After a Sunday morning spent in a cold rain with supporters of YES ON H, the petition to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, I head to UN Plaza. It's now 70 degrees under clear skies (because San Francisco). The sunlight is not kind to the habitués, including a man in a full-on nod on the corner of Market and 8th, a man whose pants may be slumped around his knees but whose instinct for self-preservation is such that he jolts upright each time the light changes and in two minutes, maybe three, has made it across Market without getting hit by a streetcar.
I’m amazed and appalled? How does this happen? Full disclosure: I’ve been in recovery for 31 years; it’ll 32 this August, God willing.
For a long time I considered full legalization/decriminalization and government control and sales of illicit drugs might be a way to slow this epidemic and take back the power from the dealers and ultimately the cartels that control them. After reading this and reporting from other cities, I’m not so sure what can be done. God bless you, Nancy.
I live in San Francisco, and am very aware of this whole controversy. Chesa Boudin was elected district attorney in November 2019 and took office in 2020. Homelessness however has been rampant in the mid-Market Street area that includes UN Plaza for decades. This is largely the result of the city government's anti-housing policies. It is very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to get approval to build anything, due to all the bureaucracy, hearing requirements, permit fees, and on and on. While the problem has noticeably grown over the past decade, not helped by the damage done by misguided government lockdowns, which caused many local businesses to close, some permanently, and cost many people their jobs and livelihoods, none of that is the DA's fault.
It's true that many homeless people have mental health issues or use drugs (often both). This too has been going on for decades. The same applies to many people who are housed, but living on the streets tends to exacerbate such problems, as well as making them more visible. You're less likely to see housed people using drugs unless you're part of that scene, because they can do it inside their homes.
"Possession with intent to sell" is also a bogus rap, and if it's true there were only three convictions for this in 2021, that's a *good* thing. Criminalizing "intent" to do something without evidence of it actually having been done is essentially creating a thought crime. Not that consensual drug sales are a real crime in any case. Some percentage of the public, some percentage of the time, are going to do things that are bad for them, whether it's using fentanyl, tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, lack of exercise, lack of healthy eating, or whatever. This has been going on for basically all of human history, and trying to outlaw it is futile. Haven't we learned anything from the failed "War on Drugs"? (Sadly, where the San Francisco electorate is concerned, I can tell you that the answer is mostly "no", as the year before Boudin was elected, voters approved a citywide ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and many vaping products.)
In any event, Boudin understands that drug use and mental health are issues which criminalizing and arresting people will not make better or solve. For this, and for wanting to end unfair policies like cash bail that discriminates against the poor, and hold police officers accountable for their misconduct when they shoot and kill people or otherwise violate their rights, he has been made the poster boy and scapegoat for social dysfunction caused by decades of failed statist policies. He has in fact had success in going after things like organized crime – his office recently scored a major bust against a theft ring.
Recognizing these things, I walked precincts for the campaign *against* the recall, doing exactly the kind of work mentioned in the article – distributing door hangers and literature. But I was a volunteer, not paid $30 an hour or anything at all for the many hours I put in. The recall effort, which was indeed funded by one wealthy Republican donor in particular, outspent those defending Boudin by a margin of around 2-1. Indeed if you look closely at the photo of the guy on the skateboard, you'll see that the flier he's holding is actually *opposing* Boudin and supporting the recall, not defending the DA as the article claims. I recognized it immediately, having often seen those recall fliers when out distributing lit for the other side.
The officially-permitted encampment by UN Plaza is, ironically, surrounded by covered fencing precisely because of the irrational fears and prejudices of many residents. Retail theft is bad, but it is not dangerous to ordinary shoppers, any more than public nudity is dangerous, or shooting up drugs is (to anyone except the user). They simply offend certain sensibilities. You can tell this is so from the frequency with which you hear the phrase "open-air" in reference to the drug sales and use being complained about – as if selling fentanyl is fundamentally any different, or shooting it up any safer, when done indoors. A similar attitude is evident in the author's description of the scene where she describes people with disabilities, using drugs, etc., while insisting she isn't trying to write a biased piece, or her going out of her way to say she doesn't support throwing people in jail for drugs – and then proceeding to make it all but explicit that this is exactly what she wants to happen.
Then there is her protagonist and fellow journalist Erica Sandberg, who doesn't see the difference between government thugs standing on a corner shooting and murdering people in cold blood, and people dying of overdoses from taking consensually purchased and voluntarily used drugs!
If I sensed that more of those complaining about homelessness, drug use, public urination/defecation and so on – which are real enough, even if you mostly see them only in a few areas of the city, and they are greatly exaggerated by conservatives for political purposes – actually cared about the lives of people on the streets, I might have more sympathy for their gripes. But listening to these complaints, the hostility and contempt for the homeless rings through again and again. They are blamed for crime and dirty streets in general, even though those same streets that aren't kept clean are also clearly not kept properly paved by a city government with a $13 billion-plus annual budget (larger than that of many entire states), and the petty theft, auto break-ins and other crimes aren't properly investigated by police who like to use a DA they don't like as an excuse for not doing their jobs.
The whole recall depressingly illustrates how many people have failed to recognize the real, systemic causes of what they see, and just look for convenient scapegoats in the poor and marginalized and in one honest, compassionate public servant who was trying to achieve real criminal justice reform and better results in the face of a difficult situation.
The author writes about the Civic Center de facto safe use are "metastasizing", when actually the homeless gathered there would otherwise likely be out on the streets. Where is the outrage at the metastasizing City Hall workforce, the thousands of bureaucrats leeching off the public and being paid 6-figure salaries while thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets, some dying of exposure every winter? (Yes, it does get quite cold in San Francisco, with the wind chill in particular, even if it rarely snows.)
On the bright side, let it be noted for the record that the outcome of the recall election was actually much closer than initially reported. As the mail-in ballots were counted, the margin by which it passed dropped from around 60-40% to about 55-45%. When whoever the mayor appoints as the next DA has been in office for a couple years and the various problems for which Boudin was unfairly blamed are still with us, maybe enough of the folks who voted for the recall will realize they were sold a bill of goods to make a difference in keeping the door open to the kind of meaningful reforms to a broken criminal justice system for which Chesa Boudin has been working.
Do you know how SF’s policy compares to Vancouver BC’s harm reduction policies? I visited the area around 2015 and, yea, I saw someone shooting up and plenty of stolen goods for sale, but my husband assured me that it had been much bleaker 10 years earlier. I’m generally a proponent of harm reduction, but addiction is such a knotty problem, intertwined with poverty, mental health, criminal justice, education, that I don’t know whether any singular policy will achieve much (and might make other issues, including optics, much worse).
I live in San Francisco, and am very aware of this whole controversy. Chesa Boudin was elected district attorney in November 2019 and took office in 2020. Homelessness however has been rampant in the mid-Market Street area that includes UN Plaza for decades. This is largely the result of the city government's anti-housing policies. It is very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to get approval to build anything, due to all the bureaucracy, hearing requirements, permit fees, and on and on. While the problem has noticeably grown over the past decade, not helped by the damage done by misguided government lockdowns, which caused many local businesses to close, some permanently, and cost many people their jobs and livelihoods, none of that is the DA's fault.
It's true that many homeless people have mental health issues or use drugs (often both). This too has been going on for decades. The same applies to many people who are housed, but living on the streets tends to exacerbate such problems, as well as making them more visible. You're less likely to see housed people using drugs unless you're part of that scene, because they can do it inside their homes.
"Possession with intent to sell" is also a bogus rap, and if it's true there were only three convictions for this in 2021, that's a *good* thing. Criminalizing "intent" to do something without evidence of it actually having been done is essentially creating a thought crime. Not that consensual drug sales are a real crime in any case. Some percentage of the public, some percentage of the time, are going to do things that are bad for them, whether it's using fentanyl, tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, lack of exercise, lack of healthy eating, or whatever. This has been going on for basically all of human history, and trying to outlaw it is futile. Haven't we learned anything from the failed "War on Drugs"? (Sadly, where the San Francisco electorate is concerned, I can tell you that the answer is mostly "no", as the year before Boudin was elected, voters approved a citywide ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and many vaping products.)
In any event, Boudin understands that drug use and mental health are issues which criminalizing and arresting people will not make better or solve. For this, and for wanting to end unfair policies like cash bail that discriminates against the poor, and hold police officers accountable for their misconduct when they shoot and kill people or otherwise violate their rights, he has been made the poster boy and scapegoat for social dysfunction caused by decades of failed statist policies. He has in fact had success in going after things like organized crime – his office recently scored a major bust against a theft ring.
Recognizing these things, I walked precincts for the campaign *against* the recall, doing exactly the kind of work mentioned in the article – distributing door hangers and literature. But I was a volunteer, not paid $30 an hour or anything at all for the many hours I put in. The recall effort, which was indeed funded by one wealthy Republican donor in particular, outspent those defending Boudin by a margin of around 2-1. Indeed if you look closely at the photo of the guy on the skateboard, you'll see that the flier he's holding is actually *opposing* Boudin and supporting the recall, not defending the DA as the article claims. I recognized it immediately, having often seen those recall fliers when out distributing lit for the other side.
The officially-permitted encampment by UN Plaza is, ironically, surrounded by covered fencing precisely because of the irrational fears and prejudices of many residents. Retail theft is bad, but it is not dangerous to ordinary shoppers, any more than public nudity is dangerous, or shooting up drugs is (to anyone except the user). They simply offend certain sensibilities. You can tell this is so from the frequency with which you hear the phrase "open-air" in reference to the drug sales and use being complained about – as if selling fentanyl is fundamentally any different, or shooting it up any safer, when done indoors. A similar attitude is evident in the author's description of the scene where she describes people with disabilities, using drugs, etc., while insisting she isn't trying to write a biased piece, or her going out of her way to say she doesn't support throwing people in jail for drugs – and then proceeding to make it all but explicit that this is exactly what she wants to happen.
Then there is her protagonist and fellow journalist Erica Sandberg, who doesn't see the difference between government thugs standing on a corner shooting and murdering people in cold blood, and people dying of overdoses from taking consensually purchased and voluntarily used drugs!
If I sensed that more of those complaining about homelessness, drug use, public urination/defecation and so on – which are real enough, even if you mostly see them only in a few areas of the city, and they are greatly exaggerated by conservatives for political purposes – actually cared about the lives of people on the streets, I might have more sympathy for their gripes. But listening to these complaints, the hostility and contempt for the homeless rings through again and again. They are blamed for crime and dirty streets in general, even though those same streets that aren't kept clean are also clearly not kept properly paved by a city government with a $13 billion-plus annual budget (larger than that of many entire states), and the petty theft, auto break-ins and other crimes aren't properly investigated by police who like to use a DA they don't like as an excuse for not doing their jobs.
The whole recall depressingly illustrates how many people have failed to recognize the real, systemic causes of what they see, and just look for convenient scapegoats in the poor and marginalized and in one honest, compassionate public servant who was trying to achieve real criminal justice reform and better results in the face of a difficult situation.
The author writes about the Civic Center de facto safe use are "metastasizing", when actually the homeless gathered there would otherwise likely be out on the streets. Where is the outrage at the metastasizing City Hall workforce, the thousands of bureaucrats leeching off the public and being paid 6-figure salaries while thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets, some dying of exposure every winter? (Yes, it does get quite cold in San Francisco, with the wind chill in particular, even if it rarely snows.)
On the bright side, let it be noted for the record that the outcome of the recall election was actually much closer than initially reported. As the mail-in ballots were counted, the margin by which it passed dropped from around 60-40% to about 55-45%. When whoever the mayor appoints as the next DA has been in office for a couple years and the various problems for which Boudin was unfairly blamed are still with us, maybe enough of the folks who voted for the recall will realize they were sold a bill of goods to make a difference in keeping the door open to the kind of meaningful reforms to a broken criminal justice system for which Chesa Boudin has been working.
This comment isn't directed at NR, but isn't this just a half step from libertopia? And considering that, I specifically wouldn't recall Chesa because he's acting here as a libertarian purist.
I’m amazed and appalled? How does this happen? Full disclosure: I’ve been in recovery for 31 years; it’ll 32 this August, God willing.
For a long time I considered full legalization/decriminalization and government control and sales of illicit drugs might be a way to slow this epidemic and take back the power from the dealers and ultimately the cartels that control them. After reading this and reporting from other cities, I’m not so sure what can be done. God bless you, Nancy.
I live in San Francisco, and am very aware of this whole controversy. Chesa Boudin was elected district attorney in November 2019 and took office in 2020. Homelessness however has been rampant in the mid-Market Street area that includes UN Plaza for decades. This is largely the result of the city government's anti-housing policies. It is very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to get approval to build anything, due to all the bureaucracy, hearing requirements, permit fees, and on and on. While the problem has noticeably grown over the past decade, not helped by the damage done by misguided government lockdowns, which caused many local businesses to close, some permanently, and cost many people their jobs and livelihoods, none of that is the DA's fault.
It's true that many homeless people have mental health issues or use drugs (often both). This too has been going on for decades. The same applies to many people who are housed, but living on the streets tends to exacerbate such problems, as well as making them more visible. You're less likely to see housed people using drugs unless you're part of that scene, because they can do it inside their homes.
"Possession with intent to sell" is also a bogus rap, and if it's true there were only three convictions for this in 2021, that's a *good* thing. Criminalizing "intent" to do something without evidence of it actually having been done is essentially creating a thought crime. Not that consensual drug sales are a real crime in any case. Some percentage of the public, some percentage of the time, are going to do things that are bad for them, whether it's using fentanyl, tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, lack of exercise, lack of healthy eating, or whatever. This has been going on for basically all of human history, and trying to outlaw it is futile. Haven't we learned anything from the failed "War on Drugs"? (Sadly, where the San Francisco electorate is concerned, I can tell you that the answer is mostly "no", as the year before Boudin was elected, voters approved a citywide ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and many vaping products.)
In any event, Boudin understands that drug use and mental health are issues which criminalizing and arresting people will not make better or solve. For this, and for wanting to end unfair policies like cash bail that discriminates against the poor, and hold police officers accountable for their misconduct when they shoot and kill people or otherwise violate their rights, he has been made the poster boy and scapegoat for social dysfunction caused by decades of failed statist policies. He has in fact had success in going after things like organized crime – his office recently scored a major bust against a theft ring.
Recognizing these things, I walked precincts for the campaign *against* the recall, doing exactly the kind of work mentioned in the article – distributing door hangers and literature. But I was a volunteer, not paid $30 an hour or anything at all for the many hours I put in. The recall effort, which was indeed funded by one wealthy Republican donor in particular, outspent those defending Boudin by a margin of around 2-1. Indeed if you look closely at the photo of the guy on the skateboard, you'll see that the flier he's holding is actually *opposing* Boudin and supporting the recall, not defending the DA as the article claims. I recognized it immediately, having often seen those recall fliers when out distributing lit for the other side.
The officially-permitted encampment by UN Plaza is, ironically, surrounded by covered fencing precisely because of the irrational fears and prejudices of many residents. Retail theft is bad, but it is not dangerous to ordinary shoppers, any more than public nudity is dangerous, or shooting up drugs is (to anyone except the user). They simply offend certain sensibilities. You can tell this is so from the frequency with which you hear the phrase "open-air" in reference to the drug sales and use being complained about – as if selling fentanyl is fundamentally any different, or shooting it up any safer, when done indoors. A similar attitude is evident in the author's description of the scene where she describes people with disabilities, using drugs, etc., while insisting she isn't trying to write a biased piece, or her going out of her way to say she doesn't support throwing people in jail for drugs – and then proceeding to make it all but explicit that this is exactly what she wants to happen.
Then there is her protagonist and fellow journalist Erica Sandberg, who doesn't see the difference between government thugs standing on a corner shooting and murdering people in cold blood, and people dying of overdoses from taking consensually purchased and voluntarily used drugs!
If I sensed that more of those complaining about homelessness, drug use, public urination/defecation and so on – which are real enough, even if you mostly see them only in a few areas of the city, and they are greatly exaggerated by conservatives for political purposes – actually cared about the lives of people on the streets, I might have more sympathy for their gripes. But listening to these complaints, the hostility and contempt for the homeless rings through again and again. They are blamed for crime and dirty streets in general, even though those same streets that aren't kept clean are also clearly not kept properly paved by a city government with a $13 billion-plus annual budget (larger than that of many entire states), and the petty theft, auto break-ins and other crimes aren't properly investigated by police who like to use a DA they don't like as an excuse for not doing their jobs.
The whole recall depressingly illustrates how many people have failed to recognize the real, systemic causes of what they see, and just look for convenient scapegoats in the poor and marginalized and in one honest, compassionate public servant who was trying to achieve real criminal justice reform and better results in the face of a difficult situation.
The author writes about the Civic Center de facto safe use are "metastasizing", when actually the homeless gathered there would otherwise likely be out on the streets. Where is the outrage at the metastasizing City Hall workforce, the thousands of bureaucrats leeching off the public and being paid 6-figure salaries while thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets, some dying of exposure every winter? (Yes, it does get quite cold in San Francisco, with the wind chill in particular, even if it rarely snows.)
On the bright side, let it be noted for the record that the outcome of the recall election was actually much closer than initially reported. As the mail-in ballots were counted, the margin by which it passed dropped from around 60-40% to about 55-45%. When whoever the mayor appoints as the next DA has been in office for a couple years and the various problems for which Boudin was unfairly blamed are still with us, maybe enough of the folks who voted for the recall will realize they were sold a bill of goods to make a difference in keeping the door open to the kind of meaningful reforms to a broken criminal justice system for which Chesa Boudin has been working.
Thank you Nancy, I always appreciate trustworthy reportage. We see so little of it these days.
Do you know how SF’s policy compares to Vancouver BC’s harm reduction policies? I visited the area around 2015 and, yea, I saw someone shooting up and plenty of stolen goods for sale, but my husband assured me that it had been much bleaker 10 years earlier. I’m generally a proponent of harm reduction, but addiction is such a knotty problem, intertwined with poverty, mental health, criminal justice, education, that I don’t know whether any singular policy will achieve much (and might make other issues, including optics, much worse).
I live in San Francisco, and am very aware of this whole controversy. Chesa Boudin was elected district attorney in November 2019 and took office in 2020. Homelessness however has been rampant in the mid-Market Street area that includes UN Plaza for decades. This is largely the result of the city government's anti-housing policies. It is very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to get approval to build anything, due to all the bureaucracy, hearing requirements, permit fees, and on and on. While the problem has noticeably grown over the past decade, not helped by the damage done by misguided government lockdowns, which caused many local businesses to close, some permanently, and cost many people their jobs and livelihoods, none of that is the DA's fault.
It's true that many homeless people have mental health issues or use drugs (often both). This too has been going on for decades. The same applies to many people who are housed, but living on the streets tends to exacerbate such problems, as well as making them more visible. You're less likely to see housed people using drugs unless you're part of that scene, because they can do it inside their homes.
"Possession with intent to sell" is also a bogus rap, and if it's true there were only three convictions for this in 2021, that's a *good* thing. Criminalizing "intent" to do something without evidence of it actually having been done is essentially creating a thought crime. Not that consensual drug sales are a real crime in any case. Some percentage of the public, some percentage of the time, are going to do things that are bad for them, whether it's using fentanyl, tobacco, alcohol or other drugs, lack of exercise, lack of healthy eating, or whatever. This has been going on for basically all of human history, and trying to outlaw it is futile. Haven't we learned anything from the failed "War on Drugs"? (Sadly, where the San Francisco electorate is concerned, I can tell you that the answer is mostly "no", as the year before Boudin was elected, voters approved a citywide ban on the sale of menthol cigarettes and many vaping products.)
In any event, Boudin understands that drug use and mental health are issues which criminalizing and arresting people will not make better or solve. For this, and for wanting to end unfair policies like cash bail that discriminates against the poor, and hold police officers accountable for their misconduct when they shoot and kill people or otherwise violate their rights, he has been made the poster boy and scapegoat for social dysfunction caused by decades of failed statist policies. He has in fact had success in going after things like organized crime – his office recently scored a major bust against a theft ring.
Recognizing these things, I walked precincts for the campaign *against* the recall, doing exactly the kind of work mentioned in the article – distributing door hangers and literature. But I was a volunteer, not paid $30 an hour or anything at all for the many hours I put in. The recall effort, which was indeed funded by one wealthy Republican donor in particular, outspent those defending Boudin by a margin of around 2-1. Indeed if you look closely at the photo of the guy on the skateboard, you'll see that the flier he's holding is actually *opposing* Boudin and supporting the recall, not defending the DA as the article claims. I recognized it immediately, having often seen those recall fliers when out distributing lit for the other side.
The officially-permitted encampment by UN Plaza is, ironically, surrounded by covered fencing precisely because of the irrational fears and prejudices of many residents. Retail theft is bad, but it is not dangerous to ordinary shoppers, any more than public nudity is dangerous, or shooting up drugs is (to anyone except the user). They simply offend certain sensibilities. You can tell this is so from the frequency with which you hear the phrase "open-air" in reference to the drug sales and use being complained about – as if selling fentanyl is fundamentally any different, or shooting it up any safer, when done indoors. A similar attitude is evident in the author's description of the scene where she describes people with disabilities, using drugs, etc., while insisting she isn't trying to write a biased piece, or her going out of her way to say she doesn't support throwing people in jail for drugs – and then proceeding to make it all but explicit that this is exactly what she wants to happen.
Then there is her protagonist and fellow journalist Erica Sandberg, who doesn't see the difference between government thugs standing on a corner shooting and murdering people in cold blood, and people dying of overdoses from taking consensually purchased and voluntarily used drugs!
If I sensed that more of those complaining about homelessness, drug use, public urination/defecation and so on – which are real enough, even if you mostly see them only in a few areas of the city, and they are greatly exaggerated by conservatives for political purposes – actually cared about the lives of people on the streets, I might have more sympathy for their gripes. But listening to these complaints, the hostility and contempt for the homeless rings through again and again. They are blamed for crime and dirty streets in general, even though those same streets that aren't kept clean are also clearly not kept properly paved by a city government with a $13 billion-plus annual budget (larger than that of many entire states), and the petty theft, auto break-ins and other crimes aren't properly investigated by police who like to use a DA they don't like as an excuse for not doing their jobs.
The whole recall depressingly illustrates how many people have failed to recognize the real, systemic causes of what they see, and just look for convenient scapegoats in the poor and marginalized and in one honest, compassionate public servant who was trying to achieve real criminal justice reform and better results in the face of a difficult situation.
The author writes about the Civic Center de facto safe use are "metastasizing", when actually the homeless gathered there would otherwise likely be out on the streets. Where is the outrage at the metastasizing City Hall workforce, the thousands of bureaucrats leeching off the public and being paid 6-figure salaries while thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets, some dying of exposure every winter? (Yes, it does get quite cold in San Francisco, with the wind chill in particular, even if it rarely snows.)
On the bright side, let it be noted for the record that the outcome of the recall election was actually much closer than initially reported. As the mail-in ballots were counted, the margin by which it passed dropped from around 60-40% to about 55-45%. When whoever the mayor appoints as the next DA has been in office for a couple years and the various problems for which Boudin was unfairly blamed are still with us, maybe enough of the folks who voted for the recall will realize they were sold a bill of goods to make a difference in keeping the door open to the kind of meaningful reforms to a broken criminal justice system for which Chesa Boudin has been working.
This comment isn't directed at NR, but isn't this just a half step from libertopia? And considering that, I specifically wouldn't recall Chesa because he's acting here as a libertarian purist.