Chesa Boudin's recall is hardly a national referendum on crime. But there are some lessons to be learned from his loss.
of Gascón indicates that insiders can be vulnerable too, which further highlights how little we understand the politics here.)We do not have answers to these questions yet. But rather than trying to determine what the recall means, it is likely far more useful—if difficult—to think about how it fits in with all the other examples of progressive prosecution we have so we can better understand the complicated politics of punishment.
Another way in which the recall could be a useful data point is with San Francisco itself, and its demographics. One major reason Boudin’s recall is seen as a national referendum on progressive prosecution is that San Francisco is seen as one of the most progressive cities in the U.S. So if a progressive can’t win there, where can a progressive succeed?does
do—does not make a place progressive, and carceral Democratic mayors are the norm in cities including Chicago, D.C., New York, and San Francisco itself. The post-tech San Francisco is much less the countercultural bastion it was decades ago.But even putting that critically important point aside, San Francisco looks quite different from most cities with progressive prosecutors.
And while it is true that the progressive left tends to favor reformers, we should also be concerned that when it comes to criminal legal reform, their support may be fickle, and that we should be concerned that white progressives likely often act like the “white moderates” Martin Luther King Jr. criticized in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” who are “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.
comparing where Krasner won to shootings in Philadelphia—suggest that in elections across a wide number of cities, reform prosecutors consistently win the voting precincts where violence isconcentrated. Notably, these communities are less vulnerable to fearmongering because violence for them is far less an abstraction and far more a lived experience.That is not to say that progressives cannot win in less Black counties.
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