By Ankita Joshi
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – With Chesa Boudin’s recall election coming up in April, many local San Francisco residents have been overcome with what has been dubbed as the “Chesa Boudin Derangement Syndrome.”
Critics who have dubbed this “syndrome” believe Boudin has become a scapegoat for everything that is going wrong in the city, regardless of the data and his policies.
“Chesa Boudin is the scapegoat in The City for anything that happens that isn’t positive,” Supervisor Hillary Ronen told the San Francisco Chronicle last month.
Boudin has been blamed for a series of problems, including but not limited to: all crime occurring in San Francisco, the national fentanyl epidemic, the police not making enough arrests, etc.
However, experts and data have found that crime has decreased since Boudin has taken office, and that overall crime is“pretty low in comparison with before the pandemic.”
Yet the data does not reflect the overall sentiment present in California as a whole.
A recent poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found 65 percent of Californians believe crime has increased in their area, with 51 percent saying Newsom has done a “poor” or “very poor” job on the issue.
Tweets on the so-called “Chesa Boudin Derangement Syndrome” have also shown that local San Francisco residents share a sentiment that Boudin has not been doing his job, regardless of what the crime statistics have shown.
In one such tweet, it was noted that some residents believed that Boudin “hasn’t prosecuted a crime for a month,” even though Boudin’s “charging rate is not much different than that of Alameda and Sacramento Counties, both of which have more moderate/conservative DAs, with Boudin prosecuting 56 percent of all cases presented.”
Critics have also claimed that the police department has purposefully failed to stop/investigate crimes in progress in an attempt to undermine Boudin’s department.
“It is absolutely unacceptable for police officers to just stop doing their jobs because they don’t like the way another department is doing its job,” charged Ronen in a letter sent in February.
Those who do support Boudin have been sympathetic, noting that with the pandemic hitting two months after he took office and multiple recall efforts against him, he has still moved forward with implementing policies he promised in his campaign.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had comments removed on the Vanguard where I referred to TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
I find it lame to feel one is clever in borrowing/copying a sarcastic criticism theme that was rejected by those who were labeled by it. Like, either accept the original as true, or come up with something new. This is sad.