The late votes tallied in the San Francisco District Attorney race came in for the anti-law-enforcement candidate, Chesa Boudin. In essence, he is going to take all the policies that have trashed a once-beautiful city and gravely degraded the quality of life there and make them all worse. Erica Sandberg has this article in the City Journal.
Boudin pledged to stop taking first-offense drunk drivers to trial, providing they didn't injure anyone. He promised to end gang enhancements, part of a California law that adds additional prison sentences to defendants who participate in violent street gangs. As for quality-of-life crimes that harm communities, he's been open about ignoring them, stating that "crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted."
So if a drunk driver, previously caught, plows into you and leaves you paralyzed from the neck down, the DA will shrug and say, "Gee, well, he didn't hurt anyone last time he was caught driving blind drunk, so we let him go and let him continue driving. Your lifetime paralysis is a small price to pay for the wonderfulness of second chances."
The word "sewer" in the title of this post is partly figurative and partly literal.
The City Journal article continues:
These changes will likely result in harm and injury. Gang warfare, for example, is heating up, as organized Honduran nationals take over large swaths of the city, selling fentanyl and other deadly narcotics. The first quarter of 2019 saw 39 fentanyl-related deaths, which, at current rates, will just about double those of last year. The sex trade is rarely victimless, and people living in and around homeless camps experience high levels of violence.
Boudin's platform of decarceration and ending the "criminalization of poverty" clearly appealed to many San Francisco voters, though the city's growing public-order woes hardly suggest over-policing or aggressive prosecution of crime. A spate of car break-ins has reached epidemic proportions, with roughly 70 smash-and-grabs happening daily. Boudin has responded by pledging to address the "root causes" of crime--addiction and homelessness--but San Francisco already spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on human services, and the problems continue to worsen. His key promise regarding car burglaries is to put the city in the business of fixing the smashed windows at a discount--essentially a gesture of defeat.
Are San Francisco's voters really so far gone as to think this is all good? Some, yes. But despite my initial thought in the previous post that the ranked-choice system worked largely as designed, it didn't work well enough. That may have been due in part to a political error on the part of interim DA and second-place finisher Suzy Lofthus, reports Heather Knight in the SF Chronicle.
Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science, said it was simply poor political strategy on the part of the Loftus campaign.
"They needed to do a ranked-choice voting strategy," McDaniel said. "Voters can listen to those signals, but the candidates have to send them in a strong, clear way."In a low-turnout, under-the-radar election, candidates couldn't assume voters would know who was politically aligned.
Evidently more voter education is needed if ranked-choice voting is ever going to work as designed.
And for the next four years, San Francisco will have a district attorney who is in the running for the nation's worst. Watch out Larry Krasner, you have competition.
Anyone planning a convention should immediately scratch San Francisco off the list of possible venues. It's going to get worse. Much worse.
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