Everyone In San Francisco Has Something To Say About Chesa

Chesa Boudin, the son of Weathermen radicals, is the nation’s most progressive prosecutor in one of the country’s most liberal cities. And now, 18 months into his term, many residents are trying to throw him out.

- By Daniel Duane

WHEN CHESA BOUDIN was sworn in as district attorney of San Francisco on January 8, 2020, he seemed perfectly cast for the moment. Since 2016, a new class of progressive prosecutors had been claiming victories in liberal cities from Chicago to St. Louis, pledging to undo decades of tough-on-crime policies. In the process, they sought to change the public’s traditional perception of their role: the DA as an anti-crime crusader or, in the words of Larry Krasner, the progressive district attorney of Philadelphia, “Dirty Harry in a suit.” In San Francisco, Boudin repudiated this image and then some. A 39-year-old public defender, he was a son of the old-school American radical left, a Rhodes Scholar with a sensational backstory that involved Marxist-revolutionary parents incarcerated for murder. He campaigned on promises to fight mass incarceration, decriminalize poverty, and hold cops accountable. Though Boudin had experienced great privilege, he had also suffered and seen human suffering, and his endorsements came from not just local political players but national public intellectuals like Angela Davis, Bernie Sanders, and Ibram X. Kendi. He embodied the surging progressive will to uproot systemic racism from courts, jails, and police departments nationwide as well as any white American male possibly could.