By the time singer-songwriter Fiona Apple introduced the practice of courtwatching to millions of Americans last year, urging them to go observe the basic machinery of the criminal legal system at work, these programs had emerged all over the nation. Typically, they’re piloted by people critical of mass incarceration who hope to shed light on the everyday abuses defendants suffer when nobody’s looking. In Los Angeles, organizers visit one of the county’s 36 courts twice a month. In Baton Rouge, the Reverend Alexis Anderson is at the local courthouse almost every day. “Everywhere you’ve got a court, somebody needs to be watching it in real time,” she told me.

A new courtwatching effort has sprung up in San Francisco in recent years. Like the other groups, Stop Crime SF volunteers attend hearings and take notes. They emphasize the importance of transparency and public accountability. “San Francisco courts are notoriously opaque,” the group’s founder, Frank Noto, told me.

But Stop Crime SF is approaching courtwatching from essentially the opposite direction. Noto and his fellow members want harsher sentences for people with repeated violations, and they’re highly critical of judges who let people out on their own recognizance, meaning without money bail, to await trial. “At a time when drug overdose deaths are at an all-time high, many chronic drug dealers and other repeat violent felons are free on our streets because of overly lenient court rulings,” the group said in an August statement.

Now, as California’s March 5 elections approach, Stop Crime SF’s sister c(4) organization, Stop Crime Action, is jumping into the city’s judicial races and working to oust two sitting judges whom it says are fueling this crisis, Michael Isaku Begert and Patrick Thompson. The group, which is also led by Noto, is championing Chip Zecher and Jean Myungjin Roland, Begert and Thompson’s challengers, who are also running with heavy tech and venture capital money and support from the local police union. 

The response from Bay Area progressives has been furious, with City Supervisor Aaron Peskin urging voters to “reject this right-wing attack on San Francisco’s judiciary.” LaDoris Cordell, a former superior court judge in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, said she worries that “you may see a sea change in how judges behave” if Stop Crime SF’s effort succeeds and Begert and Thompson are removed. 

“These judges are going to start handing down harsher sentences and who is it going to impact?” Cordell told Bolts. “Poor people, people of color, and here we go again.”

San Francisco has in recent years been embroiled in an intense debate over policing and incarceration that attracted national attention when the city elected and then quickly recalled progressive DA Chesa Boudin. In the years since, Boudin’s critics have continued blaming progressive reforms for crime and drug problems in the city, benefiting from an alliance with a fleet of billionaires who have used their considerable resources to boost politicians and legislation with a more punitive approach.

The latest offensive against San Francisco’s judges fits into this broader playbook. Still, the fact that advocates for greater punishment are using an approach crafted by proponents of criminal legal reform renders it more confounding. On its own, courtwatching is essentially neutral, and its empirical nature seems to render it trustworthy. The question is: Who’s watching? And what happens next?

The California prison population ballooned from just over 21,000 in 1978 to over 175,000 at its peak in 2006, driven in part by some judges’ tendency to maximize sentences. And the perception that voters would only support tough-on-crime officials has also shaped how the judiciary has approached its work. 

“When I started as a baby judge, and I was first appointed, one of the older judges came to me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t want to get reversed in criminal cases, just throw the book at everybody,’” Cordell recalls. 

Later, when she ran for reelection, Cordell was attacked for being too soft with defendants. “My opponent was this hard-nosed DA, and he put out, ‘she’s just a Rose Bird clone,’” she told me. That’s a reference to former California Chief Justice Rose Bird, who faced years of reprisals from conservative groups for overturning death sentences as unconstitutional. In 1986, residents voted decisively to remove her from office. 

Cordell prevailed and secured reelection, though, ultimately staying on the Santa Clara superior court from 1988 to her retirement in 2001.

These battles have picked up in recent years. Santa Clara voters recalled Judge Aaron Persky in 2018 after he gave Stanford student Brock Turner a three-month sentence for sexual assault. Turner was required to register as a sex offender for life, but after the case made national news, some onlookers found the sentence unforgivably light and levied a campaign against the judge. 

Inversely, also in 2018, four San Francisco public defenders ran from the left against sitting superior court judges; all lost, though one of them was elected the following cycle. In 2022, Angelenos elected a public defender to the bench who ran on a goal of lowering incarceration rates and criticized sitting judges for stubbornly resisting sentencing reforms. 

Progressives’ wins in judicial races came alongside their takeover of DA offices in San Francisco in 2019 with Boudin and Los Angeles in 2020 with George Gascón, outcomes that intensified pushback from critics of criminal justice reform. 

Noto, a former lobbyist for real estate developers, started Stop Crime SF as a neighborhood group back in 2017, advocating for more resources for police and new legislation to prevent car break-ins. The group promptly took on Boudin after his election and later supported the effort to recall him. That November, Joel Engardio, who was Stop Crime SF’s executive director, ousted an incumbent supervisor. 

During this time, the group expanded its scope to scrutinize the bench, building a courtwatch program to get volunteers to study how judges responded to property crimes. “We wanted to make sure that judges understood, that the district attorney understood, that these are important too and they just couldn’t ignore this,” Noto told me. Eventually they began tracking responses to violent crime and drug offenses as well. 

Stop Crime SF’s approach gained a powerful ally when Brooke Jenkins was appointed DA by Mayor London Breed to replace Boudin. Before her appointment, Jenkins was paid over $150,000 to consult for Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a group that heavily supported the recall effort and has also backed Stop Crime SF. 

Jenkins promptly clashed with local judges. When she said she would prosecute some 16 and 17 year olds as adults, the lowest age state law would allow, a veteran judge, J. Anthony Kline, refused to send any young people into the adult court system. In response, Jenkins’ office began blanket-challenging him, which effectively removed Kline’s entire case load. Jenkins also told ABC that “judges are refusing to make sure that these individuals stay in custody, and that has to change.” At a town hall in the summer of 2023, the DA excoriated local judges for releasing defendants with multiple drug offenses pre-trial, rather than keeping them locked up. 

Zecher, one of the candidates endorsed by Stop Crime Action, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was inspired to run by a comment Jenkins made urging challenges to sitting judges. Zecher, a corporate lawyer on the board of UC Law San Francisco, did not agree to a request for an interview for this article.

Boudin believes his successor has been “scapegoating” judges to deflect from her own responsibility, also pointing to Breed, an ally of Jenkins who last year vociferously criticized a federal judge for upholding a ban on of homeless encampments as long as the city lacks sufficient shelter beds. “They both leaned so heavily into the doom-loop, fearmongering approach to defining San Francisco as a way to get me out of office, and now they own the problems and the perceptions,” he told Bolts. “They can’t shake it and so they’re looking for someone else to blame.”

Breed, who like Jenkins is up for reelection in November, is also championing a wide-ranging ballot measure on March 5, Proposition E, that would expand the powers of the local police; Stop Crime Action has endorsed it. Another measure, Proposition B, would increase the size of the police force, but only if the city creates new taxes to pay for it, a condition that troubles police advocates; one of its chief opponents, Axios reports, sits on the board of Stop Crime SF.

Over the last year, Stop Crime SF’s courtwatching program, and its accusations that the local bench is fostering crime, have morphed into an effort to outright remove two local judges whom the group says exemplify this behavior. Noto wrote in the organization’s newsletter in November that Begert and Thompson “have a demonstrated track record of releasing serious and dangerous offenders back into the public.”

Begert presides over several of San Francisco’s collaborative courts, where judges either try to formulate a treatment plan for people who are jailed, or get people into services as an alternative to incarceration. He also oversees San Francisco’s CARE court, where people close to someone with substance abuse or mental health issues can petition the court to mandate treatment—a program that has also proved controversial on the left because of concerns around civil rights.

Begert told Bolts in an interview that he believes he is being targeted because of his work on the collaborative courts, alleging that his critics are pursuing an agenda that’s single-mindedly punitive.

“Why me?” he asked. “Because I’m running these treatment courts, and these treatment courts are built on trying to address the underlying causes of criminal behavior, to increase public safety by reducing future conduct. And if your primary motivation is to impose punishments on people, or to accomplish what we call in legal philosophy retribution—that’s not furthering your objectives.”

Noto rejects the notion that he’s politicizing the judiciary. He says his group is largely looking to promote transparency, and that its decisions about which judges to target stem from external feedback.

In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, Stop Crime Action released what it called a judicial “report card” that rated judges whose terms end in 2024, and gave both Begert and Thompson (and no one else) failing grades. According to The San Francisco Standard, the group drew on cases that were tracked by courtwatchers and a variety of other factors, including a survey the group sent out to local trial attorneys. 

But the group only received roughly 25 answers—most of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, from prosecutors rather than judges and defense lawyers. Mission Local reported that the group misrepresented a single person’s assessment in a way that implied numerous negative reviews. 

“I have no objection to engaging with the public and having people see what we do,” Begert told Bolts. “I think we should have more of that. My objection is to coming into the project with a political agenda.”

The other targeted judge, Patrick Thompson, handles preliminary hearings; he evaluates evidence to determine whether the case will continue to trial. Much of the criticism against him in the Stop Crime Action report card centers on cases where he released defendants with past convictions on their own recognizance pending their trial. 

The San Francisco Chronicle found this month that, in a number of the cases, Thompson’s decision to release received no objection from the prosecutor on the case, meaning that all parties agreed the defendant should be released pending trial. Lara Bazelon, a law professor who advocates for criminal justice reforms in San Francisco, says pretrial detention is legally considered a final course of action. “It’s the resort only after every other less restrictive alternative has been considered and rejected,” she said. “And that’s because when you lock someone up pretrial, you’re taking someone that is presumed innocent, and taking away their freedom for weeks or months or even years at a time.”

Thompson did not respond to a request for an interview, nor did his opponent Roland, who currently works as a prosecutor in Jenkins’s office. 

The San Francisco Bar Association, the more traditional rating system for local judges, rates each of Thompson and Begert as “well-qualified.” Zecher and Roland received no ratings from the bar association because they declined to participate in the process, an unusual decision.

The president of the association told KQED in December that she’s worried about attacks on “the independence of the judiciary.” Boudin echoed that concern, telling Bolts that judges are constrained in how they can defend themselves; he pointed to state rules known as the judicial canons that prohibit judges from talking about the cases in front of them. “Unsurprisingly, they’ve chosen people who are uniquely vulnerable,” he said. 

Courtwatchers on the left view judges as too prone to detain defendants pretrial and throw the book at them—even beyond what the law requires. Stop Crime SF, meanwhile, sends its members into courtrooms to observe criminal cases with a form asking them to rate whether “defendants were held accountable for their actions by the court.” The form defines accountability, among other things, as whether a judge sets money bail and ultimately sentences someone at—or beyond—sentencing guidelines. 

Progressive courtwatchers elsewhere have taken note of the effort in San Francisco. And while their goals differ significantly, some say they support more scrutiny on the courts on principle, since they believe courts’ opacity to the public has produced harmful results overall.

Courtwatch LA also has a website, Rate My Judge, where community members and lawyers can weigh in on their experience in court. A lot of the negative reviews center on judges’ treatment of the people in their court, but some are outcome-focused, too—one judge’s page has several comments alleging that he categorically denies resentencing petitions. They also plan to challenge judges in the future, though they would not consider a score statistically significant until it was composed of at least 45 reviews.

“I think it is something the left has to sort out or at least accept as inevitably a two way street,” said Bazelon. “Courts are open to the public. There’s nothing unlawful or untoward about going and observing what happens in court. And I don’t think it should come as any surprise that it’s going to be a tool that both sides are going to use.”

The Los Angeles organizers tend to also distrust the assessments by professional groups like the bar association, arguing that while they’re purportedly neutral, they’re biased against candidates of color and women, and against lawyers opposed to the status quo. They say their approach brings in a different, necessary perspective.

“At the end of the day, it is a community tool,” said Titilayọ Rasaki, policy and campaigns strategist for La Defensa, the Los Angeles organization that runs Courtwatch LA. “I think it’s just a question of who’s in and who’s out in your community.” She noted that many of Courtwatch LA’s volunteers have had past contact with the criminal legal system. For these people, she said, “it’s a kind of reclamation, or a way of shifting your relationship to the criminal legal system that has probably impacted your life in vastly different ways.”

Rasaki and her colleague Gabriela Vázquez, deputy director of La Defensa, told me that they weren’t threatened by Stop Crime SF’s use of a similar playbook. In their eyes, the problem with what’s happening in San Francisco is not that incumbent judges face scrutiny or opponents; it’s the “scare tactics” employed against them. “If we have a drug overdose epidemic, the easy way out is just criminalizing people, or attacking judges,” Vázquez said. “What we’re seeing in the Bay Area is that they’re trying to take the easy way out and find scapegoats.”

Still, Rasaki said she welcomes anyone to courtwatch. If they feel comfortable with how poorly people are treated and how easily they’re incarcerated, she said, “that’s a value judgment for them… We can disagree and we can use different organizing strategies and the ballot box, I guess—this is where we’re duking it out. It’s a contention of ideals.” 

“If it gets more people in the courts, if it gets more discourse about what it is that the courts are up to, and whether or not they’re meeting the needs of our society—that’s a conversation I’m really trying to start,” she said.

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“People are talking about how life-changing it’s been inside to be able to make some choices about what they’re watching on TV, or what music they’re listening to—to be able to listen to music at all,” Kinnon said. Plus, incarcerated people have tens of thousands of choices within the free eBook and audiobook library, which contains more than 63,500 titles. Some inmates with vision issues can now read almost anything in large print, when they were previously limited to the small selection of large-print books. Other inmates with low levels of literacy take advantage of audiobooks to open up the world of books to them.

Media services like these are often offered in other jails, but as they’re typically controlled by for-profit prison telecom companies, they’re often exorbitantly expensive. In most places any form of communication used to keep incarcerated people connected to the outside world, be it phone calls or tablets, has also been used to control incarcerated populations and generate profits for jails and their contractors.

San Francisco has offered jail tablets and their content at no cost to incarcerated people, part of a wave of institutions starting to decouple carceral communications from a profit motive. The free tablet program was introduced in May of 2023, a logical follow-up to San Francisco making jail phone calls free in 2020, the first county in the country to do so and the second city after New York.

Before 2023, the San Francisco jails had never implemented any tablet program for all inmates. When the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department decided to dip its toes into providing the devices, Michelle Lau, the acting director of the Financial Justice Project within the San Francisco treasurer’s office, recalls that the very first iteration of the bid request was similar to others across the country—riddled with charges for tablet services.

She remembered thinking, “We just did this whole thing with jail phone calls—why are we doing basically the same thing on a tablet?” The San Francisco Jail Justice Coalition, a coalition of community groups, pushed for a completely free tablet program. “Some [community members] even said if there were any charges, they would prefer no tablet, rather than one with high charges,” Lau said.

Tablets have been trickling into prisons and jails over the past several years, with the devices first launched in 2012 by prison communications company JPay, now owned by prison telecom giant Securus. Soon prisons and jails began hailing “free” tablets for their inmates, as these companies would indeed often distribute tablets to inmates at no cost. But once incarcerated people actually used the tablets, they were far from free.

Music might be $1.99 per song, as it is for the most expensive songs in Washington State. In Pennsylvania state prisons, eBooks cost between $2.99 and $24.99. E-messaging can be as much as Arkansas’s $0.50 per message. Or, tablet costs may rack up based on how much the tablet is used; in Minnesota’s Fillmore County, tablet use costs $0.25 for each minute, which adds up to more than $30 to watch a typical movie on a tablet screen.

Meanwhile, most incarcerated people earn little money, if any, to pay for these services. As a result, families, many of whom are indigent themselves, may support them financially. And because of the disproportionate share of Black inmates in prisons and jails, much of these fees are paid by low-income Black women, either mothers or girlfriends or wives.

Over the past two and a half years, five states have made prison phone calls (though not necessarily jail phone calls) free. The latest one, Massachusetts, just passed a law in November. A handful of major cities in addition to San Francisco have also made jail phone calls free, including New York, Miami, Louisville, and Los Angeles. 

Change will soon happen on the federal level, too. In early January 2023, President Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which allows the FCC to regulate in-state prison and jail phone calls as well as out-of-state phone calls. Under federal regulation, which is set to begin sometime in the latter half of 2024, the price of prison and jail phone calls nationwide will likely fall significantly. 

In San Francisco, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto had already supported free phone calls, so it wasn’t surprising when his office ultimately released a request for proposals for a completely free tablet program. Alissa Riker, the sheriff’s office’s director of programs, said free tablets were “a long time coming” given the office’s “philosophy of not charging the folks in custody and their families.”

Lau says San Francisco received bids from the two major prison telecoms, Securus and ViaPath (formerly GTL) for the project. They also received one from Nucleos, a new company focused on prison education programming that seemed excited about a free tablet program. The company recently transitioned to a public benefit corporation, which requires it pursue both profits and positive social benefits.

In the end, Nucleos won the contract. 

Most jails and prisons, however, are contracted with either Securus and ViaPath for their tablets. Together, the companies hold roughly 80 percent of the prison communications market valued at more than $1 billion. And Securus and ViaPath have been tracking the recent and growing trend toward free phone calls

“Some of the companies running jail phone calls, they see the writing on the wall” about the looming unprofitability of jail phone calls, said Joanna Weiss, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “They are often making up the money through the use of tablets.”

In 2015, a Securus presentation to potential investors noted that the company has “successfully decreased its exposure” to new regulation by “investing in businesses that are not regulated.” These businesses are any number of ancillary services like e-messaging, eBooks, movies and TV show rentals, and music that the company can then charge inmates to use on a tablet. (The Martha Wright-Reed Act clarifies that the FCC may now regulate video calls.)

But companies aren’t the only ones that profit—prisons and jails can earn commissions on tablet services just as with phone calls. “We’re always looking for ways to bring in additional money to the county,” Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County Jail Warden John Walton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, commenting on the jail bringing in $161,000 in tablet commissions in 2019.

Riker, from the San Francisco sheriff’s office, noted that this is what sets San Francisco’s free program apart. “Money is why other sheriff’s offices aren’t doing it,” she said. 

Typically, an institution’s profits from jail communications, whether via tablets or phones, are intended to fund inmate programming (though they sometimes simply shore up budgets or go to dubious purchases). Riker told Bolts that she’s gotten calls from people working at other jails who were astonished that San Francisco could afford to fund free tablets and give up that funding stream—regardless of the fact that the money is sourced from vulnerable prisoners and their families. 

In 2023, the mayor’s office committed to using approximately $500,000 annually from the city’s general fund to support free tablet services for people in jail. As the San Francisco sheriff’s office’s annual budget is just under $300 million, the tablet program makes up roughly 0.2 percent of the department’s total budget.

The move has been part of a citywide shift away from prison profiteering. In 2020, San Francisco’s board of supervisors passed an ordinance to bar the city from profiting off of goods and services purchased by prisoners, which led to free jail phone calls as well as the end of markups on commissary items.

But even as tablets may be an important tool for people behind bars to connect with the outside world, carceral institutions also use them to replace in-person services like classes and visitation, and even to help better control a jail or prison population. Miami-Dade County jails, like many jails across the country, suspended in-person visitation during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic. But also like many other jails, Miami-Dade has yet to reinstate in-person visits almost four years later.

“Visitation right now is only video calls,” said Katherine Passley, the co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a Miami activist group organizing families of incarcerated people and pushing for changes at the jails. Passley’s father is incarcerated at a Miami-Dade County jail. Even though the county offers free 15-minute video calls, the service itself is “horrible,” Passley said, not only because of Miami’s internet connection problems—the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked Miami one of the worst cities in the country for internet connectivity—but also because the video contract with ViaPath precludes the use of Apple iPhones for video calling. The vast majority of Beyond the Bar’s membership can’t even access video calls, she said.

As for prison programming, the sheriff’s office in San Francisco considers the tablets a supplement to in-person classes and programming and explicitly refuses to use them as a replacement. This is not necessarily the case in other jurisdictions, which may see tablet services as an affordable replacement for educational programming. Low staffing issues in South Carolina prisons partly inspired a tablet program with educational services so the state could “use technology to deliver services to these folks in their cells,” as Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told the Greenville News. 

Plus, many wardens have extolled the virtue of tablets for keeping incarcerated people busy—and keeping them under their thumbs. “It’s a great tool for us, because number one it keeps them occupied, but number two it’s something that we can take away from them for behavior modification purposes,” Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County Jail Warden Tim Betti told The Scranton Times-Tribune in 2020.

In Miami, Beyond the Bars has concentrated on tackling fee elimination in the jails, following in the footsteps of San Francisco. For instance, they’ve successfully advocated for the county to get rid of a $2 daily fee that pushed inmates into debt and commit to providing free 90-minute phone calls each day for people in jail. The group is currently working to reintroduce in-person visitation in the jails to ensure that incarcerated people and their families aren’t only able to see their loved ones through a screen.

Beyond the Bars has also recently pushed for free tablet services in Miami-Dade County jails. The tablet program outlined in the county’s request for proposals is not quite as ambitious as San Francisco’s but is better than that of the vast majority of jails nationwide. When the Miami-Dade County jails implement the program, the plan is for inmates to get their own free tablets with access to a limited number of free resources, such as an eBook library and one free movie a month. More specific details of the tablet program, however, will likely be up to the as-of-yet unannounced contractor. Beyond the Bars reached out to the local public library, which has agreed to work with them similarly to the San Francisco library—but it’s unclear if the library will ultimately be part of the program.

Kinnon, the San Francisco librarian, said she’s fielded inquiries “every week or two” from libraries interested in replicating San Francisco’s model. But she notes most of these libraries are in jurisdictions contracted with Securus or ViaPath—companies that would have to give up their profits on books and music, unlike the newcomer Nucleos. Kinnon said that from what she understands, ViaPath and Securus “have not expressed any openness or interest in working with public libraries.” Kinnon mused that one possible, though clunky, workaround would be for carceral systems to offer two tablets, one with free library services and one with the telecom provider’s services.

Companies like ViaPath and Securus “need to feel pressure…to be more open to do this and make it work,” said Kinnon, adding that San Francisco and Nucleos needed to work together to find creative ways to make the free tablet project happen. 

“But we did it,” she said. “And that means it could happen anywhere.”

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“It’s just heartbreaking to me,” April Green, O’Neil’s aunt, told Bolts. “He just gave free will to shoot [to] any officer that feels any kind of fear — he’s not going to prosecute.”

For years now, O’Neil’s family has been caught between San Francisco’s shifting politics around prosecution and police accountability. George Gascón, who was district attorney when the killing happened, declined to prosecute Samayoa, but after Chesa Boudin took over the office, he announced that he would be charging the officer. Boudin, who heralded the prosecution of Samayoa as “historic,” had sought to expand and bolster the Independent Investigations Bureau (IIB), a division of his office dedicated to investigating and prosecuting police brutality. 

But Bolts reported last year that, after Boudin was recalled by voters and replaced by Brooke Jenkins, the new DA quickly fired or demoted the IIB’s lawyers and installed a deputy who lambasted the work done under Boudin. 

Jenkins, who won a special election last November to fill the remainder of Boudin’s term, announced in February that she was dismissing the case against Samayoa because she believed Boudin had brought it “for political reasons and not in the interests of justice.” 

The overhaul of the IIB under Jenkins has alarmed families of people killed by San Francisco police who believed that they might see justice under Boudin’s IIB. Her actions since then have confirmed their worst fears. 

Sean Moore was an unarmed Black man who was shot by police in 2017 while suffering a mental health episode in his own home. (His death, three years later, was determined to be the direct result of his wounds). According to Emily Lee, the co-director of the progressive group San Francisco Rising, who has been supporting Moore’s family, Jenkins’ office has continued to decline to object whenever the defense requests delays in the case, and last month chose to turn over Moore’s medical records to the defense, which she was not required to do. (Jenkins’ spokesperson has not responded to a request for comment as of publication).

“The Moore family has been very skeptical that you know, is the DA really representing their family, or are they actually supporting the defense?” Lee said. After Cleo Moore, Sean’s elderly mother, made a “personal plea” to the judge during an April 28 court date the judge scheduled a date to set a preliminary hearing, where the relevant evidence in the case would be made public for the first time. 

When Boudin was recalled last year, his IIB was on the verge of pursuing charges against officers for the 2016 police killing of Luis Góngora Pat, an unhoused Mayan Mexican man; police claimed he was threatening them with a knife, but multiple eyewitnesses reported that he was sitting on the ground and far from officers when they started shooting—first with bean bag rounds, and then real bullets. Adriana Camerena, a family friend and advocate for the Góngora Pat family, told Bolts that they have heard nothing from the office since Jenkins won the special election. “No reach out. No interest. No care,” she said. 

Recently, Jenkins also announced that she would not be pursuing charges against the Walgreens security guard who shot and killed Banko Brown, provoking outrage from many community members who saw a throughline between the case and the DA’s dithering on the police prosecutions.

While in the state legislature, Bonta supported efforts to increase police accountability, including a bill that requires the AG’s office to take over investigations of unarmed civilians. He said at his confirmation hearing in 2021 that he would take greater action to hold police accountable. 

“If not these elected officials, then who is willing to actually say to the public that police, security officers, armed vigilantes cannot kill unarmed black men?” Lee told Bolts. “And I just don’t think we have an answer for that question, because so far we have not seen any accountability for the violence that was perpetrated against Keita O’Neil, Sean Moore, Banko Brown.” 

Bonta’s office responded to a request for comment by directing Bolts back to his letter declining to take the case.

The stalling of cases against San Francisco officers who killed people highlights why such cases are rarely prosecuted, as well as how even officials who outwardly champion police accountability can still justify alarming individual acts. Bonta’s memo echoed many of the same reasons that Gascón’s office initially declined to charge Samayoa, who was a probationary officer on his fourth day of the job in 2017 when he fired through the window of his vehicle, killing O’Neil, who was suspected of carjacking and had led police on a chase, but was unarmed. 

In his memo, Bonta writes that Samayoa, who was later fired by the department for his actions, had participated in a simulation “eerily similar” to the O’Neil shooting just three weeks earlier, in which “suspects” exiting their car during a routine traffic stop immediately fired at Samayoa, hitting him in the head with a paintball. Bonta pointed to the exercise in concluding that Samayoa shooting O’Neil “was reasonable given his training and experience.” 

Green had urged Bonta to pick up the case after Jenkins dropped it and is now alarmed by what his refusal signals. “What is this message?” Green asked, saying that Bonta “just opened the door up” for any officer to use the artificial situations they’re put in as a routine aspect of their training as justification for killing someone. 

Green has said she has been fighting for her sister, O’Neil’s mother, who has dementia but still remembers the loss of her son. When asked if she had told her sister about Bonta’s decision, Green responded immediately: “No and I never will.” 

“I’m not going to have her relive it,” she said. 

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San Francisco police shot Sean Moore, a Black man suffering from schizophrenia, right outside his own home. He died three years later of his injuries. Police say they opened fire on Luis Góngora Pat, an unhoused Mayan Mexican man, because he was threatening them with a knife, but multiple eyewitnesses reported that he was sitting on the ground and far from officers when they started shooting—first with bean bag rounds, and then real bullets. A rookie officer who suspected Keita O’Neil, another unarmed Black man, of car theft shot and killed him the moment he exited the vehicle he was in and started to flee. 

These are three of the police killings the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office tried to prosecute under Chesa Boudin, who was elected in 2019 on promises of reform that included greater police accountability. Less than a year after he took office, Boudin bucked the longstanding trend of clearing killer cops and filed manslaughter and assault charges against Christopher Samayoa, the officer who shot O’Neil, heralding the case as “historic” and calling it the first known prosecution for an on-duty police homicide in the city’s history. 

April Green, O’Neil’s aunt, wants justice for her nephew’s death. “My nephew is not coming back,” Green told me. “But there’s a lot of other kids that are being murdered by police unjustly. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. The only difference is we have a video.” Green also hopes the case sets an example. “This case will set a precedent for future cases that involve police that abuse their power,” she said. “It will show that police can be held accountable too … I think it’s very important to show that.”

But if Green’s family ever sees justice, it will be a long road. Police killed O’Neil in 2017, a year after former DA George Gascón created a new division inside his office, the Independent Investigations Bureau (IIB), to evaluate instances of police violence and determine whether to prosecute officers. This bureau’s agreement with the San Francisco Police Department, signed in 2019, signaled a sea change: before, police had always led investigations of their own. But Gascón’s IIB never filed charges against an officer for killing someone. Boudin, his successor, revamped the bureau to include attorneys with homicide experience. Boudin’s IIB was pursuing charges against several cops, including the one who killed O’Neil, and investigating dozens of other cases. 

Then, this summer, the ground shifted again. Boudin was ousted in June in a recall election organized by critics who accused him of endangering public safety. Mayor London Breed, who frequently clashed with Boudin, appointed Brooke Jenkins, a prominent surrogate for the recall effort, as the new DA. 

Jenkins has spoken often about the importance of securing justice for victims, recently tweeting, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” She has professed that she is “dedicated” to police accountability, and has said that cops who break the law should be prosecuted accordingly. 

But internal emails I obtained under California open records law and interviews with former IIB staff show that the bureau tasked with holding San Francisco police accountable has been beset by disruption and dysfunction since Boudin’s recall. 

Within two months of her appointment, Jenkins had fired or removed all three lawyers working cases on the IIB under Boudin; as of early November, only two lawyers had joined the unit to replace them. The emails reveal that the attorney Jenkins put in charge of the bureau has called the IIB’s work under Boudin “deeply corrupted,” began a “serious review” of police violence cases prioritized under the previous DA, and treated an outgoing lawyer in the bureau like a security threat instead of seeking help transferring complex and sensitive cases to the next administration. The new head of the IIB has accused the previous staff of incompetence and serious breaches of ethics, and criticized their work as being guided by “the political whims of former leaders”—echoing the charge frequently levied by the lawyers defending the police officers charged by Boudin. 

After cleaning house and declining to consult with previous IIB staff, the current IIB has cited its unfamiliarity with ongoing police prosecutions as a justification for delaying hearings in the active cases, which have been moved until after the special election set to take place on Nov. 8 to fill the remainder of Boudin’s term. Jenkins faces three opponents, including Joe Alioto Veronese and John Hamasaki. Both are former members of San Francisco’s civilian Police Commission, charged with oversight over the department, and both have taken issue with her handling of the IIB. 

“The police union has a very dedicated and passionate interest in ensuring that none of their members face accountability,” Hamasaki, a frequent critic of the city’ police department, told me. “Anything outside of kid gloves is seen as antagonistic by the police,” he said, describing a dynamic that played out in other DA races in the region this year.

Hamasaki added that Jenkins’s IIB has “sent a pretty clear message that they are going to back the police union, regardless of whether or not its members are committing crimes…what it suggests very strongly is that they believe that there’s one law for the rest of us and one law for the police.”

One of the central promises of the reform prosecution movement has been to institute meaningful scrutiny and accountability for police who kill civilians. But Boudin’s attempts to do so, and the apparent rollback under Jenkins, show the challenges of investigating law enforcement killings when police unions interpret any challenge as a declaration of war. 

The first case against an officer that Boudin’s IIB brought to trial ultimately ended in acrimony and an acquittal, with accusations of misconduct on both sides. The case infuriated San Francisco’s powerful police officers’ association, and caused the police chief to temporarily back out of an agreement between the San Francisco Police Department and the DA’s office that governs IIB’s work after the threat of a vote of no confidence from his department. 

Jenkins has cited the successful renegotiation of the agreement as evidence of a restoration of harmony between the two. She has publicly stated her desire to “repair” the DA’s relationship with the police department, and it appears that police are already reversing course on what many decried as a “work stoppage” under Boudin.

The uncertainty now hanging over the IIB cases is a fresh wound for families who have been waiting years for some form of justice. “I’m really worried that if Jenkins wins this election, that officer’s going to walk away with murdering my nephew,” Green said. “It’s no doubt in my mind.” 

“We never stop hoping for justice” 

Gascón’s IIB had declined to charge the officers who killed Luis Góngora Pat, Michael Mellone and Nathaniel Steger, but Boudin decided to reopen the case for investigation. For the Góngora family, Boudin’s decision to reconsider the case represented the first glimmer of hope that they might receive some measure of justice since 2016, when the shooting occurred. 

“We don’t have high expectations for elected officials,” said Adriana Camarena, a lawyer and Góngara family friend who has served as an informal advocate and spokesperson. “But we believed they were being earnest and truthful to us rather than just political…we never stop hoping for justice, and to clear the good name of your family members that the police has just run through dirt.”

An indigenous Mayan man from the Yucatán who had come to the United States to support his family, Góngora worked in restaurants in San Francisco for years, faithfully sending remittances so that his family could build a house. After struggles with substance abuse and an eviction, he had fallen into homelessness. The entire family was shattered by his death: His brother, José, who also immigrated to the city and had lived with him before they lost their apartment; his cousin, who also lived in San Francisco; and his widow and children back in the Yucatán, who hadn’t seen him in years.

In the months before the June 2022 recall election, IIB attorney Rebecca Young had worked to get the investigation into Góngora’s death to the point where the IIB could impanel a grand jury to make a charging decision. Two workdays after Jenkins was sworn in as Boudin’s replacement, Young emailed the new top prosecutor requesting an appointment to discuss her cases, anxious to know how they might be impacted by the change of leadership. Three days after that, Jenkins fired her in a call that Young had mistakenly assumed was going to be a case meeting. Lateef Gray, the IIB’s managing attorney under Boudin, was fired the same day as Young, leaving only one attorney, James Conger, to manage all the IIB cases on his own for weeks. (Gray didn’t respond to several requests for an interview for this piece; Conger declined to comment.) 

Young says she felt like she had failed the family. “I worked so hard just to have it go nowhere,” she told me, adding that she assumes the case won’t go forward since it was never filed. 

The sudden changes to IIB staffing after the recall left the Moore and Góngora families reeling—the Góngoras, for instance, had an upcoming meeting to discuss their case with Young and Kate Chatfield, Boudin’s chief of staff, both of whom were now gone. 

On July 21, Jenkins announced that Darby Williams, an attorney who prosecuted general felony cases at the office and who had previously worked at IIB under Gascón, would manage the bureau. Two days after Williams officially took over the IIB, Camarena wrote to her asking for updates on the case and wondering about accessing victims services, which the family had been in touch with during Boudin’s tenure. “This is a matter of urgency for us as it must be for you,” she concluded. 

Soon after, Williams sent a brief reply telling Camarena that she needed time to familiarize herself with the case, stressing that she would reach back out when she was ready to discuss it further, and promising to have someone from victims services follow up. When Camarena replied with several more questions, writing, “What may we do to help you step into our shoes and understand the type of emotional and psychological grind it is for the family to fear that justice for Luis is once again at risk due to bureaucratic changes?” Williams never responded. Camarena and the Góngora family haven’t heard from Jenkins or Mark Koo, the IIB’s most recent attorney hire, either. And victims services never did get in touch. 

“I asked her to give me a reassurance that she’s prioritizing the review of Luis’s case and taking steps to preserve the investigation work carried out by her predecessors and she did not respond at all,” Camarena told me. “All of that together let me know that she had no intention to seek justice.” 

Camarena had also asked Williams if she’d consulted with Young about the case, writing, “I’m sure she can be extremely helpful in explaining the current progress.” But Young says Williams never contacted her to ask about her months of work on either police shooting.

The internal emails I obtained show that Williams herself was concerned about her lack of knowledge about the IIB cases. Discussing one case with Conger on Aug. 3, she wrote, “​​I am sure you can appreciate that I know little about any of these cases and the concern that brings when going to court.” But Williams emphatically declined when Conger, the sole holdover from the Boudin-era IIB, offered to contact Young, who had previously worked on the case. “That would not be appropriate,” she replied. “I will figure it out.” 

“He was an angel to me” 

Gascón’s IIB investigated but never charged Kenneth Cha, the officer who shot and seriously wounded Sean Moore in 2017. Moore’s mother, Cleo, says he was denied proper medical care at San Quentin State Prison, where he died three years later, in 2020. After the Marin County coroner ruled Moore’s death a homicide, Boudin decided to reinvestigate the case.

For Cleo, who is in her eighties, the agony of losing her son still feels as raw as the day it happened. Losing her husband of nearly six decades the same year as Sean only added to the grief. They had both worked in service of San Francisco for many years—she as a nurse at SF General, her husband as a city bus and trolley operator. She still struggles to understand how the same city they dedicated their lives to took away their son. “I did what I could for the citizens of San Francisco,” she told me, “and I’ll say to anybody, my son did not deserve to be killed the way he was.” 

As a teenager, Sean loved basketball, and he was popular with girls. But a schizophrenia diagnosis upended his life. “I’m not trying to paint a picture of my son being an angel,” Cleo said, “but he was an angel to me.”

The pain of her son’s death has been compounded by the protracted nature of the court proceedings surrounding it. To both Cleo and Young, the IIB attorney who had been assigned to the case, Cha’s counsel seemed to be deliberately stalling in advance of Boudin’s recall election this past summer. 

“I have been sitting in the courtroom since January of 2021, every month,” Cleo said. “What his attorney has done, he has come into court every month and he has decided that he doesn’t have what he needs … They kick it off to the next month … he just went on and on and every month it was the same exact thing. And then we knew what he was doing. He was prolonging this until [Jenkins] took office.” 

Emails from the office indicate the Cha prosecution itself could now be up in the air under the new IIB. After Conger, who at the time was the only remaining attorney from Boudin’s IIB team, took over the case by default, he tried setting a court date for late September, where a judge and lawyers would determine a future date for a preliminary hearing. But Cha’s lawyer, Scott Burrell, quickly interjected to tell the judge that he and Williams, Conger’s supervisor and the new head of the department, had already agreed on a much later date for the hearing—after the special election. In his email, Burrell also informed the judge on the case that Williams had told him the DA’s office was now reconsidering the charges against Cha, writing, “We discussed the time necessary to complete a serious review and are asking that we set the matter for November 16.” 

Like Cha’s prosecution, the case against Samayoa had been pushed back multiple times before the recall—and like Moore, the victim’s family accuses the officer’s defense team of stalling. After Williams took over the IIB, the office asked to postpone a preliminary hearing for Samayoa initially scheduled for Aug. 18, where evidence in the case would have been made public. The next court date is now scheduled for Dec. 1—again, not even a preliminary hearing, but a meeting to set a future date for it. 

Randy Quezada, a SFDA spokesperson, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Jenkins needed more time to review the case and claimed Gascón had first declined to prosecute the officer before Boudin’s decision to pursue it, but former Gascón chief of staff Cristine Soto deBerry told the paper that Gascón never declined the case and it was still open when Boudin took office. (I asked Quezada for clarification, but did not receive a response.) 

Emily Lee, co-director of San Francisco Rising, a local progressive organization, vocalized a fear born of these delays that she hears from families. “They’re very worried that post-election, very quietly, the DA might choose to drop charges,” she said. 

Veronese, one of Jenkins’s opponents, has also criticized the new DA for “punting” the cases until after the election. “She doesn’t want to be held accountable for the choices she makes,” he told Mission Local.

After Jenkins was appointed as DA, O’Neil’s aunt April Green demanded a meeting with her. The encounter, at which Williams was also present, took place on August 24. Green called me afterward, perturbed by one thing in particular: Green said that Williams told her prosecuting law enforcement killings would require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt, and then some.” 

“Why should this officer get a higher burden of proof than anyone else?” Green asked. “I looked at her and I knew then: you’re trying to find an out.” 

“I’m just in limbo” 

It’s unclear why Jenkins and Williams kept Conger around longer than the other IIB attorneys who were fired under the new regime; neither responded to questions for this story. But the emails I obtained show that they were done with him by the middle of August—and that they were just as eager to kick him out of the IIB as the other lawyers who staffed the department under Boudin.

On Aug. 17, just five days after Jenkins reassigned Conger away from the IIB and into the general felonies department via an all-staff memo, he emailed the facilities manager to say that he returned from a late meeting to find himself locked out of the IIB office. Williams, who was copied on the exchange, responded directly to the facilities manager, chastising Conger for being too sluggish in packing up and leaving the IIB. 

“Mr. Conger has not been diligent in effectuating his physical move,” Williams wrote. “I appreciate that he is now locked out but I can attest to the fact that over the last two days he has been significantly slow in moving.” She also asked that the office immediately remove his access to IIB documents, writing cryptically, “I have concerns.” Only afterward did the office send Conger his new office seating assignment, “as of tomorrow.” Conger emailed that he would be in court first thing the next morning and could be there all day, but could circle back “and begin my move.” 

The following morning, Williams followed up with another email to the facilities manager insisting that Conger vacate his IIB office that day, “even if he has to do so during lunch,” and that they restrict his access to the IIB offices for good. The next day, she emailed Conger expounding on the “noble requirement” of confidentiality and asking that he “avoid communication with members of the public, friends, family, former IIB co-workers, and the persons involved in the investigations (by family relationships or otherwise) about subject matter related to your time here in the IIB-Unit.” She copied a number of higher ups at the DA’s office on the email. Soon after his forced exit from the IIB, Conger decided to leave the DA’s office altogether. 

With every attorney on Boudin’s IIB out, victims’ families feel completely out of the loop. 

December 1, Samayoa’s next court date, is also the fifth anniversary of O’Neil’s killing. Green told me she’s going to keep fighting for her sister, O’Neil’s mother, who has dementia. “She’s not forgotten that her son was murdered by a police officer. She’s forgotten a whole lot, but not that,” Green said. “Before she closes her eyes, I want to make sure that she can close them in peace, knowing that justice has been served.”

Cleo Moore is also waiting for her next court date on November 16, as she has done for so many months. It particularly pained her to see a television interview with Jenkins where she spoke of meeting with victims’ families. “This Miss Jenkins has never, never never spoken to me in her life,” Moore said. “Nobody has even tried to contact me. Not a soul. I’m just in limbo.” 

“I feel like I’m being shut out,” said Green. “Like I’m out in the dark.” 

“Gross misuse and abuse of resources” 

If Jenkins cleaning house wasn’t direct enough, Williams made it crystal clear that police prosecutions would be handled differently in a bombshell email that circulated inside the office three weeks after she became the IIB managing attorney.

In her letter, Williams excoriated former IIB staff, accusing them multiple times of “gross misuse and abuse of resources” and saying that “attorneys were employed in this Unit who were unqualified to work in it.” She criticized Boudin’s IIB for failing to close out cases in a timely fashion, noting that there were 36 open investigations going back to 2015. Gascón’s IIB appears to have filed many more declination reports than Boudin’s did relative to both men’s time in office; Boudin’s IIB also spent significant time taking another look at cases and bringing one to trial.

Williams also accused the former staff of investigating police officers, “not because the facts warranted those investigations” but because of “‘mission-like’ perspectives.” She wrote: the “lack of oversight and submission of the Unit’s members to the political whims of former leaders also deeply corrupted the Unit.” (You can read the full memo here.)

Young called Williams’s allegations “red herrings” to justify changes to the IIB post-election. 

Lee, of San Francisco Rising, rejects the implications that pursuing police shooting cases is inherently political. 

“If you don’t want to have the same thing thrown in your face, then you should actually treat these cases with what they’re due, and that means an actual impartial investigation of the facts,” she said. “I just think that’s all the victims are asking for—and if [Jenkins] disagrees for some reason, be transparent about it.” 

Although Jenkins and Williams have both been tight-lipped in public about their intentions for the police killings that Boudin’s IIB tried to prosecute, Williams didn’t hold back in the internal email, calling the IIB’s reopening of cases investigated by the previous DA “baseless.” 

“An injustice to all human beings”

On October 20, the families of Sean Moore, Luis Góngora Pat, and Keita O’Neil held a rally outside Jenkins’s office along with a number of community groups, including San Francisco Rising. April Green spoke, then Sean’s mother, Cleo Moore, resting on her walker near the podium. Cleo’s other son stood next to her, holding a photo of Sean at his high school graduation. 

Next, José Góngora Pat spoke briefly in Spanish. “I came today to ask for justice from the district attorney,” he said. “What the police have done is an injustice to all human beings.” 

I spoke with Camarena a few days later. “I know that for people outside the circles of these families and those of us who support the families, it might seem like these cases happened a long time ago,” she said. “But being in that rally, for me, it reminded me of how fresh the pain and the suffering is for these families.”

Before the rally, Camarena and José had spoken to another journalist. “At some point she says, ‘how do you feel,’ and he points to his heart and he just says he carries Luis in there,” Camarena said. “But what he’s told me in the past is that it’s just like a dagger in his heart.” 

The post In San Francisco, “No Intention to Seek Justice” appeared first on Bolts.

The recall is a critical blow to criminal justice reformers in the state, but it was one in a series of elections in the region involving progressive candidates on Tuesday. In nearby Contra Costa County, DA Diana Becton joined forces with Boudin in 2020 to form a small reform alliance and has also been targeted by law enforcement unions. As of publication, she enjoys a large lead against her tough-on-crime challenger. In Alameda County, in the East Bay, another reform-minded candidate is leading the open DA race and will likely be moving into a runoff. 

Still, Boudin is one of the most visible figures of the so-called progressive prosecutor movement, and the national media framed the recall as a litmus test for the viability of criminal legal system reform in the United States. The results demonstrate the immense challenges of trying to change prosecutorial practices in a place marked by dramatic inequality, at a moment of widespread backlash. They are a win for the group Safer SF Without Boudin, which was backed by an array of conservatives and centrist Democrats, and heavily funded by real estate interest groups, venture capitalists, and private equity firms.  

Perhaps more than anything, Boudin’s recall shows how inchoate anger over the visible symptoms of inequality—homelessness, public drug use, property crime–can crystallize into a renunciation of an individual politician, even as voters broadly desire the policies that politician champions. While a majority of voters wanted Boudin gone, a recent San Francisco Examiner poll found that even more supported moving mental health treatment out of jails, and diversion instead of incarceration for low-level offenses.

A former public defender, Boudin campaigned on reducing incarceration by doing away with sentencing enhancements, privileging diversion and restorative justice, and addressing racial bias in the criminal legal system. He inherited the DA’s office in January 2020, at a time when San Francisco was already suffering the consequences of income stratification and a severe housing shortage. By May of that year, homelessness had gone up by 285 percent in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood, owing largely to the pandemic’s onset. Amidst a spate of overdoses, the Tenderloin has become perhaps the strongest symbol of Boudin’s failures to the pro-recall crowd, despite its historical reputation as a down-and-out zone akin to LA’s Skid Row or New York’s Bowery neighborhood.

Boudin has been strongly opposed by law enforcement unions after campaigning to hold police accountable for violence and misconduct. But he has also butted heads with Breed, who has been mayor since 2018 and whose preferred candidate for DA he defeated in 2019. After Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin and called for more police presence on its streets, Boudin criticized her plan, calling it ineffective and overly reliant on incarceration. In turn, she has lambasted him in outlets ranging from the New York Times’s podcast “Sway” to NBC Bay Area, saying: “We need to start concentrating more on supporting the victims of this city than we are supporting in some cases, sadly, the criminals.”

Ludovic Blain, the executive director of California Donor’s Table, which supports people-of-color-led organizations in funding progressive candidates, isn’t necessarily surprised by Breed’s oppositional stance. “It’s actually in the mayor’s interest to have a DA that works with the cops because they make the mayor look better, even though they’re not solving any ongoing problems,” he told Bolts. But he believes Breed’s public contempt for Boudin had a noticeable impact on the race. “It means that it’s not just Republicans against Chesa—It’s also a Democratic woman of color,” Blain said.

Criticism from Breed and Brooke Jenkins, a Black former prosecutor in Boudin’s office who left and became a prominent spokesperson for the recall campaign, helped Boudin’s opponents shift the narrative around race and the criminal legal system. Boudin’s winning 2019 campaign centered on the widely-held belief that the system requires structural reforms to address racial bias, while Jenkins and Safer SF Without Boudin pushed for his recall by arguing his reforms hurt communities of color. 

As the pandemic brought about a troubling rise in violence against Asian Americans, especially elders, many blamed the DA for not doing enough to prevent these crimes or hold their perpetrators accountable. Boudin took pains to highlight his initiatives for the AAPI community, including hiring a number of Chinese speaking victims’ advocates, inaugurating an AAPI Victims’ Services unit, and expanding language access in court. He also sought hate crimes charges in 17 cases since taking office. 

“He is the first district attorney and one of the first SF politicians who has really brought a broader racial justice lens to his office and put some of those cases in a broader context of the history of racism and white supremacy in the country,” said Celi Tamayo-Lee, the co-director of SF Rising Action Fund. Tamayo-Lee said these efforts seemed to resonate with the working class AAPI voters that SFRAF’s canvassers spoke to. Still, they ultimately made little impact on the prevailing narrative that Boudin didn’t care about ending violence against AAPI communities. 

The recall campaign itself seized on these powerful narratives, raising $7.2 million and spending much of that money making Boudin the figurehead for all of San Francisco’s ills. Amidst this multipronged opposition, Boudin struggled to win over voters who aren’t already sold on criminal justice reform. Like the best-known reform DAs across the country, including Los Angeles’s George Gascón and Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, who easily prevailed in his own re-election race in 2021, he has emphasized that his approach is backed up by data, pointing out that San Francisco is not an anomaly—crime is going up in most counties in California, including places with more punitive incumbents like Orange County and Sacramento County. But voters in San Francisco proved more susceptible to inflammatory messages about crime and disorder. And the DA’s original message about a better, kinder, more just system—which resonated enough with voters that they elected him to office back in 2019, albeit by a thin margin—faded into the distance. 

On a night where reformers scored more promising results elsewhere, Boudin’s loss is not a death knell for the progressive prosecutor movement. But it is a reminder of the fear-driven politics that have long influenced policy around criminal punishment and incarceration. “The recall wants us to think that we’re going to be safer without him,” said Tamayo-Lee. As recall attempts become an increasingly common tool of reactionary and centrist forces in California, it is a playbook that may well be used again. 

The article has been updated with the correct timeline of the next election following the recall; Blain’s quote has been updated to correct a transcription error.

The post San Francisco Ousts a Prominent Criminal Justice Reformer appeared first on Bolts.

Nextdoor, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department has a similar history and faces an impeding investigation into a secret unit accused of targeting his political enemies. Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose deputies have been accused of harassment and organized violence against the community, faces an avalanche of challengers—eight in total—in what is arguably the nation’s most important law enforcement election this year.

The filing deadline for candidates passed earlier this month in California, filtering out dozens of counties where voters won’t get to weigh in on criminal justice policy this year. As happens nearly everywhere in the country, district attorneys and sheriffs like Barnes across the state are now certain to stay in office until 2026 because no one else is running. 

Still, millions of voters will see competitive elections for these powerful offices, which enjoy vast discretion on the rules and conditions of the local criminal legal systems. At stake are issues like whether the state continues to send people to death row—with a competitive DA race in Riverside County, one of the most aggressive jurisdictions in the entire country when it comes to seeking the death penalty—or whether minors should be prosecuted as though they are adults, a major fault line in Santa Clara County’s heated DA election.

California offers no centralized database of county-level candidates after the filing deadline, so Bolts created a cheatsheet to paint a clearer picture of what will unfold in coming months. Candidates will appear on the state’s June 7 ballot without party affiliation listed; if no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff will be held in November between the top two candidates. 

Out of 57 counties with sheriffs’ offices on the ballot, 30 drew multiple candidates. On the prosecutor front, San Francisco will hold a recall election against DA Chesa Boudin, organized by opponents of his reforms in office. Of the 56 other counties with regular DA races, 18 counties drew multiple candidates this year—seven of which are bigger than San Francisco, including Orange County, where DA Todd Spitzer faces a new fallout from racist comments. 

In fact Orange County is the most populous in the entire nation to hold a contested DA election this year. All in all, more than 16 million Californians live in counties with contested DA races, and more than 30 million in counties with contested sheriff elections. Of course, plenty of other elections matter greatly to criminal justice and law enforcement this year, notably the statewide attorney general election that has become a major proxy battle over criminal justice reform, and plenty of local elections for mayor, city attorney, and council.

See: The full list of candidates running for sheriff and DA in California.

These elections occur against the backdrop of heated debates about the future for criminal justice reform in California. The state has taken major steps away from the “tough-on-crime” consensus that sent its prisons and jails ballooning over the past decades, often through changes that voters have directly approved. In 2014, for instance, voters adopted Prop 47, which lowered the severity of some property crimes, and they rejected rollback efforts in 2020. In recent years, progressive candidates Boudin and George Gascón also won competitive DA races in San Francisco and Los Angeles on promises to lower incarceration. Both DAs went on to champion major changes to their offices like restrictions on sentencing enhancements and cash bail, efforts to reduce long prison sentences, and a ban on seeking the death penalty. 

Boudin and Gascón have since become lightning rods for critics of decarceration, who connect their policies to the rise in homicides and to broader concerns about public safety—including fears over highly-publicized burglaries, which have become a dominant issue in San Francisco. Boudin’s recall is among the highest-profile tests of the electoral resonance of this argument in the 2022 midterms, as he is arguably the most emblematic member of the nation’s “progressive progrecutor” movement alongside Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, who easily won re-election last year after facing similar attacks. (Gascón is not on the ballot this year. One recall drive against him has already failed, though his opponents are now trying again.)

But reform proponents are pointing out that similar concerns over public safety are playing out in counties run by vocal foes of criminal justice reform. Orange County’s Spitzer paints neighboring Los Angeles in apocalyptic terms to bolster his own standing, a familiar strategy for public officials in more suburban areas that border major cities. But Spitzer’s more progressive opponent is pointing out that murders and other crimes have also risen during the DA’s tenure.

The same dynamic holds in Riverside County, another jurisdiction on Los Angeles’s doorstep that has sentenced more people to death over the past five years than any other in the nation. 

Elsewhere, candidates are running to push criminal justice reforms much further in their counties. In Santa Clara County, public defender Sajid Khan accuses incumbent DA Jeffrey Rosen of being too punitive, promising a major overhaul if he is elected. Khan and Rosen have a long personal history, including Rosen threatening Khan with an ethics complaint during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as Bolts reported in February. 

Orange, Riverside, and Santa Clara are California’s three most populous counties with contested DA elections this year. Six other counties with at least half-a-million-residents also host contested DA elections this year. San Francisco’s recall election has dominated national attention. In Alameda (Oakland) and Sacramento counties, incumbents who have been critical of reform are not seeking re-election (Sacramento’s DA is running for attorney general); the field to replace them offers markedly different choices, with both reform-minded candidates and others more in line with the incumbents’ politics. In Contra Costa County, reform-minded DA Diana Becton, who in 2020 joined a progressive association with Boudin and Gascón, faces one challenger. A similar dynamic is playing out in San Joaquin County. And in Ventura County, an incumbent faces a deputy DA running on his experience as a prosecutor.

Missing from the list are plenty of populous counties like San Diego, where DA Summer Stephan will face no opponent; during her last term, Stephan tried to blunt the impact of hypothetical future reforms by pushing plea deals that required defendants to waive any rights they may have to to seek re-sentencing if the legislature passes new laws. Also missing from the list of contested elections is Kern County, where the DA has sought to go further than most in deploying carceral tactics against Calfornians experiencing homelessness.

Elections for sheriff are unfolding in a similar statewide context, since sheriffs have long been prominent foes of the state’s criminal justice reforms. By and large, there is little indication that this will change after 2022. In fact, one of the more influential Democratic critics of reform is trying to switch from the legislature to the sheriff’s office: Jim Cooper, an assemblymember who is also a former sheriff’s deputy, is one of the two candidates running for sheriff in Sacramento.

But these elections may also offer rare windows into the often disastrous conditions in the local jails that sheriffs supervise. San Diego’s jail has long been the subject of investigations into a string of deaths and other major concerns, and the county has responded by targeting a chief local journalist who was holding them to account. Sheriff Bill Gore is retiring this year, and a crowded field of seven candidates is running to replace him and inherit this system. 

In Alameda County, JoAnn Walker is running on an unusual progressive ticket against Sheriff Gregory Ahern, who has also faced scrutiny for the high number of jail deaths under his watch. Walker has tied Ahern’s use of solitary confinement to a series of suicides at the jail. “How can they come out and be normal?” she asked about people held in the local lockup at a recent forum.

California has restrictive rules on who can run for sheriff, which boxes out anyone who is an outsider to law enforcement. Some reformers have sought to eliminate this barrier to more candidates, but in the meantime there remain limits on who can even try to change these offices. In 2018, Villanueva was a veteran of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department when he ran on promises to clean it up from the inside. Instead, one of his earliest decisions once he became sheriff was to rehire deputies who were fired for misconduct.

Catch up with our other primers on prosecutor and sheriff elections in 2022 on Arkansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, as well as our national primer.

The post California’s Midterms Bring Plenty of Forks in the Road for Criminal Justice Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

Last week, San Francisco’s newly elected district attorney, Chesa Boudin, released his office’s new bail policy. Following his campaign promise, the new policy forbids prosecutors from requesting money bail under any circumstances. In addition, it allows them to request pretrial jail time only for people who face certain violent charges and who prosecutors believe pose a high risk of violence or flight. 

With these provisions, Boudin has adopted what is easily the most progressive prosecutor bail policy in the country. His reforms are more comprehensive and transparent than those adopted by other leading progressive prosecutors, such as Boston’s Rachael Rollins and Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, let alone those of DAs elsewhere in the country.

But the policy also reveals how tough-on-crime norms limit the contemporary vision of progressive prosecution. Boudin’s office will continue the practice of assessing risk to justify incarcerating legally innocent people for their future crimes. It has defended this approach with unproven appeals to public safety and predictive accuracy, that in a prior era of bail reform would have been seen as an intrusion on fundamental civil rights.

For decades, activists and some legal scholars have denounced the practice of incarcerating people pretrial as a violation of the presumption of innocence, unlikely to improve public safety, destructive to communities, and racially discriminatory. Awaiting trial from a jail cell, people suffer worse case outcomes and risk losing their jobs, their homes, and custody of their children.

Money bail has been the primary mechanism for pretrial incarceration: A judge conditions the release of a person upon the person posting a money bond, often on the recommendation of the prosecutor. Amounts are often set beyond what the person can afford. On any given day in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people are detained pretrial because they are unable to post bail.

In recent years, some progressives have won DA elections on promises to transform this bail system. Boudin, Krasner, and Rollins have released three of the most emblematic prosecutor policies on the issue so far. Each expands the circumstances under which people not yet convicted of a crime will be released from jail without financial conditions. 

Only Boudin’s reform outright eliminates money bail, though. 

According to the policy he set, prosecutors in his office can never request money bail, and they can never defend someone’s incarceration on money bail. That’s a big shift in policy that should enable many people to avoid jail pretrial. 

On the other side of the country, prosecutors in Rollins’ office can still request money bail in situations where they believe there is a flight risk. In Philadelphia, Krasner’s prosecutors face looser restrictions. Krasner instructed his prosecutors to not request cash bail for certain low-level offenses (misdemeanors and some felonies classified as nonviolent). Otherwise, prosecutors there are free to request money bail. 

So even in jurisdictions with progressive prosecutors, incarceration on unaffordable money bonds continues to be a problem. Through extensive court-watching efforts, the Philadelphia Bail Fund has found that, although the pretrial jail population has declined, Krasner’s prosecutors continue to request unaffordable bail amounts that result in pretrial incarceration, as The Appeal reported in the summer of 2019. 

By contrast, prosecutors in San Francisco will no longer be able to ask judges to detain people by imposing financial conditions on their release, at least if Boudin’s directive is properly implemented. In San Francisco, people’s freedom will not depend on their ability to post bail.

The second aspect of Boudin’s policy is that it limits when someone can be detained pretrial. If a jurisdiction only eliminates money bail, there’s always the risk that, instead of facilitating people’s release, courts and prosecutors will turn to other methods of pretrial incarceration. This is the trade-off that critics say was made with California’s 2018 bail reform law (Senate Bill 10), which is currently pending a 2020 public referendum.

That is because money bail is not the only mechanism for jailing people pretrial. In many states, including California, a judge — often acting on a prosecutor’s recommendation — can determine that a person is dangerous or is a flight risk and order that person to be jailed until the criminal case is over.

Boudin’s policy restricts when this can happen. It sets a presumption against it, and enables prosecutors to recommend pretrial detention only for people facing charges for certain violent felonies. And they can do that only if the prosecutor is convinced that the person has a “substantial likelihood” of committing “great bodily harm” or fleeing the jurisdiction if released. These are narrower circumstances than SB 10 would allow. They are also somewhat narrower than Rollins’s policy, which enables prosecutors to request pretrial incarceration for all statutorily eligible offenses in Massachusetts — mostly violent felonies and gun charges — if there is a “clear safety risk to an identifiable victim or witness.” 

But in defining the circumstances where pretrial detention ought not to occur, Boudin, like Rollins and supporters of SB 10, is also endorsing the premise that it sometimes should. 

These policies affirm that pretrial incarceration is justified based on predictions of future dangerousness. This conception of pretrial justice reflects the limits not just of particular  policies but of the current horizon of progressive prosecution. Rollins’s office has made use of such “dangerousness” holds, The Appeal reported in October, though she has requested these hearings with significantly less frequency than other Massachusetts DAs who use reform rhetoric. 

Pretrial incarceration based on dangerousness assessments, a policy first proposed as legislation by the Nixon administration, swept the country in the 1970s and 80s. It permitted courts, for the first time in American history, to legally jail people awaiting trial based on a public safety rationale. These new laws were a turn away from the conclusions of the Johnson administration’s seminal 1967 report “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” which had considered pretrial detention as way to reform bail but had determined that it “might well create more of a problem than the imposition of money bail, in the light of the difficulty of predicting dangerousness.” 

In a 1987 opinion written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court found the federal government’s new preventive detention scheme to be constitutionally permissible. In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall chastised the court for “disregard[ing] basic principles of justice.” He warned of “the coercive power of authority to imprison upon prediction” and “the dangers which the almost inevitable abuses pose to the cherished liberties of a free society.”

Boudin’s bail policy sides with Nixon and Rehnquist over Johnson and Marshall. The policy assumes that prediction can save us from the harms of pretrial incarceration. 

Like recent reforms around the country, the plan is to develop better ways to identify the “right” people to detain pretrial. The press release accompanying Boudin’s policy promises that the office will release “people who are safe” and detain “those who pose a serious threat to public safety.” 

But whether that determination is made through prosecutors’ judgment or actuarial risk assessment tools, the project cannot succeed. Neither prosecutors nor algorithms can know in advance who will commit violent crime.

It turns out that predicting violence is really hard. The information prosecutors see and the judgments they make are racially skewed. And although risk assessment tools are often touted as a solution to implicit bias, a perspective that the press release endorses by evoking the “equitable decisions” born of “objective data,” the data used to build actuarial assessments is itself deeply flawed and biased. Even the best actuarial risk assessments’ predictions of pretrial violence are frighteningly poor. Data from jurisdictions that use the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), a risk assessment tool that Boudin’s policy includes as a factor in bail decisions, show that 86 to 99 percent of the people that the algorithm flags for potential pretrial violence will not get arrested for a violent crime if released. Arnold Ventures, the company behind the PSA tool, has cautioned that the tool should not be used as the basis for detaining someone. Largely because pretrial violence is so rare, it is also hard to predict. 

Even high-risk people are unlikely to commit a violent crime while awaiting trial, so a preventive detention system involves incarcerating thousands of legally innocent people for what a fraction of people might do. The fallout of these policies disproportionately impacts poor communities and communities of color — especially Black communities. 

Boudin himself has researched the shortcomings of risk assessment tools. In a paper released last week, he and his co-authors show that, by overcharging cases, prosecutors can inflate a defendant’s risk score, leading to a recommendation for a harsher pretrial outcome, even if the charges are eventually dropped. Such outputs are a far cry from the “objective data” promised by his office press release. 

Boudin’s policy prevents prosecutors from recommending pretrial detention without supervisor approval, in an effort to foster the presumption against it. But this only moves the problems with making reliable predictions up the hierarchy. Acknowledging the gravity of pretrial incarceration does not by itself make the decisions sounder. 

By eliminating financial conditions for release and restricting when prosecutors can request to jail people pretrial, Boudin took more progressive action on bail policy than his contemporaries. 

But Boudin’s policy also upholds a pretrial incarceration scheme justified by tough-on-crime conventions. Today’s bail policies expect prosecutors and algorithms to know in advance who will commit crimes and who won’t. But no one can know that. At its core, a preventive detention scheme endorses the view that with good enough math or intuition we can overcome the moral stain of incarcerating people — not for what they have done but for what they might do.

Colin Doyle is a staff attorney at the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School. He works on bail and pretrial reform across the country at the local and state levels.

The post Chesa Boudin’s New Bail Policy is Nation’s Most Progressive. It Also Reveals Persistence of Tough-on-Crime Norms. appeared first on Bolts.

Chesa Boudin, a public defender who drew national attention for his decarceral platform, will be the next district attorney of San Francisco. He prevailed last week against three other contenders, including interim DA Suzy Loftus. 

Boudin’s victory is among a national wave of candidates who were elected prosecutor last week on commitments to fight mass incarceration. 

He ran on never seeking cash bail, promoting restorative justice and alternatives to incarceration, creating a unit to investigate ICE agents, and not prosecuting so-called qualify of life crimes, among other policies. “Let’s make San Francisco safer and more humane by healing the harm that crime causes, not just punishing the symptoms,” he wrote in an August commentary calling for restorative justice in The Appeal. And upon winning last week, he told The Appeal: “It’s time for radical change to how we envision justice.” 

This week, I talked about the implications of Boudin’s win with two San Francisco advocates who supported his campaign: Lara Bazelon, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco, and Emily Lee, director of San Francisco Rising Action Fund, a 501(c)4 organization that endorsed Boudin. I asked them about the organizing that went into Boudin’s victory, and about what they think is next for policy and activism around mass incarceration, immigration, and racial justice in San Francisco. 

You can listen to the conversation, or access it directly on SoundCloud. You can also read our transcript below.

Bazelon and Lee both view Boudin’s win as a reckoning with tough-on-crime politics, a rejection of what Bazelon calls the image of the prosecutor who tacks “as many skins as possible to the wall with no greater concept of the vast harm that that causes.” 

Lee added: “We’re going to turn that institution to something completely different than what it’s been. And that’s what this whole movement is about: It’s about reimagining what we do with our public offices.”

They point to pretrial detention, police accountability, ICE, and restorative justice as spaces poised for significant change. Lee called for advocates to press forward with demands to close a local jail, and treat Boudin’s win as an “opportunity for all of us to be pushing for experimental, new pilot programs, new interventions that are diverting people away from incarceration.”

But they also warned that transforming San Francisco will take continued activism. The Police Officers Association and other local actors may keep pushing against Boudin, as we have seen elsewhere. We have also seen elsewhere that reforms rolled out by reform-minded DAs can stall or move slowly, due to internal or external factors. “This is where the real work begins, right?” Lee said. “The job is not electing the person. The job is, once they’re elected, how is Chesa going to be able to carry out the reforms and the agenda that he set forth, and how do we as the public and the community help hold him accountable, but also support him so that he can do his job. … There needs to be a much larger movement around what he’s trying to do to make it reality.” 

She later added, “We’re going to keep ourselves organized.”

Daniel Nichanian: DA elections have long been quiet affairs. That has been changing, as it did in SF. Why is that? What outreach and organizing strategies went into elevating the visibility of the DA race, and centering its debates around mass incarceration?

Emily Lee: I think there’s two things. Obviously there’s been huge national wave of a kind of grassroots movement pushing DAs more to the left and to be more progressive. A lot of that is due in part to the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for Black lives. I think they’ve raised so much awareness around what is the impact if we don’t have a DA who’s going to hold police accountable. So I think that’s a huge reason why we see a national surge around electing progressive DAs. And I would say that in San Francisco, the majority of people still don’t know what the DA is or what it does. That’s what we saw when we were door knocking and talking to voters or when we were calling them on the phone. And that’s still true. So even though there’s been this kind of wave, it has a long way to go, I think, to really educate people and raise their understanding of how much the DA intimately can impact their lives, how much power and control the DA has. I think also there was a lot of education done with the district attorney forums that happened. I think there was over fifty forums across the entire city that people and organizations coordinated. But I think we made a start, from here on out everyone will be watching very closely.

Lara Bazelon: This is part of a national wave, but I feel like what made the San Francisco race truly interesting is that a lot of people nationally who are in the weeds on issues of criminal justice reform were maybe ready to write it off. The New York Times did a profile on Chesa early on and concluded something like, there’s very little daylight between Chesa and some of the other candidates, in particular Suzy Loftus, who was the favorite establishment candidate. This race to me was really about educating voters that there was plenty of daylight, and what it really means to be a progressive prosecutor. So Emily is absolutely right that, sort of at a baseline level, it’s about educating people that, “Wow, your DA matters,” and then beyond that, it’s about speaking to what a DA does. And so for so many years—the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, early 2000s—what did DAs do? They sort of outcompeted each other to see who would be the toughest on crime, and Republicans ran on that, Democrats ran on that. And that is what we thought DAs did: They charged people, they convicted them, and they tried to lock them up for as long as possible. 

It’s only really in the last, I don’t know, five to ten years that there’s been a reckoning with that and we’ve recognized, finally, that it’s racist, that we discriminate against people who are undocumented, that we discriminate against people who are poor. This election was really about surfacing those issues in a way that was telling voters, “We’re a progressive city, but actually when it comes to our DA, we could be a lot more progressive and here is an individual with a very specific message who is going to explain to you why that is.” And to me, that’s the triumph of this election is that it was really a referendum on what it means to be progressive and how far you can reach in terms of who you could put in that position of power.

Nichanian: Emily, you are the head of an organization that works on criminal justice reform but also on issues beyond the criminal legal system. What strategies did you use to connect mass incarceration to other spaces of organizing on social or economic justice?

Lee: I think for us, the issues related to the DA race around mass incarceration, around police accountability, around how the institution, like the office itself, like Laura said, is very racist, is very criminalizing of poverty and poor people. All of that connects to all issues we work on, right, because we work in immigrant communities that are being targeted by ICE right now and the Trump administration. We work in communities who are living below the poverty line in San Francisco and can’t afford to house their family. We really have families who are really struggling just to survive in the city which has so much wealth, and yet so many people are unable to access that wealth. And so, for us, the issue of mass incarceration will be tied with everything else we’re working on, from immigration, to housing, to workers’ rights, to young people’s rights. 

During the campaign season, we saw the San Francisco juvenile hall: Finally there was a political movement that was saying we need to close this jail down, we should not be locking up young people in cages, we should be supporting them with services and programs and rehabilitation and diversion, mental health. These are all issues tied to all the communities that we are grounded in, which is working-class low-income communities of color in San Francisco. 

So for us, it wasn’t a hard decision to say, why should we get involved in this race? It was very clear, and especially because there’s been so many incidences in the last, you know, five, seven years of police killings of innocent civilians for no reason. So many instances of police misconduct and acting with impunity, that in San Francisco and especially in Black communities and Latino communities, there’s just been so many high profile cases. There is no other need to say why is this important: because we are seeing people get killed on the streets every day. And that’s a huge tragedy, and also people are very angry about that because none of those police officers were charged, and there was no justice in a sense for those communities or those family members. We talked to Alex Nieto’s father, who says he goes to the place where his son was shot every morning at 7am. You know, that’s not something we can get back to him. For him, it’s like, he’s been in this fight for five years, right? It’s about how do we bring along other people who are very similar to Alex Nieto and his family, and really expose them to what can we do, what can we change so that police are not able to act with impunity, and they’re really held accountable, and that regular people feel like they have a role in doing that when they elect a progressive DA like Chesa.

Nichanian: One of the issues Emily just brought up is immigration, and indeed one of Boudin’s most emblematic commitments during the campaign was to create an immigration unit within the DA’s office to investigate ICE agents who violate people’s rights. Could one of you say more about that looks like, for a DA’s office to not cooperate with ICE. We often hear about this with sheriffs, or policing. Why is this an issue in a DA election in San Francisco?

Bazelon: It’s a huge issue because in jurisdictions that cooperate with ICE, what happens is if you are picked up and detained, regardless of whether you are convicted or not, and it’s discovered that you’re here and you’re not documented, you’re handed over to ICE, which essentially means if you’re in this country without papers, you will probably be deported. And so for example, in the federal system where there obviously is very close cooperation with ICE, if you are in custody, regardless of what happens at the end of your case, you are 99 percent of the time going to get deported. So in jurisdictions that don’t cooperate with ICE, when you’re in our system, the city system, regardless of what happens to you, ICE is not going to be notified. They’re not going to get some kind of notification from the district attorney’s office that, “Hey, we have this undocumented person in our jail or released on bail, come on and go pick them up.” This is especially crucial right now, given what’s happening at the federal level around immigration and this move toward mass deportations and the curtailing of people’s rights and just the scope and depth and breadth of the people who are getting scooped up and thrown out of this country. So it’s hugely significant. 

And I think, while the other candidates talked a lot of talk about how they wouldn’t cooperate, in fact, because they were career prosecutors they had, under other administrations. For example, when Suzy Loftus was high up in the policy department in Kamala Harris’s office, in SF DA’s office, they handed juveniles over to ICE regardless of whether they were convicted of any crimes. And so that’s a record that you have to live with. And when you have that contrast with someone who doesn’t have that record, and in fact has the opposite record, it’s generally, I think, more compelling to a voter who is deeply invested in that issue.

Nichanian: The city’s large racial disparities were at issue in the campaign; Emily alluded to this in the context of policing. Boudin highlighted in one ad that the majority of people in the city jail are African American, while African Americans make up a comparatively small share of the city. How did such disparities and experiences of racism fuel the organizing around this election? And how do you think a DA can make the most difference on this front, since part of racial inequalities stem from policing and arrests, or from other spaces like education or housing?

Lee: I feel like we heard so many stories of voters we talked to who were directly impacted by the criminal justice system. They had family who are incarcerated, they themselves have been incarcerated. We went to public housing in San Francisco, which is predominantly Black; we went to neighborhoods in San Francisco that were predominantly Latino and spoke only Spanish, and then we also did work talking to voters in Chinatown and Chinese-speaking voters. When we talked to those people, we had somebody who was a Spanish-speaking, Latino immigrant, a mom whose teenage son was charged with a misdemeanor, and it was about 12 years ago, and they had to pay a $20,000 bail fee, and that really impacted their family’s financial health. They were suffering for many, many years badly after that, and after learning about Chesa’s plan around eliminating cash bail, they became very clear about, “Okay, how is this going to benefit my family who’s been directly impacted,” right? And we just know that people of color, their bail is set at higher rates than white folks who’ve been charged with anything. We know that racism plays a role in all of those sentencing decisions. For us, you just can’t really separate the issues of race and the criminalization of poverty and also the targeting, overpolicing of communities of color. 

For us, the issue can’t be separated because of some of the statistics we know about who is currently incarcerated, and the statistic around the fact that there’s less than 5 percent of the population in San Francisco is Black, but the majority of incarcerated people in San Francisco jails are Black. It is a racial justice issue, and for many of the people we talked to that’s clear, because everyone has had some experience, whether it’s being in the system or interacting with police, that’s very clear to them that they’re being targeted because of their skin color, or because they’re homeless. And Chesa wasn’t afraid to talk about that. He was very clear about the racial component. And when he was asked that at a DA forum at San Francisco State that was held by formerly incarcerated students at SF State, he explicitly said, we can’t talk about this without talking about systemic racial oppression and systemic racism, we know that’s the root cause of this problem. To have a DA candidate say that is pretty compelling and pretty important for people to see that their experiences are really validated, and it’s not just about individual responsibility and you made a mistake. It’s actually deeper than that.

Bazelon: I would just say for anybody who is unfamiliar with what the Hall of Justice looks like, when you walk in there almost every single person who is in an orange jumpsuit is a Black or brown person, and it’s a pretty shocking reality and yet it’s our grimy everyday reality, and it is fundamentally racist. And I think just having someone stand up and say, directly and bluntly, this system is racist and here’s how I intend to fix it, is very refreshing. 

So you asked a question, I think it’s a really good one, how do you really change that as the DA, you’re not the police, you’re not deciding who to arrest, and that’s true. I mean, it’s true that Black adults in San Francisco are seven times more likely to be arrested than white people. But it’s also true, and this is at the back end, that they’re 10 times as likely to be convicted, and they’re more likely being booked on more serious charges, even based on similar conduct. They’re more likely to be jailed rather than bailed, more likely to be convicted of serious crimes and get longer sentences. And none of these disparities, in study after study, can be explained by age or homelessness or poverty or crime rates. So the question really comes to the DA, and they do a lot of things, they have a lot of power. There’s something called a declination rate, which means the police bring cases and you say I’m not going to prosecute this case. Or the question comes down to what to charge, and you don’t charge a very serious felony when you feel like a misdemeanor charge is more appropriate. So those are just two very simple ways that the DA can have a massive impact. Because a DA who just sort of funnels every case that the police bring to them is going to I think exacerbate a system a mass incarceration, particularly given who the police are in San Francisco. 

Unfortunately, as we know, that department is just tremendously problematic. And so the DA doesn’t have to be a rubber stamp. They can actually push back and be a check on racism. And I think Emily made the extremely important point that poverty and race cannot be disentangled from each other and Chesa Boudin’s promise never to see cash bail is enormously significant because we know that when people are jailed, they will plead guilty to almost anything, innocent or guilty, just to get out because they’re desperate to be united with their families, get their jobs back, stay in their housing. And so once you get someone out on bail and allow them to really fight their case, the outcomes for them are hugely significant and different. So that decision alone, I think is going to have impact on people who are poor and people of color.

Nichanian: This seems like a good opportunity to delve into the role and profile of a DA. I’m thinking first of a moment that I think really captures some of this campaign’s dynamics: One of Boudin’s opponents said that, given his politics, Boudin should be running for public defender, not for DA. I thought that was a striking statement in terms of the division of roles it implied, and this fixed idea of who should be fulfilling what function in the system. What is your reaction to this implied division of role, and also to the fact that Boudin is a public defender who has now won the DA race?

Lee: I’ll start, I’m sure Lara you have a lot to say about this as well. I mean, I think that’s exactly what we need. We need more public defenders to be running for DA in this country. Because the data, the research, the experiences of people show that locking people up is not the solution. That is not how you create public safety. That’s not how you reduce crime. There is so much that is just becoming the new common sense about how the fact is jailing people, incarcerating them, spending tons of money, is a complete waste of people’s lives, but also of resources. 

We’re going to turn that institution to something completely different than what it’s been. And that’s what this whole movement is about: It’s about reimagining what we do with our public offices. Because, yes, originally, that was what the DA always did, as Lara said at the beginning, just about trying to increase the number of people you lock up. And that’s what DAs bragged about, is how many people they put in jail, because that meant that they were keeping people safe. And I think that that is so archaic and disproven at this point that it’s ridiculous to think that a public defender should not run for DA. I think Chesa is going to be the forefront of a wave of public defenders running for DA. And I think that’s a great thing actually for our country, and to really reimagine how we’re using our public resources to rehabilitate people and to give them a second chance instead of throwing them away. 

Bazelon: The other thing that’s so interesting to me about that comment, though, you should run for public defender, is that it fundamentally misunderstands the role of the prosecutor. And it’s sad to me that more than almost a hundred years after this famous Supreme Court decision about the role of the prosecutor called Berger versus United States, there’s still this misunderstanding. What the Court said then was, a prosecutor is a minister of justice and to do that job they represent everybody equally. So the prosecutor isn’t there to represent a particular victim. They represent all of us, and their job is to do justice which means, if their case isn’t good, they dismiss it. It doesn’t mean seeking the highest possible sentence, it means seeking a just sentence, it means diversion, it means all kinds of things that come under this larger umbrella of doing justice. And so when you have this concept that is, as Emily said, archaic and narrow and antiquated, it’s also really sadly completely contradictory to what the role constitutionally is and has historically been understood. And unfortunately, for the last half a century or so there has been just a real warping of the idea of what a, quote, “real prosecutor” is, which is this tough on crime person who is interested in tacking as many skins as possible to the wall with no greater concept of the vast harm that that causes, not only because it doesn’t make people less safe, but because it devastates entire communities and really impoverishes us all.

Nichanian: I’d like to flip my question about the DA’s role here, because some in the movement against mass incarceration have expressed concerns about the role some DAs have come to occupy in it. One argument is that this elevates as movement leaders people whose job and arsenal of tools involve using the powers of the criminal legal system, which comes with all the structural problems we’ve been discussing. How did you approach or think about this set of concerns when you decided to make the San Francisco DA election an important part of your work this year?

Bazelon: I think this is a really important question because there is a segment of the left that feels like there is really no such thing as a progressive prosecutor and that being a prosecutor is inherently corrupting, and that anybody in that position is going to turn into a tool that promotes mass incarceration. And I guess I just fundamentally disagree with that. I think to take that position is to be purist to the detriment of everybody and ceding so much powerful space. So to those people, I would say, and are you happy with the alternative? You want to cede this ground to the status quo with which you are deeply and understandably dissatisfied. And I don’t believe that electing people like Chesa Boudin is going to mean perpetuating the status quo. First of all, because I think he’s proved substantively through his entire life who he is, but second of all, because the voters are going to hold him accountable. And if he doesn’t do what he says he’s going to do, and if he doesn’t truly shake things up, he’s not going to stay in office. So I just disagree with the position, although I understand it and it’s born, I think, out of so much really tragic and frustrating experience with the powerful opposition of the state, especially by people who have worked on behalf of voiceless and poor people, and just seeing over and over and over again, how difficult it is to get justice for their clients. So I understand it, but I don’t agree with it.

Lee: There are organizations that decided not to endorse in the race because of that very point you made. But I think for us, people who have to live with the day in day out the reality of actually living in and actually having family members who are in the system, that’s not a choice they can make. Our job is to change what the reality is, and our job is to shape it so that it is more just and it is more acceptable. I think there’s just too much at stake for all of our communities who are directly impacted by this to say that the DA doesn’t matter, because to them it has mattered in their lives, and it has made very tangible real impact. 

This is the challenge. This is what people call the challenge of co-governing, is about how do we get our elected officials in this imperfect society and our imperfect democracy to actually do the will of the people. And that’s our job. That is what we are trying to do by electing them and holding them accountable and getting the most progressive, the most accountable candidate into office. This is where the real work begins, right? The job is not electing the person. The job is, once they’re elected, how is Chesa going to be able to carry out the reforms and the agenda that he set forth, and how do we as the public and the community help hold him accountable, but also support him so that he can do his job because he’s one person, he’s not going to change it. There needs to be a much larger movement around what he’s trying to do to make it reality, and I think we go in with eyes wide open, about what it means to go into that seat and go into that system to really change things. It will be uphill even for him, because there’s much larger forces at play.

Nichanian: I’d like to delve further into what you were just saying about whether an elected official is pushing the envelope.  A growing number of DAs talk of “ending mass incarceration” at this point. Where does Boudin fit on their spectrum? What do you think are a few of his boldest and most radical proposals, in terms of shrinking the prison population and shrinking the footprint of the criminal legal system? And also, what are a few areas or issues where you think he could go further than what he has said, and where your coalitions intend to keep pushing him?

Bazelon: I think the two maybe most important policies that he’s put forward in terms of reducing or ending mass incarceration are, one, the bail policy, and it’s important to note that he’s been a leader nationally and in our state in challenging money bail, and we’ve talked about that a lot. But there is a direct connection between the number of people we lock up pretrial and the number of people who end up spending inordinate amounts of time in jail and prison. Another important policy is that he’s not going to seek certain kinds of enhancements. So for example, a lot of people get extra long sentences because gang enhancements get tacked on to the time that they’re already ordered to serve based on very flimsy and problematic evidence. 

And then the final thing that’s so, so important is that he has said he will offer restorative justice to any victim who wants it, and that is pretty powerful because restorative justice really is a very different way of looking at harm and looking at reknitting and healing communities. And it’s not about incarceration, it’s very victim-centered and it’s around putting victims and offenders and their respective communities together in various kinds of ways. Circles with facilitators for example, and having the harm done to the victim be validated, giving the victim a chance to control the narrative, whereas oftentimes it’s the prosecutor who does, and having both sides sort of come up with what they want out of the process. What’s so interesting is I think people assume victims are kind of monolithic and they all want the same thing, and what they want is a conviction and this huge sentence. And that’s just really a fundamental misunderstanding of a lot of victims, who they are, and what they actually want. I think he’s been really clear that it has to be voluntary and victim-centered, and it has to be something that they asked for. But assuming people take him up on that, and the research shows that they do, that when given a choice many people opt for this, that in and of itself is a radical plan to reduce mass incarceration.

Lee: I agree. I think that’s a huge leap in terms of bringing some practiced community interventions that have been used in schools, have been used in many other institutions to show, yes, restorative justice does work. But the current DA office has not been built to use it, and so he’s really reshaping and reimagining what that role of the DA can do and how it can further that. And I think it’s going to probably have the results in some experiments, and it’ll be challenging, and there’ll be some failures and some successes, and that’s part of the job. We should be using, seeing his stepping into office as an opportunity for all of us to be pushing for experimental, new pilot programs, new interventions that are diverting people away from incarceration. And I think he’s willing to do that, he’s willing to work with us, which is why people have supported him.

And I think in terms of things we want to hold him accountable for: We talked about closing juvenile hall, that was able to actually gain political traction from the entire board of supervisors supporting it. It became the kind of mainstream thing, support the closure of juvenile hall. And I think what the next fight is in San Francisco is closing 850 Bryant, and not building a new jail. That’s something that Chesa will be asked, and he will be asked by the community and by other advocates to say, will you commit to supporting this effort to close 850 Bryant, and I think that will be something that people will push him on very hard and hold him accountable. And it’s not an easy fight. It’s not an easy fight. 

We’re going to keep ourselves organized, we’re going to keep the campaign, the people, kind of the momentum from this campaign—that is what’s going to hold Chesa accountable to his platform and vision, in addition to his own kind of moral compass, but also, what we built through this campaign is what’s going to show whether he’s going to be accountable to us or not. So I think the question is, how do we make sure that this movement and this kind of groundswell support for him across the city maintains itself and sustains itself beyond the election night parties, right? That’s the real work ahead for us.

Nichanian: We have seen in other in other counties, in other states, different sorts of actors emerge as the main opponents of the reforms of the prosecutor (the attorney general in the context of Philadelphia, some judges in Virginia). Are there particular institutions in San Francisco that you think could challenge the sort of reforms that Boudin has proposed? 

Bazelon: I think you’re right to say that there has been pushback against various progressive DAs. For example, as you say in Philadelphia, with Larry Krasner, it’s not even just conflicts with the AG. It’s Philadelphia trial judges refusing to go along with pleas and other policies that have been hammered out, and the parties are all in agreement. Kim Gardner in St. Louis had a case taken away from her, a wrongful conviction case, where as the prosecutor she’s conceded it. There’s internal pushback within offices where there are longtime veteran district attorneys, assistant DAs who are unhappy with new management. I am pretty optimistic on those fronts in the sense that I don’t see the judges here acting that way. I don’t see the attorney general of California interfering the way that you’ve seen in Pennsylvania. I don’t see the legislature interfering the way that they have in Pennsylvania again, for example. 

The big challenge here is the Police Officers Association. The big challenge is the police. And you know this race, the POA spent $650,000 on attack ads. They were everywhere. And so I think there’s a lot of fence mending that needs to happen, but I’m optimistic that it will, in large part because he is a really singular individual in that he has the power to persuade people. And so my sense is that there is going to be fence mending, but I also think it’s going to require a lot of work. 

Lee: I would just add that with anybody who wants to come in and move and shake things up in a political establishment, you need to have support. You can’t do that alone, and you’re going to need other elected officials around you who are also going to support the kind of reform you’re trying to move. I think that’s very true in San Francisco, where we need to make sure we keep a progressive majority on the board of supervisors, we need to make sure we’re electing other folks for important city positions that are down with an agenda that’s about ending mass incarceration. 

So I think it’s all connected. It’s all tied together. Nothing can change solely because one person’s been elected. And we’ve seen that again, and again, and again. Obviously, they are a huge influence and huge impact. But if we’re talking about really changing an entire system, an entire way of doing the work, then that requires a citywide change actually, it’s not just the DA’s office. 

Part of it is building buy in from our other politicians and policymakers, legislators, all of that needs to also change the same time. The Police Officers Association, they will continue to try to take him down, and so I think for us, it’s how do we make sure that the conversation doesn’t devolve into these dog whistle attack ads that they’ve been using and actually, how do we make sure that what’s centered in the conversation is actual real people’s concerns. What people are worried about is housing. They’re worried about homeless people in their community, and how do you help those people. How do you get them the mental health services they need? They’re worried about education for their kids.

I’d love to end with a question on that, and go back to something we discussed earlier about the interconnections between mass incarceration and all the other issues you’ve been mentioning. One of the calls for progressive DAs to go further has been for them to look beyond the confines of the criminal legal system, to look for things that would shrink the criminal legal system and shrink the DA’s role. What would you want from the DA’s office when it comes to these other issues? How can those things connect so that the DA’s office plays a role in promoting policies that effectively might not involve the DA’s office?

Lee: I would just say that I think the DA is not, they’re not a service provider, right? I think we should be clear that the DA has a particular role in diverting people. But again they are not the ones who should be providing services necessarily, and there’s a big role to be partnering with and collaborating with community organizations, other agencies who do provide those direct kind of services. I think it’s going to be one of those things that we have to grapple with, is what does it actually look like to really prioritize diversion, because that’s resources and that’s money, so where do you get that money? Where does the city find the money to do that, and that’s a fight at City Hall, and it’s a fight over the budget, and that involves a lot of community-based organizations and people who are social workers and work with clients. It’s a huge question about what the priority for what the city spends its money on. And for too long, we spent too much money on police and incarceration. 

I think there is a question for me that I’m wondering is, so how does it actually look? How do you actually develop that system that’s going to divert people and that there’s a clear process and partnerships that have developed. And that is I think what some of the experimentation and piloting is going to be. I’m sure there’s successes that we can be also exploring from other cities when they’ve tried to focus on diversion, rehabilitation,providing access to services. But the reality is, there’s not enough right now. We don’t have enough housing, we don’t have enough shelters, we don’t have enough healthcare for people. So these are not problems a DA can solve on their own. The DA’s going to have to work very closely with a lot of different partners and stakeholders.

Bazelon: I think that’s a great answer. You’re right. The DA is not a school, and it’s not a hospital. And unfortunately, they have really been treated, sort of in a weird way, as both. And it’s very ineffectual. But that said, there are some really innovative programs that are much much less costly than jail and prison. And for so many people who commit crimes, at the root of it is poverty and addiction and lack of options. So Emily was talking about diversionary programs; they’re really important, all kinds of them. And rather than jailing someone who’s an addict over and over, knowing they’re going to get out and do it all over again, if you send them to treatment instead, and then give them the opportunity to get a job and provide wraparound services: That may seem very expensive, it’s actually a lot cheaper than sending them to jail and prison repeatedly and paying that huge cost. So I think that that is one specific way that a DA can reallocate resources away from spending tons of money jailing people, and more toward getting at the root causes of why they are offending and treating those causes so that the recidivism rate goes down and public safety increases.

Lee: Yeah, we talked with somebody who was the director of a job placement program who was like, “Oh my god, it’s so challenging for people who are coming out of jail and reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people,” and he was like, “Yeah, we need more resources, we need more help,” and I think he was convinced to vote for Chesa because of that commitment to diversion and rehabilitation, because it is investing in people and that takes resources. And there’s so many people who there’s just not enough right now, and we need to be figuring out how to expand those kinds of programs and really looking at the root causes—it’s a cycle, right, that people are going in and coming out and going back in again.

Bazelon: And I think, just to put a fine point on it, when people start complaining about the cost, what I would like to say to them is you can pay now or you can pay later, and if you pay later, you’re going to be paying a lot more.

Nichanian: Well, it’s gonna be very interesting to watch how all this unfold in the coming years. Thank you so much for making the time for this conversation.

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