A Recall for Blame, Not Fix
Terry H. Schwadron
June 9. 2022
In our political zeal to stick labels on trends, the talking heads have defined the recall of San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin as an instant national declaration of war on crime and rejection of anything but traditional policing.
As has now become our new custom, the overstatement and bluster that is deeply reflected in sloganeering and partisan campaign financing is being used to press a wider case that it is the Left that is responsible for increases in crime everywhere. It’s a plank in the generalized culture wars that anything we don’t like, want to confront or fix from immigration to homelessness to mental illness to gas prices is someone’s fault, particularly if that someone is Joe Biden or a liberal reformer like Boudin.
We can agree that no one invites more crime and that there are plenty of questions about fairness and balance in our policing and justice systems. But what addresses those problems is not a single election in a single city fueled by police unions and deep Republican fund-raising campaigns — or building more prisons. The United States already have the largest incarceration numbers of any of the developed nations, and now routinely keeps arrestees in jail if they cannot afford even a low bail even before their case comes to court.
Years of failed or only partly effective crime-fighting programs have taught us that we need to be looking at what prompts crime, including homelessness and drug use.
It doesn’t seem like much of a risk to predict that over the next year, the same crime increases being cited for Boudin’s recall will be similar with a more traditional district attorney, since that office is involved in prosecution decisions rather than stopping street crimes.
Blame may send a message, but it doesn’t fix anything.
In San Francisco
Yes, it is a fair reading that people who elected Boudin and others who believe that our justice systems need more balance to be effective lost faith with Boudin as they clocked increases in homelessness, drug use and mostly burglaries and vandalism rise in the city. They also saw release of inmates disproportionately harshly punished and those held only for lack of cash to make bail on minor charges and more use of alternative sentencing and diversion programs towards disrupting those root causes.
A San Francisco Chronicle analysis found that violent crime in San Francisco actually declined during Boudin’s pandemic years, though property crimes are rising now, particularly burglaries. And he was responsible for a tiny number of cases in which a criminal was rearrested after violence.
I’ve listened to Boudin, who comes across as much as a pragmatist as a reformer. While he could get social services to work with him, he had trouble working with city police, who often were active in withholding street support for programs that included release of arrestees. Boudin did not hesitate to investigate police, earning their enmity, and he lost a good number of prosecutors in his office.
San Francisco voters did get what was advertised: Boudin, a former public defender whose parents spent decades in prison before working with inmate social service programs, kept campaign promises of eliminating cash bail, holding police accountable and diverting people from the criminal legal system.
The recall effort was led by an organization called San Franciscans for Public Safety, which blamed Boudin for crime rises, and was funded by wealthy donors, including William Oberndorf, a Republican megadonor.
Reading Elections as Policy
The question here involves using this election as a political ad for a national focus on crime. Politics demands that we equate real questions about effectiveness in our justice system with some calls from the Left about taking money from police departments and building up social services — a call that Democrats as a party have rejected time and again.
Evidence shows that crime rates were unusually low for two years during pandemic, and that the percentage increases reported in cities across the nation this year are mathematically larger by comparison with years of unusually low numbers.
Nevertheless, mayoral wins by campaigns in New York City and now Los Angeles basically along crime lines help build the perception that only more police will help alter crime.
In my own New York City neighborhood — a post-pandemic cluster of street complaints — the talk had to translate into deployment of new patrol shifts to make a temporary difference in who’s hanging out in dark corners in an area where the city has concentrated methadone clinics. But the local precinct inspector says he needs the help of the clinics, construction companies erecting protective scaffolding and an array of city and state services to make a dent in drug- and homeless-related complaints, the root of our local crime. Prosecutorial decisions to “catch-and-release,” the bugaboo in conservative arguments (see this opinion piece by Washington Post columnist James Hohmann) are on the list too.
If we truly want to note a national turn to stop crime, why are we having so much trouble passing gun legislation in Congress aimed at doing even something minimal about mass shootings? If we truly care about taking a stand about crime, why is the Supreme Court about to issue a decision loosening open carry gun laws? Why do we insist on gun rights for legal usage while ignoring the huge illegal trade in street guns?
If we have identified homelessness as a specific cause of crime reports, why aren’t we being aggressive about finding housing programs or distributing the location of drug clinics or studying why race is such a factor in incarceration campaigns? Where are the programs to divert the lure of easy-money gang membership to more constructive roles in our society?
What I read in these election results is that we want Someone in Charge to simply remove what we do not want to see before us, and to do so overnight. It’s the same impulse we are seeing in talk of gas prices and infant formula shortages.
We don’t want crime or public signs of homelessness, but we also don’t want to do the work as communities to make it disappear. Blame is so much easier.
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