Hate crimes against Asians in San Francisco rose enormously last year, increasing from nine incidents in 2020 to 60 last year. Nearly 75 percent of Asians in the city report being scared and fearful of being attacked or bullied and are similarly fearful for their children.
It is a straightforward process to reduce these crimes: increase police presence on the streets and prosecute those who are committing these acts. Simple in principle, but prosecution is becoming somewhat of a unicorn in a city whose district attorney has views about crime and punishment that are very different from the straightforward approach.
Meet progressive attorney Chesa Boudin, who was elected as San Francisco DA in November 2019, narrowly defeating Suzy Loftus, the former San Francisco police commissioner and interim SF DA. Loftus was backed by a host of heavyweights, including city mayor London Breed, Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and then senator Kamala Harris, who was also the state’s former attorney general.
Boudin’s backers? Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the district attorneys of Philadelphia and Cook County (which includes Chicago), Illinois. As you can see, Boudin’s major support was from those who liked his politics but wouldn’t have had to suffer the consequences of Boudin’s prosecutorial decisions. Boudin previously had worked in the city’s public defender’s office, defending many of the types of criminals that he is now responsible for bringing to justice.
Boudin’s DA office practices what is known as restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitating offenders over punishing them, and which strives to repair harm through an offender’s meeting or communicating with the victim:
“When we started this campaign, we believed that the people of San Francisco wanted a different vision of justice. We believed they valued second chances for those who have made mistakes, prized compassion over punishment, and wanted equal justice for all, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation and citizenship. We were right.”
But unfortunate things can happen when society takes theories out of the classroom and onto the street, and this is no exception. The first, which was entirely predictable, is that restorative justice ignores the incentive effects of how laws provide discipline against those who commit crimes by making the expected outcome of the crime costly through punishment.
For example, a woman charged with 120 counts of theft, including eight felony counts, was released from jail with an ankle monitor. And another San Francisco woman released with an ankle monitor was involved with abducting two girls.
Vern Pierson, the district attorney of El Dorado County and past president of the California District Attorneys Association, views this as the consequence of a legal system that fails to hold people accountable.
Speaking about the woman charged with 120 counts of theft from a Target store, Pierson stated, “Frankly, someone like this—she knows there’s no consequence.” He is right, and she knows exactly what she is doing.
Another drawback of restorative justice is that its utopian views of criminals being rehabilitated and apologizing to their victims are not working out so well in San Francisco. Hanko Abe and Elizabeth Platt are two victims of the restorative justice fallout who will never have the chance to receive justice and understanding from Troy McAlister. Abe and Platt were hit by and killed by McAlister as he was driving while intoxicated and was making a getaway from a burglary he had committed. The car he was driving was stolen, and drugs were found inside the car.
McAlister was on parole, having served a partial sentence for robbery, and remained on parole despite having been arrested several times since his release from prison. None of the arrests were prosecuted by Boudin’s office, who blamed the state parole office for McAlister’s remaining on the streets . But not so fast—the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs parole, identified the problem as being the DA’s office not filing charges.
“Our top priority is public safety and we will work with our local partners on this unfortunate incident,” the statement said. “None of the parolee’s arrests following his 2020 release have yet to result in filings of criminal charges by the District Attorney,” who interestingly enough is a DA who was McAlister’s public defender on robbery charges in 2015.
Immediately after this tragedy, San Franciscans initiated a recall campaign against Boudin. The recall campaign succeeded, and Boudin will face recall in June. Even the politically astute city mayor had some not-so-nice words for Boudin, including these: “There is a criminal justice system in San Francisco that has failed to acknowledge that a repetitive offender of crime in our city has been able to be released without being held accountable.” (source: recallchesaboudin.org)
In the meantime, Asians, and many other San Franciscans, feel unsafe in their city. One elderly man who allegedly was beaten by a father and son using a baseball bat and a glass bottle, after the elderly man and the boy nearly collided by mistake while walking in Chinatown, was appalled that the father received only one year of probation from the attack. The Alliance for Asian American justice has filed a civil lawsuit on the victim’s behalf and a federal lawsuit against Boudin for not doing enough to prosecute such crimes.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of all this is that so much crime and heartbreak could have been prevented had common-sense application of the law been pursued. Perhaps it will be, after June.
