By The Vanguard Staff
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Former Progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said this week he won’t be running for DA again, and is taking a position as founding executive director of UC Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center, according to the San Francisco Standard.
“A lifetime of visiting my biological parents in prison and my work as a public defender and district attorney have made clear that our system fails to keep communities safe and fails to treat them equitably,” Boudin said in the statement.
Boudin was recalled last June after a recall campaign that capitalized on fears of rising lawlessness in the city, the SF Standard noted.
The Standard added Boudin “will run what’s dubbed a ‘research and advocacy hub’ focusing on criminal legal reform, quoting statement from Berkeley Law.
“Chesa was chosen after a national search and has substantial experience across the criminal justice system,” said the law school’s dean, Erwin Chemerinsky. “He has thought deeply about the system, and I cannot think of anyone better to create and direct this important center.”
The SF Standard added Boudin, in his new job, will “lead projects that examine how structural inequities related to poverty and racism shape the criminal justice system.”
Boudin, as SF District Attorney, “expanded programs that served as alternatives to jail time, often drawing criticism that he was more worried about criminal offenders than victims. His recall was widely viewed as a rebuke of a progressive approach to criminal justice,” the SF Standard noted.
“Voters weren’t asked to choose between criminal justice reform and something else,” Boudin told supporters on the night he was voted out, according to the Standard, adding, “They were given an opportunity to voice their outrage and their frustration, and they took that opportunity.”
Brooke Jenkins, “who had a prominent and lucrative role in the recall campaign, was appointed by SF Mayor London Breed to finish Boudin’s term,” the SF Standard wrote.
So a failed San Francisco DA now gets a job as the executive director of UC Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center?
Failed is subjective. Things have gotten worse in SF since Jenkins took over. No one seems to be noticing. Maybe the problem had nothing to do with the DA.
Failed in the eyes of the people who voted him out of office.
The vote count wasn’t subjective at all.
So what? The current DA has failed just as badly. Drug overdose deaths have dramatically increased under her watch! 🙂