failure of City Hall to address the most visible, urgent problems that we see on our streets and in our communities. We cannot expect to solve problems when City Hall spends hundreds of millions of dollars and does not even move the needle. And that's what's happened with homelessness. When Prop. C passed in 2018, The City had hundreds of millions of dollars to dedicate to homelessness. And we have almost exactly the same number of people living on our streets now as we did before that proposition passed.

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Why do you think there has been a lot of attention focused on how judges have impeded city efforts as opposed to what elected leaders can do to get people quickly housed?

It’s a really dangerous sign for democracy when elected officials — in the executive and legislative branches of government — are pointing the finger at the non-political branch, the judiciary, and blaming them for things that actually should be solved by the political branches. 

The judicial branch is not supposed to make the law, it’s supposed to interpret and apply it. The other two branches are supposed to pass and change laws, adopt and effectuate budgets. And they've had many, many years to do that with regard to homelessness. 

The judiciary’s opinion simply says, “If you want to use criminal enforcement against homeless people who set up tents, you first have to show there’s somewhere they can go to sleep.” If you have homeless shelters available and people don't want to go to them, absolutely, you can arrest them, you can prosecute them. 

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What is your response to residents who say that they don't want to abandon poor people but they still have the right to feel safe on San Francisco streets?

If we're at a point in American history where seeing poverty makes us uncomfortable or unsafe, living in big cities is going to be tough. Every big city in America has visible poverty. If you go to New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, or Austin, there's visible poverty in certain neighborhoods. And that's the reality of American life. 

We have tremendous historic wealth inequality. We have a rising cost of living.  We have lots of people with untreated, undiagnosed mental illness and drug addiction. At the same time, people like you and I do have a right to feel safe. We have a right for our families to feel safe. We pay taxes. We appropriately worry about the safety of our spouses and of our kids when they're out and about. We have to think about what's actually going to work and what's going to solve the problem. The courtroom that's being used to prosecute the homeless is not being allocated to prosecute actual crimes.

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You've been a proponent of expanding diversion programs. If we did a sweep of homeless camps, why not use it as an opportunity not to criminalize them but rather to help them get the aid they need?

We've tried that. The problem is The City is not actually committed to making the services available. People would wait weeks or months in jail for a drug treatment bed to become available to them. So this idea that we're going to use the criminal justice system as a path or a gateway can work in some cases, but we don't have enough supply of the services. If we're serious about giving people who want help, we need to have treatment on demand as the first step, then we can worry about the people who are treatment resistant, who refuse services, and who need to be controlled or coerced into treatment. But right now we're turning people away who are desperate to get help.

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Do you think the current DA's office, the police, and the mayor’s office are working together more closely than they did during your tenure?

It’s absolutely true that police stopped making arrests when I was DA and started working harder under the new administration. That's very clear in their own data. There was a widespread blue flu, as they call it, during my administration, where police simply said, “We don't agree with the policies, we're not going to do our job.” 

Now, is that bad from the standpoint of city governance? Of course, it's bad. When the people and institutions that are funded by tax dollars simply choose to stop doing their job or disregard elected civilian leadership at the local or national level, we cease to have a democracy. If what it takes to get police who are well paid to do their job is a veto over democratic elections, then we no longer have a democracy.

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You were District Attorney for two and a half years. Do you regret anything? Or, in retrospect would you do anything differently?

About a million things. I ran a government bureaucracy with 300 staff members through a COVID-19 pandemic and two different recall attempts. If you don't make mistakes in the context of all that, then you're Superman underneath that jacket. I didn't have the ability to personally be in the weeds on every case or every new arrest that came in, and so you have to delegate and trust people. And some of the people I trusted, sadly, I shouldn't have. So of course there's lots of things I wish I could have done differently. 

But fundamentally, if your question is, “Do I think there's one or two things that I could have done differently that would have prevented the recall?” The answer is no. Unless I could have prevented the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Were you hurt by current DA Brooke Jenkins actively campaigning against you, even though she was part of your office?

I didn't think she owed me any particular loyalty. I didn't hire her. But I think the way she went about it was really dishonest. And I think it's interesting to see that she and the mayor now seem to be at odds with each other. They seem to be distancing themselves from each other. But that shouldn't be a surprise. When people show the level of disloyalty and dishonesty that both of them have shown throughout their political careers, why would you think they'd have any loyalty to each other?

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What could we do now to change the political culture in San Francisco?

We need a new mayor. When you have the level of dishonesty and corruption and petty politics that we've seen for years and years — and when you see the disinterest in solving problems and the focus on being vindictive and tearing down people that don't tow her line — we need a new mayor.  She's appointed basically everybody in government. She has more control over this city than any mayor in any other city in the country. And yet, she’s constantly pointing fingers. We need a mayor who's willing to reach across the aisle and work with people with different backgrounds and different experiences. And to be present in a way that Mayor Breed simply hasn't been.

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For the full interview with Chesa Boudin, tune in to Ben Kaplan’s WE ARE SAN FRANCISCO podcast and YouTube show.

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