Chesa Boudin Grew up Visiting His Parents in Prison. He Later Became San Francisco DA.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:02 Chesa: The mayor refused to work with me. The chief of police publicly withdrew from various memorandums of understandings that we had. It was a pretty intense backlash.

0:00:18 Chesa: When people are shot and killed by police, the police write the report and say that the person killed was a suspect. And so the statewide victim compensation board won't provide any reimbursement for funeral expenses or medical expenses because they're not treated as victims.

0:00:33 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1177. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and we have got a great one for you today. Matt and I interviewed Chesa Boudin, former district attorney for San Francisco, and I don't really want to spoil much at all beyond that. You might recognize the name, you might know some stuff about him, but you likely don't know everything, and his story is just fascinating. I can't stop marveling at it. You're going to want to hear it. There's so much there. I'll at least say Chesa was obviously a progressive prosecutor and he dealt with intense resistance from the entrenched powers of San Francisco. Just going to show that no matter how quote unquote liberal a place might be, no matter how progressive a place may be, these institutions are not. They just aren't. And so I'm so excited to hear a firsthand account of what it's like to go against many in those institutions. You know, it's sort of like the deep state except real and also it's the police. It's like the Deep State we should actually care about. But Chesa's life is so fascinating and we're going to get deep into it. So we'll take our usual break. You can avoid the ads at patreon .com slash law. And then we will get right on over to the interview with Chesa Boudin.

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0:01:47 Thomas: Chesa Boudin, thanks so much for joining us today.

0:01:50 Chesa: Great to be with you.

0:01:50 Thomas: There's so many questions I could ask, so many things I could say, but after researching you a bit and realizing that despite living only, you know, a dozen miles away from you, I don't think I knew even half of your story. And I bet a bunch of people won't even know that. So I'm wondering if you could just tell us your story. There's no part of your life that doesn't seem really fascinating and compelling. So what do you think? Could you just tell us your story or your origin?

0:02:13 Chesa: Sure. You know, as probably for all your listeners, what our story is and how we define it is a work in progress. And I like to think that there's a lot of chapters still to write. But as it pertains to criminal justice, it's been a journey. And in many ways, it started off when I was 14 months old and my parents dropped me at a babysitter in New York City and they never came back to get me. While I was playing that day with the babysitter and another friend whose parents used the same kind of like a nanny share, my parents were driving the getaway car in an armed robbery. And the robbery had been organized by, carried out by an organization called the Black Liberation Army. My parents were white solidarity, playing a supportive role for that robbery because of their political convictions and their political vision. And it went terribly wrong almost immediately. One of the security guards was killed. Another one was shot. Then the people who carried out the robbery fled the scene to where my parents were waiting, switched into the back of a U-Haul van that my parents were driving. Somebody saw the transfer of guns and money from the sort of immediate escape car into the U-Haul that my parents were driving. And by the time my parents got to the highway, there was already a roadblock and police already had the license plate. They knew exactly what they were looking for. Both my parents were unarmed, so they came out of the car with their hands up. But when the police went around to the back of the vehicle to search it, folks came out shooting automatic weapons. And they shot and killed two police officers right there.

0:03:45 Chesa: And it was mayhem. It was a shootout, carjackings. Both of my parents were arrested. I don't remember that day. I Don't remember who picked me up from the babysitter. I don' t remember even a couple of years later when a judge sentenced my father to 75 years to to life in prison. When he sentenced my mother to 20 years to life in prison, my earliest memories are actually visiting my parents in jail and prison, going through metal detectors, steel gates, just to be able to give my parents a hug, just be able to have contact with the people who brought me into the world, and grappling my entire childhood with the harm my parents had caused, with the consequences for the community where the crime was committed, and for our family, and for me. And it's something that got me interested from a very early age in criminal justice and in the law. And fast forward to my time at Yale College and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law School. I was really interested in trying to take some of the lessons I'd learned and apply them to making the world a fairer place, a safer place. One of the things I learned through all those decades of visiting prisons is that the United States leads the world in locking people up. We incarcerate about 25 % of the world's prisoners, even though we're about 4 % of world's population. We spend way more money on jails and prisons than other countries do. And it's not working. It's a system that's really dysfunctional in a few different ways, right? I mean, one of them is that the prison systems that we have, the jails that we don't rehabilitate people. They don't set them up to succeed. We have massive recidivism or rearrest rates. And it's no surprise. You look at a place like California that's spending in the neighborhood of $17 billion on its Department of Corrections this year, and only about 1 % of that money is allocated to rehabilitation. So it's not what we're trying to do. We're actually setting people up to fail. It's making us less safe, not more safe. And then you look at how this system and the spending is justified. Often it's justified in the name of victims and the real suffering and harm that crime causes to communities and to individuals who are victimized. But the reality is the system treats victims like pieces of evidence. There's no real investment. There's not real resources put behind helping victims to heal or to feel safe or to replace lost income or to get therapy or any of the things that would be basic starting points if we were really serious about trying to make victims whole. Instead, we tell victims that we need them to testify, that we needs them to ask the judge for a harsh sentence, and then once the case is over, that's all victims have to show for it. Our system teaches victims to measure justice in years of incarceration. And that means a lot of the people who are victims today are criminal defendants tomorrow. We have people on both sides of this, you know, false binary and our system's failing on both side. And then finally, you know, we're spending so much money on incarceration that we're actually starving local communities of the things that we know are needed to make safe and vibrant neighborhoods,

0:06:50 Chesa: Things like healthcare, education, access to housing, things that we would all put at the very top of a list if we said, you know, design your ideal community to raise a family in or to feel safe in and, and local communities don't have the resources because we're so over invested in punishment and incarceration. Incarceration. So I learned those lessons and I saw that system up close and personal as a child of incarcerated parents. When I graduated from law school, I decided to fight against that system, one case at a time. I joined the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, worked my way up from misdemeanors to felonies to serious felonries. And I really loved the job. I loved working on behalf of clients who were in a real moment of crisis, who needed help and having the skills to fight for them and to give them voice, to tell their side of the story to a judge or a jury. But I also grew frustrated with the systemic inequities and the structural injustices that meant even in cases where I won a dismissal or an acquittal from a jury where I got the best possible outcome for my clients, they were still going back to the same over -policed and under -resourced neighborhoods. I saw day in, day out, things like money bail and racism and resource inequities between defense and prosecution play out in ways that had very serious implications, not only for the people I served, but also for the city I called home. It was kind of a confluence of factors in 2019 that led me to make a major career shift. But in January of 2019, I announced that I was running for San Francisco District Attorney. In other words, the opposite side of the aisle. I'd been a public defender. The cases I defended, the clients I represented were being prosecuted by the district attorney. And I decided to run to be the head of that office. And in November of 2019 after a very hard -fought campaign in a ranked choice election where where only 35 % of the electorate put me as their first choice, I managed to win the race and was sworn into office in January of 2020, just two months before COVID shut our whole world down. So I'm happy to stop there and

0:08:48 Chesa: Lots to unpack. I'll let you lead us.

0:08:51 Thomas: So for the next eight hours, we'll try to unpack that. Yeah, I, gosh, there's so many places we could go. I do want to, before we get to the rest of the so much places we Could Go, I did want to pause like a little bit more on what it felt like to essentially have the upbringing you did. And you mentioned that you took a lot of lessons from that experience and your parents and what happened. And when you said that, I thought, well, I could imagine so many possible ways that could go. You know, I can imagine so much more. So many ways of feeling that could be contradictory, that could Be, you know, 180 degrees from where you are. So I wonder if we could explore that maybe a little Bit more. Or just why did that lead you to the conclusions it did? Was there ever any resentment on your part? You know, was there any of those kind of feelings?

0:08:55 Chesa: Oh, for sure. Look, I mean, you show me a five-year-old or a six-year-old or a 10-year-old who doesn't have some of those feelings, right? Regardless of their family circumstances, It's a natural part of the kind of evolution of maturation of childhood. And so absolutely, when I was really little, I was grappling with a whole range of emotions, including guilt and anger and shame, stigma. I was trying to make sense of why my parents had brought me into the world and then taken a risk that was so extreme, not only with their own liberty, but with their ability to be parents for me.

0:10:14 Chesa: So I'll give you an example. I got off the phone. One of the main ways I built a relationship with my parents in the early years was through phone calls. And I got out the phone once when I was maybe four years old and I started crying. My adoptive parents tried to comfort me. They asked what was wrong. And I said, if only I could have talked, I would have told them not to go. As though somehow it had been my obligation at the age of 14 months old to prevent this tragedy from occurring, to warn my parents. Other times I would express a feeling of guilt that it was my fault in other ways. Like I once told the therapist that I was seeing as a child that if I'd been more lovable, maybe my parents wouldn't have risked losing me. So those feelings of guilt and shame and stigma and then in anger, there were times I remember on one prison visit to my mother when I must have been six or eight years old, I got really angry at her. And I ran off and I hid in the boy's bathroom. And of course she couldn't come into the boy'S bathroom. It was actually in a part of the visiting room that incarcerated people weren't allowed in on top of the fact that it it was men's restroom and she was a woman. So I stayed there for quite a while. And that was a way of asserting my power, of demonstrating my anger. I wanted to visit. I loved those visits. And over the years, they were a critical part of my ability to process what I'd been through and for our family to go through our own kind of restorative justice healing process in which I learned that it wasn't my fault and was able to really put the shame and the stigma aside. And in which I came to understand that my parents were really fundamentally good, loving people who had made a terrible mistake and been misguided. Those are some of the things that I grappled with. And it took me quite a while to harness the energy and the anger around my abandonment and my parents' incarceration and channel it into productive outlets like sports teams and model United Nations or chess club.

0:12:08 Matt: And law school, eventually.

0:12:10 Chesa: Eventually law school, that's right.

0:12:10 Matt: And so that's what I wanted to ask, I guess, because I represent a lot of incarcerated people and work with a lot of families of people who are in custody in one way or another. And I've had this thought a lot that, just like with immigration policy, that the people making these decisions and the people at the top often have no exposure to any of the actual reality of what's going on in these situations. And it's so unusual. I mean, I think most of our listeners know someone, or perhaps unfortunately themselves, have have experienced losing a relative to cancer or maybe a drunk driver or other things that are influenced by policy that people can go into careers to try to do something about. But I think it's so unusual, as you know, to have two parents incarcerated to go on to work in this field. And I was just wondering, as a lawyer starting out, did you discuss that background with your clients? Is that something that came up?

0:12:53 Chesa: Absolutely. And the point you're making is one I actually just heard last week. I heard Brian Stevenson, the founder of Equal Justice Initiative, speak really powerfully about. He talked about it in terms of proximity. When it comes to incarceration, the reality is that nearly half of adults in the United States have an immediate family member who's either currently or formerly incarcerated.

0:13:13 Chesa: So it's a very, very common experience. It's a shared experience. But to your point, often the people with that experience aren't in positions of power. They're they're not people with advanced degrees or, you know, in the halls of Congress. And many of the policies that have driven mass incarceration and execution of innocent people that have driven family separation are only possible because of that lack of proximity, because the people in power, the people with authority who are making decisions, who are drafting legislation, who are executing memorandums of understanding in these spaces can dehumanize and otherize the people on the other end of their policies. When you get close, either through your own lived experience or through direct service work, when you have relationships, when you go to church or coach a sports team with people who are caught up in these inhuman systems, it becomes impossible to continue dehumanizing them. And many of the policies that so many take for granted or ignore become unthinkable and inhuman. And for me, as an early career public defender, sharing my lived experience was important for a lot of reasons. One is a critical task of any lawyer is to build trust with their client. And when you're dealing with clients facing incarceration, especially as the cases got more serious and the exposure to prison got more and more severe, having clients know that I took very seriously the plight they were in was a critical part of building trust with some clients. It wasn't something that I talked about with every client, but in some cases, especially cases that were going to be long -term relationships that were going to take years to litigate where clients were exposed to life in prison. It was something that was helpful for them to know. And just like I wanted to get to know my clients and knew that I could do a better job representing them. If I got to know them, if I met their grandmothers, their children, if I went to the communities where they grew up, that was part of my ability to tell their story, to humanize them, to present mitigation to the court or to put on a full defense. It was equally important for them to get to know me, particularly because they didn't get to choose their lawyer. When you're assigned a public defender, you're not looking in the phone book and doing interviews and deciding which lawyer you prefer. You're being assigned pretty much at random by the court. And I wanted them to both see me fighting for them every day and also know that I believed in the work that I I was doing that I could relate to them, even though I might've looked different, even though I'm dressed differently, even thought I might have had a fancy Ivy League degree, that I can really relate on a human level to what they were facing and I was going to do all I could to advocate for them.

0:16:00 Matt: That is so important because I think that if you'd lost both of your parents to cancer at 14 months, nobody would question if you and spend the rest of your life, you know, finding the cure to cancer. But I think we can all agree that the prison system that incurs oral thinking is in its own way a cancer on the society. And just to hear that perspective is just so incredible. And to hear it from somebody who's been in a position to do something about it.

0:16:20 Matt: Was that something you went to law school thinking?

0:16:22 Chesa: Absolutely. Look, I was concerned when I started law school that a career as a public defender or a career in criminal justice might be a little too close to home, that it might be hard for me to leave my work at the office. And I was right to be concerned about that because that's exactly what happened. But it's a passion. It's a calling. It has been my life's work. And it's one of those areas of public policy where there is absolutely no shortage of room for improvement, of opportunities to do justice better, to enhance safety in ways that aren't just limited to wealthy white communities. These. It's an area of work where you'll never run out of work to do and where the concrete gains from even small changes are really, really tangible, really impactful, really broad. And so I find it, even separate from my lived experience, I find to be a tremendously rewarding area to do work. You know, when you can help avoid a wrongful conviction or when you can help someone who's been harmed by crime heal in a way that prevents them from getting getting arrested or committing a crime themselves.

0:17:31 Chesa: Massive impact.

0:17:33 Matt: And was there, you were talking about your observation just as a public defender, seeing systemic injustice in a way you hadn't even before. Was there a moment when you realized you you might be able to do more on the other side.

0:17:42 Chesa: There was, I mean, it wasn't like a single moment. It was more of a process, but the traditional role of a public defender, as you know, is one case at a time. You get assigned cases and you do your best to zealously fight for the individual clients in their individual cases. And day in, day out, you get assigned new cases at least as fast as old ones get resolved. It's not really, for the most part, a system impact kind of job. But I started doing more and more system impact work as a public defender. I started doing it in a whole variety of ways. I Started doing work around immigration detention and working with the sheriff and our board of supervisors in San Francisco to improve our sanctuary city policies. I Start doing it around impact litigation with regard to money bail that that incarcerates people based on their poverty, not based on the risk or having been convicted of a crime, I started doing a range of other kinds of policy work, launching new units within the public defender's office. And increasingly, I was spending my time not just on individual cases in the traditional kind of public defender workflow, but more and more of my time and energy was going into this broader policy work and impact work. So that was one kind of thread in my own life and my own trajectory. Another one was that the movement, the criminal justice reform movement, which is a really broad, diverse coalition of movements, was gaining momentum, was gaining power. And one of the sub -currents within the broader national criminal justice reform movement has become known as the progressive prosecutor movement or the reform prosecutor movement. Basically, in a nutshell, this was a movement starting in the mid -20 -teens where people were running for and winning the office of district attorney in local elections, not based on the traditional tough on crime rhetoric, promising to send more people to prison for longer, but rather based on a recognition that we actually incarcerated too many people for too long and that we could enhance public safety through decarceration. People were winning on platforms that committed to police accountability, that committed to prosecute and corrupt politicians and billionaires who were stealing from their employees. This is a very unusual moment in American political history. I saw that happening across the country in cities like Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago and more. And then finally, the kind of third piece of the puzzle for me was that San Francisco in 2019 had the first open election for district attorney in over a century.

0:20:22 Chesa: In other words, the first time in over over a century when there was no incumbent listed on the ballot running for the office of district attorney was 2019. And so with an open race at a moment where the criminal justice reform movement had so much momentum, including driving policy reforms through district attorney elections. And I looked at my own life and saw that I'd been doing more and more policy work anyway, and it just sort of made sense.

0:20:46 Thomas: Why was that the first time in 100 years? Is that just a weird accidental coincidence? Or, like, was THERE some change in how the elections were done? Or why was that?

0:20:54 Chesa: It tells you a lot about how local politics work in this country in San Francisco. But the reason is basically because with a few exceptions, incumbents in the office of district attorney are very, very challenging to oust.

0:21:07 Thomas: Hmm. Wait.

0:21:08 Chesa: So you mostly see incumbents win reelection. And when they decide to leave, they leave on their terms. And that means that they don't want to leave at the end of their term in office. They want to leave when they can have some influence over who replaces them. And so often they'll resign in the middle of a term, say two years or three years into their elected term, so that they can help control who takes over behind them. And then that person who gets appointed runs as an incumbent in the next election.

0:21:37 Chesa: Every once in a while, you have an incumbent who will get beaten by an outsider. That's what Kamala Harris did when she was first elected. That is the exception. But even in that election, when Kamala Harrison won the office of San Francisco District Attorney, there there was an incumbent on the ballot. She ran against him and beat him. And the next year, she was the incumbent.

0:21:55 Thomas: Mm -hm. Was this the first office you had ever run for?

0:21:58 Chesa: Yes, I'd never run for office. I'd never really been directly involved in electoral politics. I've never been seriously involved in campaigns, never worked as a legislative aide or staffer for somebody in city hall. So it was a really steep learning curve for me. And I only had 11 months between when I announced it and the election.

0:22:15 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about that. How did that process and also how the campaign went, you know, like how that must have been really crazy.

0:22:23 Chesa: Well, it was definitely, like I said, a steep learning curve, very intense year. Couldn't have done it without a lot of support from my now wife, then fiance, family, friends, and without the kind of grassroots campaign movement that defied the odds. I mean, for context, when I joined the race, when announced my candidacy, there were already four other candidates in the race. One of them had already locked up endorsements from the governor, the lieutenant governor, both US senators, the majority of our board of supervisors already had over $150 ,000 in the bank, which is a lot of money in San Francisco because the max contribution is limited to $500.

0:23:01 Chesa: So we're talking about a significant war chest, all those endorsements, all that name recognition before I'd even announced my candidacy. So I was definitely starting off way behind. And the way we ran the campaign was grassroots. We built momentum through volunteer mobilizations, through house parties, through door knocking, through text message banking, through literature drops. We did something like 36 different candidate forms or debates all across the city. And I said yes to every invitation I got. Didn't care who the audience was, didn't care what the conversation was about. I was on street corners from 5 a .m. to 7 a .am. Excuse me, that was election day.

0:23:39 Chesa: Most days would be from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. during commuter rush hour. And then also in the evenings, if I didn't have anything scheduled, just out there shaking hands, introducing myself to voters, talking about my vision for making the city safer in our justice system more fair. And all that hard work paid off. You know, we ended up raising a competitive amount of money through small dollar donations. We ended up getting really significant endorsements, including from Senator Bernie Sanders. You Know, other national leaders came out to support our campaign. A lot of other elected prosecutors across the country came out to report the campaign. And as I said, on election day, you know, San Francisco is a jurisdiction that does rank choice voting. So there were four candidates on the final ballot. But of those four, voters were allowed to choose first, second, third choice. And I had the most first choice votes, but it was only 35 % of the turnout. And then the candidate with the fewest votes was eliminated and their ballots were redistributed. I was still in the lead, but barely. And then, the third place candidate was eliminated. And her votes were redistribution. And when all that was said and done, I ended up with the most votes, but it wasn't exactly a, a powerful mandate for change. But it was a resounding victory against an establishment candidate who was expected to win. In fact, I skipped over kind of a crazy part of the story, but the outgoing DA was still in office during most of this campaign year.

0:25:07 Chesa: He had announced that he was not seeking reelection, but he was still an office. And he ended up leaving office in early October, almost exactly a month before the election day. In effect, he left the same week as vote by mail ballots arrived in every registered voter's mailbox in the city and county of San Francisco. And the mayor by that point was really worried that I was going to win the race. They knew from polling that this was a very close race between me and the mayor's first choice candidate. And so what the mayor did, which really kind of surprised everybody with how blatantly problematic it was, the mayor appointed her chosen candidate to replace him. With literally four weeks to go in the campaign, my main opponent in the campaign became the DA. But it was too late for that to be listed on the ballot next to her name. It was too later for her to say for her job description, acting district attorney or something like that. And there was a huge backlash. People felt like it was the mayor putting her finger on the scale. They felt like the chief of staff could have done the job for the next three weeks.

0:26:07 Chesa: They thought like there were any number of options of people who were not candidates for the job. Let the the voters choose? It's the first time in 110 years you have an open election. Why are you trying to shift the scales? And I think it backfired. I think our campaign work helped ensure that it backflired because it ended up being kind of a liability for them. Even though, of course, the candidate did press conferences every single day and used the full power of the office.

0:26:29 Thomas: Right. Yeah, I'm sure those are totally organic.

0:26:34 Chesa: Exactly.

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0:28:17 Matt: Running on an explicitly decarceral platform. You were saying, I mean, from what I remember, and just as you said around the same time as Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachel Rollins here in Boston, many others around the country, it was an exciting time. And clearly, even if you're saying there wasn't a powerful mandate, a lot of voters went for it and a lot people supported you. I guess I'm interested in the politics of running for district attorney on a decarceral platform and on promoting a better vision is something that is not traditionally associated. But I think it's very easy to run saying, I'm going to lock everybody up and throw the book at everyone in front of me. But it's so much more nuanced what you were doing. And even just the societal concept of crime and trying to explain about how that's not really the way that people think it is. What was that like to kind of craft that narrative and try to present it to the broadest population?

0:29:00 Chesa: Well, it's challenging. Your point is exactly right. It's a simple, easy, kind of culturally accepted narrative that bad people do bad things and bad things should happen and that's sort of the traditional tough on crime narrative. Of course, when we peel back the layers of the onion, it's not that complicated to realize that if you put people in jail who are innocent or who are parents or who've committed really, really minor offenses or for crimes of poverty, that you're actually destabilizing their lives in ways that make it more likely they'll commit serious crimes in the future. There's really compelling research that looks at the criminogenic, meaning the crime -causing effect of short periods of incarceration for low -level offenses. In other words, you take somebody who is loitering or who is trespassing or who istrunk in public and you put them in jail where they're exposed to diseases, where they lose their housing, their job, their contact with medical providers, where They are liable to be sexually assaulted. I mean, the kinds of horrible traumas that occur in jails and the disruption to people's lives that occur through even just a couple days of incarceration make it more likely for people to commit crime. They make us collectively less safe, not more safe. It's not that complicated, but it requires a little bit of nuance to explain. And one of the things I learned the hard way is that being an elected official, you do have a big soapbox. You have the opportunity to issue press releases and to make announcements and to get attention. But, you know, it's not an easy job to focus on public education. And really, there are other organizations and aspects of civil society that are better positioned to play that role. You know, I'll give you a concrete example. When I would go to community safety town halls, which is a regular part of my job, you know, the people who would show up at those town halls were people who were concerned about their safety. They weren't people who thought everything was hunky -dory. This wasn't a random cross -section of society. These were people Who, for whatever reason, were in fear, were upset, were anxious enough enough to spend an evening of their life listening to the district attorney and the chief of police talk about public safety policy. And so me trying to explain in detail to those folks the failings of mass incarceration or the issues with structural racism in policing, or even pointing to statistics that showed crime was in fact falling, was usually a fool's errand. And as a politician, often it's more effective to meet people where they're at. And rather than saying, look at these charts, hey, you know, property crime is down 20%, which it was during my administration, saying to people, who here has been a victim of crime in the last year? You're going to get some hands that are raised. And for those people who raise their hand, they don't care what the statistics show, because for them, crime is up. And that's what matters. So I think there's a real challenge with communicating both as an elected official and more broadly, these more complicated, nuanced policy solutions, and especially given the short timeframe that most politicians are acting on. People are thinking about reelection. They're thinking about the 24 -hour news cycle. They're think about easy wins. And good public policy takes time. And so I think it's a real structural problem, not just for criminal justice policy, but for climate, for immigration, for economic policy, for housing policy. You can't just snap your fingers and have new houses tomorrow, right?

0:32:22 Matt: Certainly.

0:32:22 Chesa: It takes time to invest in policies that actually solve these problems. And all too often, we're not giving our politicians the time or the incentives to do what social science research tells us makes for good policy.

0:32:35 Thomas: Were any of your opponents also running on any sort of progressive platform in any way? Because, I mean, it is a progressive place. Or did you kind of stand alone in your approach?

0:32:45 Chesa: Well, what was interesting about 2019 is that there was such a groundswelling of momentum around criminal justice reform nationwide and in San Francisco, around police accountability, around decarceration, that the candidates in the race in San Francisco all called themselves progressive prosecutors. I mean, it was a brand, it Was a label that everybody in the the race wanted to claim. And a lot of the debates were about us digging in on what that meant and talking about, for me, driving clear policy distinctions between me and the other candidates for voters in the audience, because everybody was trying to claim they were a reformer. Now that's a different political moment than the one we're in today, but what's still true and what has been true, certainly in urban areas across the country for many years, is that when you ask voters, when you give them a choice about whether they want more investment in jails and prisons and incarceration, or whether they wants more investment in rehabilitation, voters overwhelmingly want rehabilitation. They want police that follow the law. They want criminal justice systems that avoid incarcerating innocent people or people who are simply too poor to post bail. These are policies that are widely popular when you put them to voters, but have a little bit more of an uphill battle

0:34:02 Chesa: When it comes to actual policy implementation because of the kind of disconnect that we've been talking about.

0:34:08 Matt: Yeah, I think one of the most powerful points you made was that crime is defined by the police. It's defined by the existing system. And your office took a number of steps to sort of open that box a little further.

0:34:17 Thomas: So you win. That must have been incredible. What's the first thing you did? Talk about the actions you took and what you were able to accomplish.

0:34:24 Chesa: Well, I basically had three core campaign promises. I mean, obviously there were lots of details. We had a website full of policy proposals on a whole range of issues, but the three core cornerstones of the campaign were first of all, decarceration and prioritizing interventions that address root causes of crime first. Second, investment in victim services. Third, equal enforcement of the law, meaning police accountability, meaning investigating politicians for corruption, meaning a white collar division that goes after companies engaged in wage theft or systematic misclassification of employees to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. It meant taking on the rich, the well -connected when they violate the law, not simply waiting for police to bring us the usual suspects, which is how most of the criminal justice system is driven. And when I took office, I tried to do those things and we did it with a lot of success. I mean, every budget that I submitted during my tenure, we asked for more victim services. We had a whole wide array of really creative, proactive ways to help victims. For example, during COVID, we knew that domestic violence victims were all too often being forced to shelter in place with their abusers. And

0:35:34 Chesa: So we came up with creative partnerships. One of them was with Lyft to provide free transportation for folks who needed to get away from an abuser to safety. Another was with some housing developers who had vacant units to provide medium -term housing for women and their families who were fleeing from abuse. Use. Another was with our local 911 dispatch to accept 911 calls, not via phone call, but via text message in case somebody was hiding in a bathroom or lying in bed next to an abuser and needed to get help. We also, for the first time anywhere in the state of California, implemented a policy requiring that we provide for court certified interpreters, not only when victims and witnesses were testifying in court as pieces of evidence, the way they're usually treated, but to dignify their experience, their suffering, their right to follow the case, even if they don't speak English, with interpreters who could sit with them in court and watch other proceedings unfold in the courtroom and understand what was being said in their case. We also invested in small business repayment. We had a big problem in a lot of cities in 2020 during COVID with small businesses that were boarded up being vandalized or their windows was being broken. And all too often, police didn't catch the suspects. Nobody was arrested. There was nobody for us to prosecute. Well, traditional tough on crime approach is to say to those business owners, sorry, tough luck. But what we did was we said, no, we want to make you whole. And so we came up with a pilot program to reimburse victims for their out -of -pocket insurance deductible for fixing broken windows or painting over graffiti, a whole wide array array of things like that.

0:37:12 Thomas: Didn't even realize that was something you could do in that position.

0:37:14 Chesa: I mean, these are the kind of common sense approaches that we would be taking if people were serious about supporting victims. I'll give you another example. When people are shot and killed by police, the police write the report and say that the person killed was a suspect. And so the statewide victim compensation board won't provide any reimbursement for funeral expenses or medical expenses because they're not treated as victims. Well, I didn't believe that a mother should be forced to rely on a GoFundMe page to pay for her son's funeral when he was shot and killed by police. And so we implemented a policy of ensuring that we would cover funeral expenses for victims of police violence, just like victims of any other violence. There's so many areas of opportunity to actually help people who've been harmed by violence in our community. Andso we really leaned into that work. The other thing we did was we leaned into decarceration. When the chief medical director of the San Francisco County Jail called me in March of 2020 and said, Mr. DA, I need you to understand I cannot socially distance and keep people safe if we don't significantly decrease the number of people in the jail. She said, you've got to find ways to reduce the jail population or we're going to have a massive outbreak. And sure enough, in jurisdictions that didn't decarcerate, in Cook County, Illinois, in Marion Prison in Ohio, in San Quentin Prison, prison in Marin County, California, all of these carceral institutions served as vectors for the spread of COVID because they didn't decarcerate, because they did not listen to medical experts. But we did. We cut the number of people in our county jail by about 40%. And we did it at a time when crime rates were falling and continuing to fall. So we saw a double -digit decline in violent crime, a double digit decline in property crime during my tenure. And we were able to create a virtuous cycle where less incarceration also meant less crime, less destabilization, less disruption, and more ability for the folks in the jail, medical staff, programming staff, sheriff's deputies, to focus on doing their jobs well with the people who did have to be there. And then finally, you know, with regard to equal enforcement of the law, we filed the first and second ever homicide charges against an on -duty San Francisco police officer who shot and killed an unarmed civilian in the line of duty.

0:39:26 Chesa: We've took the first ever excessive force case against a San Francisco police officer to trial. We launched a worker protection unit that filed major civil enforcement actions against gig economy companies that were systematically stealing from their employees. So, you know, we took on the big fights and in the process we made some powerful enemies.

0:39:45 Matt: Was going to say, you made a lot of friends in San Francisco, I'm sure.

0:39:46 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, what was the resistance like? How did you do all this? You know, in the system you were in? What kinds of resistance did you face from the entrenched power?

0:39:54 Chesa: We faced massive resistance. One of the most telling examples of the resistance we faced was in the form of what has become known as blue flu or a police work stoppage. I mean, If you compare just, for example, the last six months of my tenure, if you compare the last six months in my tenure and look at police clearance rates, the rate at which police solve reported crime, and you compare that with the same exact first six months of the year in 2019, the year before I was elected, you see an astounding decline. You see across the board double-digit declines in the rate of which police are solving crime. Petty theft, car break-ins, 48% fewer cases solved in 2022 than in 2019.

0:40:34 Chesa: Robberies, a 41% decline. And so rape, 42% decline, motor vehicle theft, 29% decline So you have a double digit decline in reported crime. And yet somehow with the same, with even more resources, with more police officers, fewer crimes to investigate, police are solving in some instances, less than half the number of cases they were solving a few years earlier. It doesn't add up, right?

0:41:00 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:00 Chesa: So we saw massive resistance in the form of police going on a work stoppage. We saw about $10 million, most of it from tech and real estate lobbyists and some individuals, some very wealthy real estate moguls and tech moguls. They spent a huge amount of money fear-mongering, publicizing every single crime that occurred in the city and really giving the city an international bad name to the point that people around the world thought San Francisco was a dangerous place. And in reality, my administration was continuing on a trend line towards historically historically low crime rates in both violent and property crime.

0:41:32 Chesa: So we saw really entrenched resistance also from other government agencies. The mayor refused to work with me. The chief of police publicly withdrew from various memorandums of understandings that we had. We saw police Twitter accounts constantly undermining our work and our partnership. It was, yeah, it was a pretty intense backlash.

0:41:32 Matt: How about the judges? Sure.

0:41:50 Chesa: Well, judges are all individually elected or appointed in San Francisco. And so it's hard to paint a kind of a single black and white picture of them. But we had some judges do things that are blatantly unethical, go on the record and make political statements about me or my office and their preferences for how it should be run. We saw a lot of judges refuse to accept plea deals that we negotiated. We saw a case where somebody we believe was wrongfully convicted and had been in prison for decades for a murder they didn't commit. When we went to the court and said, Hey, this person needs to be released. You know, here's the research. Here's the paperwork. Here's why the court wouldn't release that person.

0:42:23 Chesa: And actually delayed by a full year, insisting on hearing after hearing, after hearing before they'd released somebody who was innocent. And those kinds of things just never happen with a traditional prosecutor. So we saw very, very entrenched resistance and high profile. I mean, one judge's on the record statements ended up being used in mailings and TV ads that were put out to attack me by the recall. And that's not ethically appropriate for a judge to insert themselves in a political process in that way, but it happened.

0:42:53 Matt: So I wanted to ask, as we're getting to the last few minutes here, if you could address, because I know this has come up a lot, but just as we are closing here, sort of the inherent black and white thinking that I think we hear a lot. There can't be such a thing as a progressive prosecutor as an abolitionist prosecutor, because I don't necessarily agree with that. I'm sure you don't, and I'd like to hear what your thoughts are there.

0:43:09 Chesa: Well, look, I see the progressive prosecutor movement really as a harm reduction movement. I see it not as the solution to all of the inequities or injustices, not as the single silver bullet that's going to fix mass incarceration or undo the history of slavery and race -based criminalization of entire communities. I sea it simply as a part of a broad -based movement and as a way to reduce the harm that drugs and mental health and lack of access to housing and education and criminalization of poverty have caused for individuals and for communities. And so the, you know, the goal for me was never to say, hey, I'm going to solve all of these problems, but rather to be in a position where I could help bend the curve, where together with other allies, with other partners in government and in the community, we could start doing less harm through the criminal justice system and in process reducing crime.

0:43:14 Matt: How do you see that toward the greater goal of abolition, which is, of course, a multi -generational project?

0:44:05 Chesa: Well, I've had this conversation a lot with Angela Davis, who endorsed my election. And in my current role as the founding executive director of Criminal Law and Justice Center at Berkeley Law School, Angela was our first big public event and public speaker. And we talked about this on stage in front of hundreds of students. You know, Angela is obviously an abolitionist. She's done more in modern American history to advance abolitionist theory than just about anybody. And for her, there's absolutely no contradiction with supporting the election of a prosecutor like myself or others who are going to do less harm. If you take what I'll call a narrow abolitionist framework and prosecutors. I don't want there to be police. I don't wanna have jails or prisons. Okay, how do we get there from where we are today?

0:44:44 Matt: Right. Right?

0:44:45 Chesa: What's that path look like? How long does it take? As you point out, probably multi-generational. Of course, we all wanna live in a world without crime, of course, without violence, of course. That's not the world we're in today. And it's a long way off. And so in the meantime, many of us believe, I believe, we have to have consequences for people who violate the law. We have to add people who fairly meet out those consequences and fairly and neutrally present evidence to courts and to juries. It's critically important that people who share solid values and who are ethical and who have integrity be in those roles. We don't want to abandon that field to folks who are going to double down on failed policies of the drug war and mass incarceration and criminalization of poverty. So I think it's critical that we look at ways to take power and to use that power to represent the values of our communities and to implement policies that are grounded in evidence and science and that we know will actually make us safer and pay dividends in the form of savings that can be reinvested in our communities. Sure.

0:45:44 Matt: Absolutely agree. Thank you. That's a great answer. Great.

0:45:45 Thomas: Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. I wish we weren't. There's so much more, but Chesa, thank you for taking the time. Really compelling story. And I hope we can talk to you again. Is there anywhere at all you want to send our listeners to check out more about you and your work?

0:45:59 Chesa: Lots of websites out there. Obviously, I don't believe everything you read on the internet, but check out the work we're doing now at the Criminal Law and Justice Center at UC Berkeley Law School. You can find that. I publish regularly more academic content. You can check out some of my work, including speeches I gave while in office on SSRN, which which is the Social Science Research Network. A lot of my scholarship and work is published there. And more generally, just remember not to buy into the false narratives that TikTok and Instagram and the news media feed us about crime and safety. There's so much misinformation, so much fear mongering. And as you said earlier, the way that we define crime is even itself something that needs to be interrogated, questioned. And we should really look to leaders that are willing to do the hard work, not simply try to sell us on a failed policy see based on fear.

0:46:48 Matt: Thank You so much. What a pleasure.

0:46:50 Chesa: Thank you all.

0:46:54 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:46:54 Thomas: So as you heard us reference, Chesa was on a very tight timeline, had a hard out. So that was cut not super short, but far shorter than I would have wanted. And so what we did was we actually, this recording took place over a month ago, I think, that you just heard. And we just recently grabbed Chesa for part two of his story because we barely touched it. We didn't even get through the literal half of it because you might note that Chesa is the former district attorney of San Francisco. So what happened? Well, some of that entrenched resistance. Some of that actual deep state stuff I mentioned. We're going to get into more on his term, what he did, what he tried to do, what was successful at doing, the barriers, the resistance, the pushback, and into ultimately how he ended up where he is now in part two. Can't wait for you to hear that. Thank you so much for listening. Please share the show if you enjoyed this. Hey, check out YouTube. Should have said this. We are posting clips of the show on YouTube. We might be doing some other stuff on YouTube in the very near future. As well, of course, to all the other stuff like the TikTok and Instagram stuff that I don't totally understand. I at least understand YouTube as a dinosaur. But yeah, check out the channel. Go to the YouTube channel. It's in the links somewhere. And that's another way. Or look for any of the videos that are shared. We share them everywhere. And share those with your friends. Share them with anybody. We're really trying to get the word out on this show more lately. And we'd be absolutely honored if you'd lend us a hand with that. All right. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.