Entrenched Power Hates It When Actual Progressives Are in Office

Transcript

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

0:00:24 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1178. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and it's here, folks. It is part two with Chase Abudin. I've been waiting for it. I know you've been waiting for Chase is just so fantastic. I could listen to this guy forever. I don't know if he ever plans on running for office again, but if he does, I will vote for him if I can. And I wish we had more chases out there. We probably do. But anyway, make sure you listen to part one, of course. And that one we talked about his life and his campaign and sort of the stuff prior to being in office, a little bit of stuff in office as well. Well, today we're talking much more about his time in office, what he tried to accomplish, what he did accomplish, how that went, what it was like, and ultimately why he is no longer in that office. So let's go ahead and get right to it. Oh, and this recording, my voice was terrible. That was last week when my voice is awful. So don't worry, I'm better now. I'm all better. All right, we're going to take a little break, which you can avoid at patreon.com/law. Please support the show. We've got a lot of awful movies coming soon, by the way, patrons only. We watched Juror No. 2, so you don't have to, although you should. It's actually a good movie. Me, Lydia, Matt, Casey had a great recording. Still working on the edit to that. We'll have it out soon. patreon.com/law. All right, we'll jump on with Chesa Boudin.

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0:01:38 Thomas: So, Chesa, we talked a lot about your story of both your background and when you ran for office. We got a little bit into your term, but we would love to dig more into that. Just remind us, reset us. What year are we talking? Where are we? The time and place. And let's get into to uh what what happened during your term

0:01:56 Chesa: Sure. So I was elected in November of 2019. I was sworn into office the first week of January 2020. And I think probably any new elected official in a big city, especially after a really close race, ranked choice race in particular, where I only ended up with, including first, second, and third choice votes, I think it was 42 % of the vote. You've got work to do. You've gotta meet people that you didn't know before. You gotta get to know how city government works. You've got to get to know the bureaucracy that you're now in charge of, you know, your staff, I had to find where the bathroom was, that kind of thing. You know, I mean, seriously, there's like a lot of, it's a very steep learning curve when you're a newly elected official for the first time in office. And then add to it, just kind of the politics of the moment, the resistance that we'd faced, the fact that I was really an outsider to the DA's office, coming from the public defender's office, not from a career in the DA's office. It was a very, very steep learning curve. Then less than two months later, COVID -19 shuts the whole city down, shuts the world down. To be clear, I had expected that my first year in office would be spent on a steep learning graph. I had expect that I would have to meet with people who had opposed my campaign and supported my opponents, that I'd have to met with people and organizations and and constituencies, and reassure them that I was going to govern for everybody in San Francisco, not just the base that I Was delivering, you know, core campaign promises for. But way before I had a chance to do that, COVID shut us down, and we stopped doing in person meetings. And I have a vivid memory of one of my campaign supporters who, whose social and economic class largely supported my opponent, wanting to host a meet and greet at their house so that I could meet some of their neighborhoods, some of their community, people who had heard bad things about me but who might be open to meeting me now that I was in office and we literally never scheduled it I mean it just never happened, we tried COVID happened and then before you knew it, fast forward a couple years, I'm getting recalled and people's views are set in stone, so it really threw us for a loop, but it also on a more substantive policy standpoint, it also also dramatically changed how criminal justice systems operated. It changed the nature of crime and policing in ways that were really dynamic and hard to predict. So we saw really significant changes in how much and what kinds of crime was occurring in San Francisco. And we had to make very significant changes to how we presented evidence in court, how cases were resolved, the kinds of pressures we had from the jail medical staff, for example, to decrease the jail population was something totally new and unprecedented in terms of the issues at play in the criminal justice policy realm. So let me stop there, but you get a sense.

0:04:48 Chesa: It was a real curveball in terms of everything I was expecting. Yeah.

0:04:49 Matt: Yeah. Obviously, the pandemic wasn't anything that anybody wanted, but it did, as you're saying, there were prosecutors around the country far less progressive than you that had to start thinking about decarceral techniques and not putting people away for just the reasons you're talking about. So in a way that did, I mean, how did that kind of fit into your existing program and allow you to further your goals when you had to think very carefully about who you're putting in jail?

0:05:12 Chesa: Well, I mean, look, the good news, the silver lining in the horrors of the pandemic for us was that crime in San Francisco fell dramatically. And I'm just talking about reported crime. I'm not talking about arrest. That's a separate category we can talk about. But the number of crimes that were reported in San San Francisco fell by double digits. And part of that is that what drove San Francisco crime numbers pre -pandemic was property crime. It was car break -ins, it was shoplifting, commercial burglaries. And when retail stores closed because of the pandemic, when tourists stopped traveling because of pandemic, there were fewer opportunities for people committing those crimes to do so. And so it's not a surprise. I'm not taking credit for it. It's sort of a natural result of crimes of opportunity no longer being opportune. Some of the people who committed those crimes started committing other kinds of crimes. We saw an increase in people stealing cars. We saw an decrease in people breaking into closed businesses and garages attached to homes. It wasn't all rosy when it comes to crime statistics, but overall, there was a massive decrease in the number of reported crimes. That was a good thing. We also wanted, and this is something I'd campaigned on to reduce reliance on incarceration as a primary response to social problems. And when we had the jail medical director and the Department of Public Health telling us that we had to decarcerate, that helped get the sheriff and the police and other stakeholders to join us in a quest to reduce the number of people in jail. And we did so. We reduced the number of People in our county jail by about 40 % in my first year. Really, I can't imagine that that would have been possible, but for COVID. And then the other thing that I'd campaigned on that happened, and we'd already implemented some of our own policies, but it happened on a statewide level was a desire to end wealth -based pretrial detention, to end the use of money bail. And I implemented a policy to that effect very shortly after taking office. But in the context of COVID, the state judicial council issued a emergency order. I think it was emergency order order number four in April of 2020, if I remember correctly, that basically said, we're not using money bail for entire categories of lower level crimes. And that had a really significant impact on reducing the jail numbers in San Francisco and beyond. So there was all these things happening, some of which definitely would not have happened, but for the pandemic, and some of which did very much dovetail with our campaign promises.

0:07:43 Thomas: It sort of like how people started working from home and then they're like wait we could just do this like this actually works fine like you can still get a lot done people are happier largely speaking not every time and then similarly after the pandemic ended they'relike well let's stop doing that for no reason yeah

0:07:59 Chesa: Yeah, I think that's not a bad analogy for some of this stuff, right? I mean, obviously, if we could keep the dramatic decreases in property crime that occurred during the pandemic, that'd be great. But you wouldn't want to have the increase in residential burglaries, for example, that we saw. Residential burglarIES are scary, and they did go up in the beginning of the pandemic in San Francisco. Another maybe sort of policy layer to put on your analogy would be to say ending the use of money bail bail statewide was a really good thing. It saved huge amounts of taxpayer dollars. It reduced massive amounts of unnecessary harm to people who were presumed innocent and whose lives are all too often destroyed by unnecessary short -term pretrial incarceration simply because they can't afford to pay bail price tag on their freedom. And we have really good data now from the Public Policy Institute of California, PPIC, as well as from the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, where I am, that has looked at crime rates and failure to appear rates and similar key metrics related to the use of the so -called zero bail schedules in the pandemic. And we've seen that crime rates didn't increase and that using money bail does not significantly increase likelihood of people coming back to court. And so really great example of saying, like with work from home for certain people in certain kinds of jobs. Hey, this works. This actually works and saves us commuting and putting on makeup or high heels or waiting in line to get the bus or having to pay for lunch out. Yeah, huge savings and huge improvements in some ways. And other things just weren't the same. Let me give you one example. Trying to present evidence in court, a big part of what a judge or a jury, a fact finder does in a criminal case is they evaluate the evidence and And they decide which witnesses are telling the truth and which pieces of evidence they should believe, how much weight to give, which witness's testimony. Really hard to do that when the person is testifying over Zoom or even when they're testifying in person but wearing a big mask and you can't see their face or their facial expressions. So we definitely lost a lot of things that were a critical part of criminal justice process.

0:08:06 Thomas: Unemployment

0:10:16 Matt: Getting to the point I think that people really don't think about, a point you've made often, and actually the Center for American Progress confirmed in pretty extensive research, including your own administration, that prosecutor behavior, prosecutor policy just doesn't really seem to affect crime rates directly. And I think That might be a novel idea for a lot of people. Or the idea that ending money bail or decreasing the number of people that we recommend for jail doesn't create a city full of Batman villains and wild crime everywhere. I think that there's just a lot of ideas that, especially right -wing people, but just a whole lot of law and order, quote -unquote, type people have put out there about this stuff. But what are your thoughts on sort of that general concept? What is it a prosecutor is actually, what are the outcomes that you're actually hoping for?

0:10:58 Chesa: Well, criminologists and social science researchers have long known. I mean, it's consensus that nothing prosecutors do in the short term has a meaningful impact on crime trends. In the long term, maybe if you're in office for many years and if you are really consistent in the way you implement certain kinds of policies, it might over time have a measurable impact on crime rates. But there are so many bigger picture macro factors that affect crime rates and it's common sense if you think about it. How could any one individual elected official do more to shape the arc of crime trends than say the COVID -19 pandemic, or then say access to illegal firearms, or than say the fentanyl pandemic, which swept the whole country. Another way to look at this to make it kind of just intuitive and logical is to say, if tough on crime prosecutors could meaningfully decrease violent crime or crime in general, then surely the jurisdictions with the really tough prosecutors would have the lower crime rates. And that's just not what we see.

0:12:07 Chesa: You know, red states have higher murder rates than blue states. If you compare even, say, within the state of California, San Francisco County to Kern County, where Bakersfield is the biggest city, you know, Bakersfield is a very conservative city. The DA in Kern County is a Republican. Effectively, you know, the county is effectively a deep red county. And their crime rates, similar population size to San Francisco, but their crime rate are much higher. And they were throughout my tenure. So again, you can look across the country and see this. The same thing is true in Florida, in Texas, you look at jurisdictions with really tough prosecutors, and you compare them with reform prosecutors in similar jurisdictions. And the crime rates tend to be lower in the reform inform jurisdictions, not the inverse. So certainly not any evidence that being so -called tough on crime is smart on crime.

0:12:58 Matt: And what are you thoughts on that? Why is that?

0:13:00 Chesa: Well, I think there's a number of things driving it. I mean, what the best informed and sort of most honest critics might say is homicide rates are really different in urban and rural areas. And blue states tend to have more wealth and more big cities than red states. And so that may affect homicide rates, for example. And if you slice and dice it differently. They would say there's a blue city homicide problem, and that even within red states, the murders are concentrated in cities with, you know, Democratic mayors. That's an argument I've often heard. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that the mayor of, let's say, Austin, or let's see, even Bakersfield, the mayors of those jurisdictions don't set criminal justice policy. You know, you just, that's not how it works. Criminal laws are passed at the state level, District attorneys are elected at the county level. And so to focus it on a municipal level, I think really perverts and misstates the issue. But I think the bigger issue is that when you live in a community that normalizes violence, whether it's perpetrated by the state or whether through easy access to a normalization of guns, you're going to have more crime. When you live in a state that systematically under -invest, as so many red states do, in education and housing and healthcare, you're going to have more crime. It's not rocket science. The kinds of things that when they're at their best, and they're often not, but when they are at their get illegal firearms, not easy, we're going to be safer. And that's what the data shows when you compare red and blue jurisdictions.

0:14:20 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It just seems like so obvious that there's so many other policies that drive violent crime, especially, but you know, you look at a place like Finland or the Nordic countries where very low rates of incarceration, very low, low rates of crime across the board and very good equity across gender, class, race, right? I mean, I just, that those things have to come together and it just seems so painfully obvious to me. And I really appreciate you elucidating that. I want to ask about your use of diversion programs as well. If I understand it right, I think I read that you had some of the the highest use of diversion rates. You actually at one point had equity between convictions and diversion recommendations. Is that right?

0:15:21 Chesa: Yeah. I mean, it definitely depends how you slice and dice it. Let me say it this way. For me, and this is something I campaigned on and something that was really important to me throughout my time in office, I wanted programs, treatments, forms of accountability that addressed root causes of crime to be the path of least resistance for people we were prosecuting. What do I mean by that? I mean if we arrest someone and we're prosecuting them, whether it's for shoplifting or for drug sales or for something more serious, and we learn or believe that the root cause of their criminal behavior is untreated mental illness, then we are going to make our community safer by requiring engagement with mental health services and programming and medication where appropriate than we are by simply holding them in jail for some arbitrary number of days or weeks and then dumping them back on the street. And so all too often, our criminal justice system doesn't have alternatives to incarceration. But even when and where it does, too often those alternatives, whether they be things like behavioral health court or mental health diversion or veterans court, just to give a few examples that we have in San Francisco, young adult court, all too too often those alternatives are much more difficult, more burdensome, more limited than simply pleading guilty and getting out of jail. I used to hate it as a public defender when I knew I had clients with serious substance use issues. And I knew that their best bet to avoid a future arrest was if they could use the current arrest and the current criminal case as a wake -up call and an opportunity to get off the street and on their feet. And I wanted the ability to help help guide my clients into those kinds of programs where they existed. But all too often, the DA's office would say to them, look, if you want to go to a program, you might have to wait in jail for six weeks. And then at the end of the program, if you successfully complete it, we're still going to require you to have a felony conviction. And meanwhile, if you want to plead guilty today, you can get out of jail with a with a probation. And I'm like, well, it's really hard to persuade someone, especially someone battling addiction or

0:17:22 Chesa: Mental illness, to do the more more difficult thing that requires you to spend longer in jail for a less certain outcome. That's crazy.

0:17:22 Thomas: Why is it set up like that like is it intentional or is it just a product of I know I know bureaucracy is weird and the layers of things getting past is weird why is

0:17:30 Chesa: It's crazy, yeah. I mean, it's crazy It's a few things, right? I mean one is the massive investment in the very sort of traditional jail, probation, prison bureaucracies So there is effectively unlimited resources and unlimited capacity in those systems The alternatives that we just discussed require social workers, public health workers They require, in some cases, partnerships with, you know, nonprofit sector and they're underinvested in. So we really have very limited capacity. In our young adult court in San Francisco, for example, there was always a many month long waiting list for people who wanted the services, job training, resume development, to be able to get into that program. It's just under -resourced. And so that's one big part of it. It. The other part of it is the policy decisions that the DA's office made. And I want to be clear, I couldn't unilaterally change in any way the resource allocation. It wasn't our budget. That was something that happened at the county level. I could beg and plead with the Department of Public Health, with the mayor, the board of supervisors, but ultimately that was outside my control. The part that was within my control as DA was what kind of offers we were going to make. And so I said to my managers and my staff, I'm not going to micromanage the specific offers in specific cases, but I want us to craft plea offers in ways that make these root cause treatment courts the path of least resistance. I want us to encourage people to go that direction, to incentivize it. There has to be more of a stick in the traditional criminal approach than there is in the treatment approach. And there has to Be more of A carrot in the Treatment approach than There is in The traditional criminal Approach. And that meant maybe you get a dismissal at the end of the program instead of a felony. Or maybe you Get a misdemeanor instead of A felony. Maybe we can find ways to get people out of custody sooner rather than later. We were really creative given the limits on resources and particularly the limits during COVID -19 where a lot of shelters and other service providers stopped accepting in -person intake. But yeah, it's a crazy system and it seems so obvious that we should make getting sober or getting mental health treatment the primary goal of accountability in the criminal justice system. I want to say one other piece about this because a lot of critics will say, oh, you're just giving these people to get out of jail free card and being sick or addicted isn't a defense and people shouldn't use that to get out of jail and then earn a dismissal. And I understand that argument. I understand that logic. The thing that is often overlooked that's really important to remember is when we sent a case to, let's say, our community justice court or to our behavioral health court, if the defendant in that case failed, if they tested positive, if they got rearrested, if they absconded from the treatment program, then the judge supervising their treatment could terminate them from the program and send their case right back over to the criminal court. And we lost nothing in the process.

0:20:32 Thomas: Hmm

0:20:33 Chesa: We lost nothing, but we had everything to gain. We could always continue to prosecute them and seek to secure a felony or a prison sentence. That option was always still on the table. But we gained the possibility of a meaningful intervention that could transform someone's life away from crime and set them on a path towards success and paying taxes and supporting their family. So I was a big believer in it. I was really proud of our records around expanding use of diversion and really disappointed to see the kind of dishonest narrative that so many in the media and the recall pushed saying our conviction rates were low. Of course, our conviction rate were lower. We weren't trying to obtain convictions. We were trying to change people's lives and, and hold them accountable in ways that didn't require a conviction because they were sober and they were on medication and they were housed and they had jobs and they were taking care of their families.

0:21:17 Matt: Sure. Right. Yeah, of course, conviction is just one outcome, and you have so many better outcomes that you can reach. And I sat in one morning on Dorchester Drug Court here in Boston, and I'd never seen drug court in action before. And it was the same courtroom and the same judge that I'd seen many times, but it was a different place. It really felt like a completely different thing. And I think maybe for those who aren't really familiar or haven't really thought about drug court, what does it mean to you? And what have you seen? What kind of results have you seen from it? Sure. Sure.

0:21:51 Chesa: Well, drug courts work really differently in lots of places. And I don't want to, you know, I don't want to paint with too broad a stroke, but I used to work in our drug court in San Francisco as a public defender. So I have a sense of how that works. And, you know, I will just say that the courts are – the differences between drug courts are driven by a couple of factors. The first is who's eligible, what kinds of cases, how serious, what kind of treatment needs. A second factor is what are the treatment plans available? Are they abstinence only? Are they harm reduction based? Are they residential inpatient? Are they outpatient? You know, so there's a lot. And then also, like, what is the benefit of completing the program for the defendant? In San Francisco, there was a judge, a really thoughtful, compassionate judge who took his job extremely seriously, built relationships with the people in drug court, didn't hesitate to terminate people if he didn't think they were serious about trying to get and stay sober, but also showed lots of empathy for people who were struggling with sobriety. Having that kind of a judge overseeing drug court makes a massive difference. And then the other big factor is the quality of the social workers or treatment team. And some of our treatment courts in San Francisco had really, really high quality staff. Our veterans court, our young adult court had low caseload, not enough, but decently paid staff. Staff. Some of our other collaborative or diversionary courts simply did not have adequate staffing with adequate training, skills, resources. And it showed in terms of the outcomes of those courts. So, you know, drug courts, basically the idea is you're arrested for a crime that was committed because of or in connection to your addiction. And instead of just putting you in in a jail cell for a month or a year, we're going to supervise your treatment in the hopes that you can get and stay sober or reduce the harmful impacts of substance use in your life.

0:23:54 Matt: Yeah. Could you actually just, because I think this is so important. It's something I really am coming to believe in. If you could just kind of elucidate the difference, because you use the word collaborative, and that's really just what it is. It'S not adversarial. It' s everybody in the courtroom working together for one person's benefit. Can you kind of just give us an idea, I guess, the difference between the average morning and your district court and drug court?

0:24:16 Chesa: Yeah, big difference. Exactly as you said, I mean, they are collaborative. They're designed to be collaborative. And what that means is, you know, in a traditional adversarial criminal courtroom, the prosecutor's goal, all else equal, is to secure a conviction and impose a punishment. And the defense lawyer's goal all else, equal is to get their client out of custody and to to minimize any kind of consequences that their clients may face, guilty or innocent. It's an adversarial system. They want opposite things, essentially. The defendant wants a dismissal of charges and the prosecutor wants a conviction. In collaborative courts, by contrast, once a case has been sent there, the collective goal of the court, of the prosecutor, of The Defendant is success in the treatment plan, whatever that treatment plan looks like. And if The Defended doesn't like the treatment plant that the social workers or healthcare care providers offer, they can always go back to criminal court. That's their choice. They can always say, this isn't for me. And if the prosecutor says, hey, the violations or the lack of compliance here is so severe, they Can ask the court to send the case back to a criminal judge. But the baseline goal in collaborative courts is that people succeed in their treatment plan and that they get a significant benefit, whether that's dismissal or significant reduction of charges as a result of that success.

0:25:29 Matt: So you mentioned also young adult court, so that's different from juvenile courts in San Francisco?

0:25:34 Chesa: Yes, big difference. So juvenile courts apply to people under the age of 18 at the time of the commission of the offense. Young adult courts in San Francisco are designed for people between 18 and 25 at the time of The Commission of the Offense. So we are talking about people who are legally adults and who are being prosecuted in the adult criminal system rather than the juvenile system. But because of a recognition of the way that the human brain develops and adolescent behavior continuing well into early legal adulthood, San Francisco Francisco established this young adult court that essentially treats people under the age of 25 differently in inappropriate cases, not in all cases. And as I said, there's a long wait list to get into that court because it's desirable. It gives people skills. It helps them get jobs. It helps people who don't speak English, learn English. There's real value added for the defendants, even aside from the reduction of charges.

0:26:31 Matt: And this keeps them from being charged as adults? Is that the overall goal there?

0:26:35 Chesa: No, no. I mean, again, to get into young adult court, you are already by definition in adult court. You have, so the way it would start typically, let me give you an example. Let's say, let's say you are a 19 year old and you get arrested for breaking into a car and stealing a backpack, what we call a second degree burglary in California criminal law. You're facing a felony commercial, excuse me, a felony second degree burillery. And when you show up in court, your public defender talks to you about young adult court. And if it seems like it's a good fit for you, you can then say to the judge and the prosecutor, I'm eligible. I meet the following eligibility criteria, age, charge, criminal record, et cetera. And I'd like to go to young adult Court. If you are eligible pursuant to the terms of a memorandum of understanding between the justice stakeholders, then you get placed on a wait list and your case essentially gets sort of held in abeyance. It doesn't move move forward. You have future court dates just to check in. And when there's a spot that opens up, you get referred to young adult court. You get assigned a case manager. The case manager reports to the court. The judge in that courtroom gets to know you, takes an interest in you and your development. And eventually there's an graduation ceremony. Those graduation ceremonies are tremendously moving. I've had the privilege of speaking at several of them.

0:26:40 Matt: Inadult.

0:27:52 Thomas: Well yeah are the outcomes what do we know about the outcomes of people who get that versus the traditional system

0:27:58 Chesa: But we know that, as I said earlier, collaborative courts that are well -resourced have phenomenal outcomes. Our Veterans Court, our Young Adult Court, for example, have really, really phenomenal outcomes. Some of the collaborative courts have fewer resources, have social workers with far heavier caseloads, and some of them take people with challenges that are simply harder to solve. So, you know, our Behavioral Health Court in San Francisco, for example, takes people who often have very, very serious, longstanding mental illness. And that can be difficult to solve, it's not a problem that just goes away. Way. But what we know is that across the board, these programs have far better results than your traditional criminal justice approach.

0:28:41 Thomas: Yeah I mean I'm just looking at it from a just totally rational observer hey if this thing turns out way better but you you're describing this this incredible wait list well maybe uh maybe we ought to make sure there's no wait list like why wouldn't we just want everybody to get into it if the outcomes outcomes are better. That's better for everybody, right?

0:28:59 Chesa: Yeah, you'd think so. But again, remember, there's a logic that drives so much criminal justice policy in this country that is a logic of punishment, not of sound policy. And so if your goal is to make an example out of someone or to play on people's fear or to scapegoat certain communities, immigrant communities, communities of color, then no, then you're not interested in something that might statistically have been shown through countless studies to reduce future crime. You might just want to warehouse people for as long as possible. And often you can find a victim of crime who associates justice with longer, or harsher punishment. Our culture teaches victims of crime often that the most they can hope for is serious punishment against the person who has harmed them. And so prosecutors who are looking to do that can often hold up a victim's request for harser punishment or objection to a collaborative court and say, well, we object to this regardless of the data because it's not what what the victim wants. And we saw that happen a lot with some of the attacks on us.

0:29:29 Thomas: I mean, maybe

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0:31:53 Thomas: That's a good time to transition. We've kind of teased it a little bit. I'm wondering if you could kind of tell the story from your perspective at the time, what was your first inclination that something was, for lack of a better word, that something a foot, something was wrong in terms of kind of the campaign against you?

0:32:07 Chesa: Well, they registered a website to try to recall me the same week I was sworn into office. So we knew that it was early. It was early for me to actually move into my office before they tried to kick me out of it. And obviously, that's an important indication of the

0:32:22 Thomas: Of how good faith this is.

0:32:24 Chesa: Fact that this really had nothing to do with what I did or didn't do. Obviously, we made mistakes and hindsight's 2020. It's easy to Monday morning quarterback and look back and say, well, what would have happened? What could have happened? But the effort to recall me started literally as soon as I was sworn into office. It picked up steam. I mean, again, I think COVID also changed the dynamic of that recall effort and that opposition in ways that are hard to entirely unpack. But I think it kind of forced people who were trying to undermine me to hit pause while we all grappled with this new world order. Then I think it reinvigorated them once social isolation led to new and different fears and anxieties. I saw that really pick up steam at the end of my first year in office. There was a really high profile tragic crime in San Francisco that resulted in the death of two women. That crime was immediately sensationalized and weaponized in political ways that never would have happened under a different district attorney in a different jurisdiction, but would have happened to any reform prosecutor. And that's when the effort to recall me really picked up steam. And a few months later, there was an initial formal recall served on me. That one failed to gather enough signatures, but it sort of inspired a copycat recall effort that was more well -funded and ultimately did gather the signatures necessary to qualify for the ballot.

0:33:48 Matt: I just wanted to stop you for a second. You mentioned that crime, which I believe you're referring, it was a drunk driver in December 2020, or something about that, right?

0:33:55 Thomas: Yeah,

0:33:55 Chesa: Yeah, it was New Year's Eve, 2020. He wasn't drunk. I think, If I remember correctly, he was alleged to be high on meth and he was in a stolen car.

0:34:01 Matt: Because the irony from what you're saying is, of course, that just the kind of diversionary programs we're talking about would be the best solution, right, of getting people off of meth and something more violent, right?

0:34:10 Thomas: That's what it was? I'm surprised. From your description I thought it was going to be you know like obviously that yeah they find like oh immigrant murder somebody but like it's it's a crime that would have happened yeah huh

0:34:18 Chesa: Yeah, this was not an intentional killing. This was not, no, nobody alleges that this was an intentional kill. The political issue in the case, among others, was that he had been released under my administration after serving five years in county jail, dating to prior to my administration. And we could have potentially sent him to prison for life and we didn't. And then he was arrested multiple times after his release, but in large part because of the COVID pandemic and the zero money bail order, things that in many instances actually had more to do with statewide parole and court policy than anything I did or could have done, he was released very quickly after those arrests. And the arrests were for very low level things, for things where if his parole officer, for example, had, or if my office had found a way to force him into some kind of treatment, things might have ended differently. But in the context of the COVID pandemic, there weren't resources. And we had a policy consistent with many other DA's offices across the state, as did the statewide parole office, of basically trying to have minimal interventions for low -level police contacts because of the limited resources and the fears around COVID. And so we did have, my office and parole did have missed opportunities to intervene in the life of someone who then went on to, albeit accidentally in the sense that he wasn't trying, he didn't know the people he killed.

0:35:36 Chesa: He lost control of a car, crashed into them in a a crosswalk. But yes, this was not a sex crime. This was not an intentional homicide. But nevertheless, it was a tragedy. It was on New Year's Eve. The people who died were really sympathetic people. And the person who killed them in the eyes of the press and the public was much less so. But again, I think if it hadn't been this case, it would have been something else because it started a trend in which literally any crime that was committed would be weaponized. I remember one case where my office actually asked the court to detain a suspect pending trial. We thought he was violent, had a violent history. We didn't think any conditions of release would be adequate to protect public safety. And the judge disagreed and released him. Him. And a few days later, he was walking down the street and randomly stabs an elderly Asian woman with a knife. Luckily, she didn't die. But immediately, people were blaming me for this and blaming my office and my policies, even though in fairness, they might have blamed the judge or the court. And I'm not a big believer in pointing the finger at judges for lots of reasons. I think they've got a difficult job and they've gotta make decisions every day. Some of them, they don't have a crystal ball. They're gonna make mistakes.

0:36:47 Chesa: But that wasn't the gut reaction when I was in office. It was to blame me for everything, every crime. There was a crime where I remember a homicide where the suspect had literally never been arrested before. And he commits a homicide. He had no prior context in any jurisdiction. He gets arrested. We charge him with murder. We asked the court to hold him in custody pending trial. And people were still protesting. And, and, and, you know,

0:37:10 Thomas: Well in fairness you turned down the federal funding for those precogs so you know that was kind of a boneheaded move

0:37:13 Chesa: I mean, yeah, it was crazy. It Was crazy. It was just, you know, but that was the politics of it. And again, I think it's pretty common for other reformed prosecutors to see this kind of weaponization.

0:37:25 Thomas: But why do you think it went as far as it did is just I'm sure you've thought a lot about it is there anything in particular because these crimes happen all the the time like you say it could have been used against any progressive prosecutor is it that you know the time and place and and the policies you tried to do is that what do you what do you how do you account for this movement being ultimately successful

0:37:44 Chesa: I think some of it, as I said, had to do with the kind of fear and social isolation of COVID. I mean, it really undermined my ability to get out there and build relationships with people that didn't know or support me in my initial campaign. But the other thing that's really fundamentally different and important to remember is that most elected officials in this country would not survive a recall of the kind that San Francisco allows. House. In other words, Gavin Newsom survived his recall when he was on the ballot because the procedural rules are very different. His recall, he was campaigning against Larry Elder. A bunch of other people put their names on the bullet, and Larry Elder was the one polling the best. And when Newsom started campaigning again against that other candidate, voters in California, including people who really disliked Newsom, got scared and decided to start donating, volunteering, and voting. But at the local level and county level in California most recalls, like the one in my case, doesn't allow other candidates to put their names on the ballot. So if you are on a recall ballot, it just asks voters, shall so -and -so continue to be in office? Shall they finish their term? Yep. Yep. Correct. Exactly. No negatives. Exactly. And think about how much of campaign strategy and spending is focused on attacking in the other candidate. Or another way to say it is this. Exactly. And you can't do that when you're being recalled because everything that goes wrong is your fault. And there's nobody else proposing anything concrete that's different for you to critique and say, wait, that wouldn't work or here are the problems or what's their track record.

0:38:47 Thomas: They get to like imagine their best version of a replacement for you sort of like the thing where they always like well I don't get it a generic democrat with no name pulls through the roof but then in this it's like yeah you don't think there's a reason for that wow that's tough yeah all of it yeah right yeah

0:39:21 Chesa: Another way to think about it is when you go to vote, let's say you voted for Kamala Harris or for Joe Biden or for, let'S go further back for Bill Clinton. You may have really liked those candidates, but there's an equal chance, I'd say, roughly equal, that you just really disliked the person they were running against. A lot of people who voted for Harris did so because they liked her. Millions of other people did so because they were going to vote for anybody who wasn't Trump. When you're running against yourself, you lose that whole segment of the population. Despite that setup, if you will, we actually got more votes against the recall than I did to get elected in the first place.

0:39:55 Matt: Nice. The recall was funded by a super PAC called the Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, which I assume was some sort of grassroots organization of concerned citizens, right.

0:39:59 Thomas: Oh they sound so nice yeah yeah

0:40:03 Chesa: Actually, they're based in Marin County, not in San Francisco. Yes, that is the correct name. And their biggest donors were the real estate industry and a guy named William Oberndorf, who's an investor in San Francisco, who is a major donor to Republican causes across the country, gave more than $6 million to Mitch McConnell to help take control of the Senate for the Republicans and has been a really loyal Republican donor at the national level. And he spent more money than we'll ever know because much of it moved illegally through a nonprofit. And we don't have any kind of transparency into any visibility into how the nonprofit spent its money. But we know that it illegally paid the current district attorney in San Francisco to do unreported work. And then she claimed she was a volunteer for the recall when she was actually getting paid by the nonprofit arm of the political committee that was funding the recall to do work that was undisclosed. And they were paying her to the tune of about $300 ,000 on an annual basis. Yeah.

0:40:05 Matt: Oh, perfect. And the California Association of Realtors got in on the party too. Is that right?

0:41:11 Chesa: And some individual real estate firms. So yes, the association did, but also one of the biggest individual donors was the Shorenstein Real Estate Company in San Francisco. And no surprise, the head of that company also has been seen at courtside Warriors game, courtside seats with the new DA, kind of wining and dining her with tickets worth thousands of dollars.

0:41:32 Matt: So did this, I mean, just, just putting the pieces together here between the super PAC that's funded by the richest people in the city and the association of realtors is the concern here that you weren't putting enough unhoused people into jail? Was that really what it was about?

0:41:38 Chesa: Definitely a big part of it. I had some San Francisco billionaire heirs that asked for meetings with me specifically say they wanted me to be more aggressive prosecuting unhoused people. And they wanted my office to solve the homelessness problem, which was crazy to me. You can't lock your way up out of poverty. You know, you can't put somebody in jail and they magically come out and have a house.

0:42:02 Thomas: I don't understand what they're thinking it's so

0:42:05 Chesa: It is so frustrating. And I, and I tried to explain to them what the limits were and what we could do and the need to build more shelters and the, and the needs for, for more affordable housing. But definitely in San Francisco and beyond, the real estate industry is often arm and arm with over -policing of poor communities. It's a very effective way to gentrify neighborhoods, to drive up real estate values, to drive out so -called undesirable tenants or owners. And here's another way to look at it. Imagine you're an individual realtor and you've got a property in a kind of up and coming neighborhood that's for sale. And you have a buyer who's a serious buyer and you want them to pay top dollar. But while you're doing the tour of the property, they happen to see a homeless tent down the block, an unhoused person living in a tent on the corner. That offer is not going to materialize. It's not going to be what you were hoping. It's not going to be what it might've been. And so there's a real financial narrow, immediate financial interest amongst the real estate industry to disappear signs of poverty or addiction or mental illness. Rather than doing the long, hard, honest work of fixing these problems through investment in social infrastructure and safety nets. All too often, they want quick fixes.

0:42:24 Thomas: Frustrating

0:43:13 Chesa: They want to just sweep problems under the rug or into the jailhouse.

0:43:16 Thomas: Yeah, I didn't think about that now that you said I mean, I've wondered why people are so short-sighted on this it's always when it comes to homelessness in particular it's like well move along you know it's move along where are they moving to they're just going to move to a different place where they're still homeless. I've never understood the short-term thinking. I hadn't put together that financial incentive of like, oh yeah, we need a temporary band-aid isn't good for anyone except maybe a guy trying to sell a property for a minute. I never thought about that.

0:43:41 Chesa: I'll tell you a quick funny story. During my recall election in the final month, we had a campaign headquarters in Noe Valley area of San Francisco. We started noticing that there were unhoused people setting up tents in front of our campaign office. Some of my campaign staff went out to give them some water. We always had food and snacks. They went to offer them water and food and just sort of said, hey, when we moved in here, there were no homeless camps here out of curiosity, like, why are you here? And they said, oh, the police told us they won't bother us if we sat up in front of your headquarters.

0:44:12 Chesa: Yeah. And of course, that upset the neighbors. There were businesses near us, there were apartment buildings, and people didn't like it. And the police in that regard succeeded in turning people who otherwise might have been with us or indifferent against us. But it is really a race to the bottom. I mean, you start seeing individual municipalities criminalize homelessness or poverty and push people around aggressively. And it becomes a race to the bottom. It becomes sort of a war to see which jurisdiction can be so hostile, so cruel, so inhumane to its most marginalized, helpless residents that those people pick up and go somewhere slightly less terrible. And it's a sad reflection of humanity that that's where we are today. Even in a state like California. That was my idea. That was my view for sure.

0:44:58 Matt: And the DA's office is probably just about the last place that can actually fix these problems, obviously, not to put too fine a point on it, but I mean, it's really the end of the line for this kind of stuff.

0:45:10 Matt: Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean it's just got to be such a hard campaign because so much of what we're talking about today has so much nuance, as these subjects always do, and requires sitting down and really explaining things to people. But I have to say, just looking around the country, progressive and reformed prosecutors are still winning. The movement's still going. We've got Larry Krasner and Alvin Bragg identifies as that. There's Monique Moreau in Florida, somebody in Texas actually recently unexpected. What's your kind of view of the overall movement right now? How's it looking?

0:45:38 Chesa: It's under relentless withering attack, but that shouldn't be a surprise if you look at the state of politics in this country. I mean, the fascists are winning right now. They've got control of basically every branch of government, many state governments, and civil society in general is under attack. Universities, even corporate law firms, even corporate media are under really intense attack in a way that is probably unprecedented in U.S. history. So it should be no surprise that reform-minded prosecutors are also under attack and that there have been some setbacks. But to your point, there've been lots of big, important wins that all too often go ignored by mainstream media. So even in the same election cycle that I got recalled and where much of the national media wanted to herald the demise of the progressive prosecutor movement, there were really significant wins in multiple jurisdictions across the country that just didn't get reported on by mainstream news. And fundamentally, I think what we know from the data, from the surveys, from election results, from polling, is that in general, criminal justice reform is massively popular. It's popular not just among Democrats, not just in urban areas, but also in rural areas. Voters across the country and across political spectrums want to see less reliance on incarceration, more treatment and rehabilitation, especially for young or first -time offenders. They want to see accountability for politicians and police that break the law. They wanna see a justice system that doesn't convict the innocent and that doesn' treat kids as adults. That's overwhelmingly what voters want. It's popular. And it's popular for good reason because it's what social science

0:47:17 Chesa: Tells us makes for good policy. But politics keeps getting in the way. And that's the real challenge. That's the fight. That's the work we've gotta do in criminal justice and sadly now on so many other fronts.

0:47:27 Matt: And You've got a chance now at UC Berkeley Law, I guess we should have mentioned before, you're the executive director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center, to get kind of the bigger picture meta approach. What have you been learning kind of from that vantage after the service?

0:47:39 Chesa: Well, first of all, I have to say I love my community at UC Berkeley and the law school in particular, but we work with folks all across the campus. We work with phenomenal students, undergrad law, graduate students. We get to do interdisciplinary research, file impact litigation. We got to do really deep, complex education work with our students, with our future lawyers, and also in the community, trying to elevate the nuance of the conversation in the public square about public safety and criminal justice. So I love the work that I'm doing now. It's a great home, a great community, and I've really enjoyed being able to do a mix of work that includes educating and capacitating the next generation of advocates while also helping to push forward our collective understanding of how criminal justice policy does or doesn't work through real -world research projects, Getting to partner with government agencies to help design and improve model policies for everything from police surveillance technology to prosecutorial initiated resentencing to looking at marijuana enforcement in jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana. Really wide range of public safety issues. And I love the work. I love the people. And in this moment, it feels like maybe, ironically, the area where we can make the biggest impact given how hostile the government is to science.

0:49:13 Matt: Sure, sure. If you could throw out a project or something you're researching right now that might be particularly interesting.

0:49:21 Chesa: Sure, we have a lawsuit we filed. It's not a research project, but it's a lawsuit that stems from some of our research and advocacy around reentry. And we knew that one of the critical moments in the criminal justice cycle is when people get released from custody. And all too often, of course, we have people recidivate or get rearrested. And if we can break that cycle, if we can find ways to make sure that once people get released, they don't come back into the system, we'll all be safer. We'll save massive resources. We're decreasing incarceration rates. It's sort of a win -win -win. And we learned that there's this law on the books in California since the 1970s. We call it the gate money law. There's a law that actually then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed because he understood that it actually made us safer. What the law did was it required the Department of Corrections to give people getting out of prison $200. Now, $200 was a lot more money then than it is today. It has not been adjusted for inflation. It would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,500 today. But the idea behind this law was to say, we don't want people who get out of a prison to have to commit a robbery for their first meal. We don't night they're

0:50:31 Thomas: Yeah, that makes sense.

0:50:31 Chesa: Out of a jail cell. It makes sense, right? I mean, let's give people a little bit of startup money just so they can maybe get a clean shirt when they go to that first job interview. And ironically, the government agency that's responsible for punishing people who break the law has itself been breaking the law in California for now more than 30 years. That law took effect in the 70s. In the 90s, the Department of Corrections issued a regulation that said it It was going to deduct all kinds of things from the, um, from the gate money, the gate money allowance. And so instead of giving people the full 200, it was, you know, charging them for transportation or for clothing or for this or that. And so we have a group of potentially, we estimate about a million people who have been released from prison and not given the money that the law entitles them to. So we filed a class action lawsuit where we're fighting to get that money back in the pockets it to the people to whom the law says it's owed, and also to help raise awareness about the ways in which the Department of Corrections is actually not only violating the law, but undermining public safety, undermining policies that Ronald Reagan understood made us safer. So that's one example of an advocacy research project we're working on.

0:51:44 Thomas: That's really cool.

0:51:45 Matt: That's great.

0:51:49 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:51:49 Thomas: As we're out of time, I kind of want to ask this question. The funders, the people, the money people who were behind the campaign against you, where did that get them? You know, what did they, I'm just curious what, who, who took over? What do you think that the people put millions of dollars into this? What do You think that money bought them?

0:51:55 Chesa: Well, I got them a district attorney appointed by the mayor, but now reelected, named Brooke Jenkins, who is a profoundly dishonest person. I mean, has been caught, documented bold-faced lies multiple times. Cases she's prosecuted personally have been reversed for prosecutor misconduct. Court of Appeal found her to have committed misconduct in the very last case she tried as a prosecutor before she was appointed to be the head of DA. So an ethical issue there. But then also the state bar has had to investigate, I think, six or eight different complaints against her for misconduct, and in one case, they actually referred to ethical diversion because of her misstatements and misconduct. So the irony of a so -called tough on crime prosecutor who kills the diversion programs I started, now herself being the beneficiary of ethical diversion for her misconduct related to the recall, is lost on no one. But that's what they got. I don't know that the billionaires who paid for the recall mined. I mean, she's not prosecuting companies that steal from workers. She's not persecuting police that that kill unarmed civilians. She's not objecting to ICE arresting people on the courthouse steps. And, you know, I think from that perspective, she's kind of doing what the, what the real, and she's happy to criminalize poverty and talk tough. So I think she's exactly

0:53:21 Chesa: What they wanted.

0:53:21 Matt: What's the single, I guess, if you could say the thing that you're most proud of in your time in office that you take away from it?

0:53:28 Chesa: I'm really proud that while I was in office, we stayed true to our values and our commitments. You know, we, we encountered tremendously difficult, unprecedented, unforeseen obstacles like the COVID pandemic and multiple recalls. And through it all, we were able to learn and grow and adjust, but also really be principled in the way we approach those problems and in our efforts to deliver what we promised voters we would deliver. Our time was cut short, but it was easily the most impactful two and a half years of my professional life so far. And I'm really proud of the work we did to avoid a COVID outbreak in the county jail, to help lead a movement around racial justice and police accountability at the national level, of the work we did to advocate on behalf of workers' rights when their employers were stealing from them, to go after not only the people on the street carrying illegal guns, but also, I think, more importantly, the manufacturers of those illegal guns through litigation against ghost gun manufacturers. And perhaps most of all, the critical work we Did to expand victim services and support in ways that weren't tied or limited to increasing or ratcheting up punishment, but actually to meeting victims where they were at and finding ways to address their needs, even where police failed to make an arrest or where no amount of punishment could undo the harm. But there were other things that could. And that was a huge priority of mine from day one on the campaign trail. And I look back on our expansion of victim services as a major achievement.

0:55:00 Matt: Great. And I got to say the principles and commitment really come through in talking to you. I really appreciate your time and everything you've had to say today.

0:55:08 Chesa: Well, thank you so much. It's great talking with you all and hopefully we can do it again sometime.

0:55:12 Thomas: Yeah. Thank you so much. Great talking to you.

0:55:13 Chesa: Take care.

0:55:32 Thomas: Sorry. I didn't mean to go out on a bummer. Sorry. I was having a coffee, a coughing attack. Hold on.

0:55:34 Matt: Well, That's right.