 In 2020, Chesa Boudin became San Francisco's district attorney, promising radical new policies that exemplified the city's leading-edge liberalism. Cops would make fewer arrests, and more wrongdoers would be diverted to drug and mental health programs instead of prison. Prosecutors would be forbidden from seeking cash bail and arrests for consensual sex work, public camping, and public urination would be a thing of the past. After two years of rising complaints about quality of life, San Francisco residents have overwhelmingly voted him out of office in a special election. Journalist Nancy Rommelman covered the recall for reason, and she talks about what Boudin's ouster might mean not just for the city by the bay, but for California and other progressive DAs around the country. Nancy Rommelman, thanks for talking to reason. Thanks for having me, Nick. What happened with the Chesa Boudin recall? The voters voted somewhat decisively to put him on his way. He had an extremely progressive platform, which would be to really do as a little arresting as possible different restorative justice programs. The police really were, I don't want to put too fine a point on this, but he came into office and his number one mandate was to start prosecuting what he saw to be corrupt police and also to go extremely easily on people that were caught dealing drugs. So on a certain level, there's a lot to like from a libertarian perspective, right? Exactly. There appears to be a lot to like. So of course, it's in the execution, right? So let's just see what happened, what people have told me and which some of the data do support. Crime in San Francisco is not up across the board, as some people like to say, like, oh, my God, it's on fire. It's not, but there are very specific areas where it is up. And that's in theft and we're talking about retail theft. We're talking about home invasions. We're talking about car, people breaking into cars. We're talking about gunplay. This makes people feel unsafe. Okay. So that's number one. I voted for you, Boudin, but you know what? All of a sudden, I'm not feeling quite as good. I go to the park, people are overdosing, my kids can't play. I mean, it might not be like huge in this, in the scope of like ideological things, but it is when it affects you. The second thing that really happened is that in December 2021, Mayor London Breed called the State of Emergency in the Tenderloin District and said, what we got to do is give people a safe place to use drugs. They opened this thing. It was originally called the Linkage Center. It's now called the Tenderloin Center where you could go in and ostensibly get like housing stuff, medical stuff. If you were houseless, you could get help with that. But what it also was from the day it opened was a safe place to use drugs. Now, there are people that say, well, that's a good thing, Nancy. Don't you want people not overdosing in the street? Well, yeah. What happened is that did it stay? Did people avail themselves of the services? No, because you're an addict and what's the first thing you got to do? You got to take your shot and then maybe I'll deal with the housing tomorrow. Okay. So that's number one, something like one half of 1% of people were availing themselves when they went in there. Number two, of course it metastasized. I got to tell you, this is hell on earth. I literally was watching dozens of people die. I was watching them die. It was like walking into a final stage cancer ward and watching people. They're laying on the streets. They are laying on the streets with their bodies or at least their feet. That's what I really saw several two or three people with their feet just completely exploding with sores, completely unsanitary. And then across the way, there's a wall of 40 people. I mean, not all of them at that moment shooting up, but that's it's a big long shooting gallery. So this is what's happened. All right. So now the people of San Francisco say, you know what? Oh, and why is this happening? Okay, because this is what I was told. Chesa Boudin would not talk to me. So I did not get this from his mouth. I got this mostly from detractors that were saying, well, it is the case that three people were arrested and prosecuted last year for drug dealing. Three, now we had 792 overdose deaths between 2019 and 2021. So you're, you know, this is a very, very small percentage of people that are being prosecuted. Now his office's contention as it was related to me is that a lot of the people that are dealing drugs are illegal immigrants, especially from Honduras. If you there's a mechanism in California that if you arrest someone and they have a immigrant interest, whatever a difficult immigration status, they can get sent back to their home country. Okay, so the idea was if we arrest these people and prosecute them, they could be sent back to their home country and murdered by the drug cartels. So I don't want people to be murdered. But I also have to ask the question if you've only had three prosecutions last year, number one, I don't know how many of them had an immigration issue. Second of all, where do you get your data that say these people are being murdered? I think it was a bit of a scare tactic to people that are saying, look, we have to work the plan. It works if you work it. But people said it's not working. And you know why they say that, Nick? Because it is such a visible pox on the city. It's not an invisible problem. How much is Chesa Baudin paying for the accumulated sins of San Francisco leadership? Because the homelessness, criminality, but also just a real rancor about the price of housing, the economy, tanking, things like that. Is he kind of the most visible person that could take the fall for a much broader failure to run a city in a way that people want to be there? I think some of that's true. And I think even the people that voted yes on H, which was the measure that got him out, said that to me last night. They're like, he can't be blamed for the homelessness. He can't be blamed for all of the drug overdose deaths. But the DA does have something to do with it. They feel that he has the mechanism or it's within his power to enact some sorts of policies that would at least stop the drug issue from happening. And the reason I think that that's actually germane and actually true is because the thefts that are happening are often people that need drugs, right? They need money. You know, there's this idea that like, well, people come to San Francisco because the city makes it super easy for them. Like they get $680 a month in support. They get a couple hundred dollars in food stamps. But how long does that really last? Okay, what a couple of days, maybe a week, you've got to feed that habit. How are you going to do it? It one of the ways is criminality, right? And so people are stealing. So when I was done on you in Plaza Nick, you can't believe it. There's everybody selling things in very small quantities, two cans of corn, three bars of soap. It's what they've been able to get to just get to their next thing. Okay. So theft does have something to do with the drug issues and maybe trying to do something about that theft would have some sort of impact. Discuss the roots of the recall. Who were the primary funders? And did you talk to any of them after the vote took place? You did have some tech money, Gary Tan, I know, put in $100,000. I got that quote from him. There was, it, it, it, Boudin's people, and I had this said to me directly and emailed to me directly that it was a big Republican propaganda campaign to get him out. Well, I can say to that that 6.7% of San Francisco is Republican. So even if you got every last one of those votes, and maybe you did, that is not going to equal the 60% of people that voted him out yesterday. Now it's true that, you know, progressives tend to vote later, like they vote closer to the day of, so we may get some mail-in ballots, but they're not going to, it's not going to be overturned, not when you've hit 60%. Is there a sense that this is a wake-up call, not just for, you know, Chesa Baudin, perhaps, but the San Francisco government more broadly and also California? Gavin Newsom kind of, you know, who beat a recall election just a few months ago, but is kind of in an embattled situation. California has a lot of issues. You know, is London Breed the mayor of San Francisco going to move in a different direction? Is Gavin Newsom, is there any sense of that? So I think London Breed already has moved in a different direction. She had been somewhat vocal of Defund the Police when that was really all the rage in the country. We've seen almost every municipality that was kind of got behind that kind of move away from that when they found out that their citizens kind of weren't really down with that and maybe it wasn't working. So she's a bit of a political animal. Everybody's like, how much more can she flip-flop? Well, she's a politician. She's going to go where she wants to go. In terms of the city and the democratic sort of machine, it's interesting. As of yesterday afternoon, all of the local big media, the Chronicle, the Examiner, all of the almost all of the representatives, I think two Warren and I, and I'm sorry, I don't know who they were, were backing Boudin. It's going to be interesting to see now when he is decisively voted out what they say. Are they going to say, hmm, maybe I got to like, maybe I got to listen to my constituents. Maybe this road that we're trying to convince people they want to be on is not only not the road they want to be on, but they're telling us it's not working for them. I mean, of course, that would be lovely. In terms of the state of California, I don't know that anything's ever going to budge Gavin Newsom. So I can't answer to that. But I will tell you that the people were telling me last night that they're pretty dead set. They got a real good head of steam up with being able to recall the school board people. I was here, I covered that. That was extremely decisive. It put some gas in the tank to get Boudin out. And they were pretty adamant last night that they are going to try, they're going to keep trying to insert some sanity into San Francisco politics.