The U.S. is one of the most incarcerated nations in the world. But why does the U.S. have so many people in prison and what are the biggest drivers of mass incarceration? One way to understand the answer to this question is to look at how prosecution is done in America. Reimagining criminal justice procedures has been the focus of a growing progressive prosecutor movement. Chesa Boudin, a proponent of reforming prosecutorial procedures, is the former district attorney of San Francisco, a position that he held until his recall in 2022. His biological parents spent a combined 62 years in prison starting when he was a baby. He’s now the founding executive director of Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center. Boudin joins WITHpod to discuss his familial experience with incarceration, the backlash he received while in office, building out alternative infrastructures, rethinking decarceration and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey, WITHpod listeners. Before we get in today’s episode, reminder that we are taking this podcast, WITHpod, on the road again and I’m going to be in Chicago at the House of Blues on Monday, October 9 and in Philadelphia at the Fillmore heater Monday, October 16. Now, I’m telling you this at the top of this because we still have just a few limited number of tickets available for that Chicago event. That’ll be with award winning author and acclaimed professor Imani Perry, rapper and actor Vic Mensa, MSNBC contributor Trymaine Lee. We’re going to be talking all about the sort of global impact of hip hop on its 50th anniversary, where it came from, where it’s going. It’s going to be an unbelievable conversation.
We also still have tickets for a Philadelphia event, and that’s going to be an amazing one too. A double header. We’ve got “New York Times” bestselling author Naomi Klein. We’ll talk about her latest book, which is fascinating and bizarre. It’s called “Doppelganger,” all about the ways that disinformation are warping the world around us. And second part of the double header, thrilled to be joined by my colleague and dear friend, MSNBC anchor Joy Reid. We’re going to talk about the backlash to history and the peril of this particular political moment.
You can buy tickets online at msnbc.com/withpodtour and join us in person for some fascinating conversations with amazing guests. Buy your tickets today at msnbc.com/withpodtour. I cannot wait to see you in our live audience this fall.
Chesa Boudin: The role of the prosecutor is a critical one in our justice system, that we have a long way to go to get to a world without crime. We all want to live in that world. I don’t expect this going to happen in my lifetime. And until then, we need to have consequences for people who commit crimes. And we need to make sure that those consequences are actually advancing the public interest, doing justice, promoting safety, not simply fake tough talk, which is unfortunately what we get an awful lot of from red jurisdictions.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host Chris Hayes. If you are a regular listener, podcaster, even if you’re not, you probably know that the U.S. is one of the most, if not the most incarcerated nations on earth. We don’t really have any peers. There are some places whose statistics we suspect are maybe not on the level like China and Russia, which may be incarcerating more people than we think. But as best we can tell, there’s just no one that incarcerates, has as many people behind bars as we do.
And this has been an enormous subject to debate of political battle and also of policy innovation. So, one of the questions that people have been asking, particularly people attune to what we call mass incarceration is why, right? Why? Why do we have more people in prison than other countries? There’s a bunch of different hypotheses you might have. Well, we have more crimes. We have a more criminal population. And it’s true, America has a lot of violence, way more violence in pure country. So that’s driving part of it. We’re a more violent place than other OECD countries, but that doesn’t account for all of it.
And then you might think, well, it’s really the police. We just do a lot more arresting and a lot more policing of people. And it turns out when you look at it, it’s not quite clear that’s the case, that police and policing is not necessarily the biggest driver of mass incarceration. And in the last 10 or 15 years, some folks started doing empirical work particularly looking at the period of time where incarceration really started to, you know, really, really expand, late 80’s, early 90’s. And one of the things identified is we just put people away for a way longer than other countries.
The length of sentences in the U.S., there’s just nothing like it. The length of American prison sentences are completely out of whack with other peer countries. So, then the question becomes, well, why? Why are we putting away people for so much time? Part of that statutory, part of it’s the kind of tough on crime legislation, things like mandatory minimums. But a bunch of really interesting pioneering work was done, particularly by a guy named John Pfaff who’s at Fordham Law, that identified that actually a huge part, perhaps the single biggest driver of mass incarceration were prosecutors and prosecutor’s offices.
Prosecutors are the sort of key institution in the criminal justice system that is making judgments about what to prosecute and crucially, how much prison time to ask for. And one of the sorts of really fascinating counterintuitive findings that started to emerge, I would say about a decade ago, was if you’re looking for a fulcrum to change mass incarceration in America, if you’re looking for a single place to intervene, one place to look is at how we do prosecution. And with this notion in mind, there was the beginning of a generation of reform progressive prosecutors. Probably the first was Larry Krasner in Philadelphia. We’ve had him on the podcast. He was the second or third episode. This is a guy who spent his entire life as a defense attorney, ran for and won to be a prosecutor.
But these have cropped up all over the place. There’s been prosecutors in places as disparate as Orlando, Florida, in Cook County, in Chicago, in San Francisco, which we’ll get to in a moment, where people have run for office to be prosecutors explicitly coming from a perspective of rethinking criminal justice, rethinking criminal punishment, rethinking mass incarceration, trying to bring the lens of racial justice and ending mass incarceration to a position that has very traditionally been the kind of bastion of the most sort of punitive approaches to law and order.
This has caused tremendous political controversy. Ron DeSantis now talks about it all the time on the trail. Donald Trump does. Republicans are talking about going after these no-good reform prosecutors. The state of Georgia just passed a law allowing them to basically remove prosecutors that were, you know, not prosecuting crimes to their liking. DeSantis has fired two prosecutors, the second of which he fired because she was essentially a reformed prosecutor.
And perhaps the biggest flashpoint in this battle was in the city of San Francisco, where a man by the name of Chesa Boudin got elected as a reformed prosecutor. He has a fascinating personal life story, which you’ll hear about in a moment, that informed his perspective on criminal justice in an incredibly intimate way. And he took office right as we’re sort of coming out of the pandemic at that moment when there was just a tremendous amount of social dislocation in every neighborhood and community around the country. This was particularly true in urban environments where people had spent years with their treatment cut off, in which there were much higher levels of sort of like disorder, crime, both in index crimes and violence crime was going up all over the country.
And as Chesa Boudin took over this office, this sort of backlash was generated, pretty well-funded, which we’ll get into, that called for a recall. Basically, you reformed prosecutor are going easy on the criminals in San Francisco, and San Francisco is sliding into the abyss and it’s your fault. And they were successful. About a year and a half after he took over the office, Chesa Boudin was removed. Now, I happen to know Chesa a bit. He went to high school with both my wife and her sister. We have a lot of people we’ve known in common. I followed very closely this story. I think a lot of you did. It got a lot of national attention.
And ever since it happened, I’ve been wanting to talk to Chesa about this experience because like really, he’s lived the full cycle. I mean, if there’s a person in America who’s like got the best grounds-eye view on the politics of crime, law and order, backlash in the whole country right now, it is Chesa. He lived it on the way up and on the way down, and while in office, who’s lived it his whole life because of how you’ll hear about in his upbringing. So, I really wanted to have this conversation for a long time and Chase, it’s a great honor to have you on the program.
Chesa Boudin: Chris, thanks for having me on. It’s an honor to be here and I’m excited to dig in and talk about some really important issues with you today.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. For people that don’t know your particular biography and upbringing, which I think obviously informs your work and informed the approach you brought. Tell us a little bit about the household you grew up in and your parents.
Chesa Boudin: Well, I was born and being raised on the Upper West Side, sort of South Harlem part of Manhattan. My parents left me at the babysitter one day when I was about 14-months-old. And they went off that day, you know, as any other day, but they never came back to get me. That day, that particular day in October 1981, while I was playing at the babysitter, my parents were driving the getaway car in an armed robbery that was organized with the Black Liberation Army.
And the robbery went terribly wrong. A security guard driving a Brinks truck was shot and killed. Subsequently, two police officers were shot and killed. My parents were both arrested and, of course, couldn’t come back to get me that day or for many decades. I don’t remember their arrest. I don’t remember the moment when a judge sentenced my mother to 20 years to life in prison or the moment when a judge sentenced my father for exactly the same participation in exactly the same crime to 75 years to life.
Instead, my earliest memories growing up are waiting in long lines outside jails and prisons to visit my parents, lines that were mostly black and brown women and children. Way before I understood the history of racism or slavery, before I’d ever heard the term mass incarceration, I began to grapple with my own identity as a child of incarcerated parents and with our country’s identity as the nation that leads the world in locking people up. It’s a perspective, as you point out, Chris, that has informed in many ways my entire life and my professional career.
Chris Hayes: Your parents were both leftists and radicals. They had been part of the Students for Democratic Society and then what was called the Weather Underground and were part of a community of folks with very radical politics. This Brinks trunk robbery was a scheme to fund, right, like the Black Liberation Army was the basic logic behind it?
Chesa Boudin: That’s right, Chris. Their activism and ultimately the crimes for which they were committed came out of a long history dating back to the early 1960s of organizing in support of the civil rights movement against the war in Vietnam, and ultimately led them to increasingly radical and militant support for black liberation groups like the Black Liberation Army. This was not a typical crime. They weren’t themselves going to get a single dollar of the proceeds had the robbery been successful. It was, in fact, as you point out, to fund militant political work by an organization that my parents were trying to be in solidarity with.
Chris Hayes: We’ll talk a little bit more about your folks. Tell me your parents’ names.
Chesa Boudin: My biological parents are Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: I was raised by friends of theirs after their arrest, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who shared some of that political history, who were part of SDS and the Weather Underground, but who had turned themselves in to authorities, who already had two sons, who became my older brothers, and who, when they saw the news about my biological parents, stepped up and stepped forward and offered to take me in and raise me as one of their own sons.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and your adoptive parents, we should know, who turned themselves in, were not prosecuted basically because the transgressions of the FBI and COINTELPRO in the degree of warrantless spying and surveillance that they had subjected these groups to, which was being revealed around that time, made it essentially impossible to bring a case. Am I right about that?
Chesa Boudin: You’re absolutely right. My adoptive parents had turned themselves in before the crime for which my biological parents ended up serving so many decades in prison. And to the extent that, you know, Bernadine, my adoptive mother, had been on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list for a period of time, none of the alleged crimes that they were accused of and wanted for were prosecutable because, precisely as you say, of illegal misconduct by law enforcement.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and there’s an amazing movie, River Phoenix, called “Running On Empty,” which is about Bill and Bernadine sort of before that period when they’re sort of on the lam and they’re undercover and they’re raising these sons. I mean, so you grew up and you have a resume that is, you know, it’s the kind of resume of like a presidential nominee. You know, you went to very fancy schools and you went to Yale law and you’re a Rhodes scholar if I’m not mistaken.
I’m sure I’m missing something. I know there’s a long line of accolades. Obviously, you had an incredible academic performance, you moved through a lot of very elite institutions. And during that entire time, right, you’re being raised by your sort of adoptive parents, but you’re visiting your birth parents in prison.
Chesa Boudin: That’s exactly right, Chris. I spent my entire life, as long as I can remember, visiting my birth parents in prison. My mom ended up doing 22 years before she was released from prison on parole supervision. That was shortly after I graduated from Yale College. My biological father was released in 2021 after more than 40 years in prison. And that was at a time when I was already in the office of district attorney and facing my second recall attempt against me.
Chris Hayes: What were those visits like?
Chesa Boudin: You know, we could spend hours talking about prison visits. It’s a subject I’ve done a lot of scholarly research and publishing on. And of course, I’ve spent what are probably countless hours, days even, in prison visiting rooms. The visits depended a lot on which institution my parents were in. In the early years when they were in jail, they were very different kinds of visits from later on when they were in state prison. My mom’s prison had a really child-friendly visiting room with a children’s center that had board games and blocks and arts and crafts projects. And all of that was largely thanks to the heroic work of a nun named Sister Elaine.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: And the then warden of the prison also named Elaine, Elaine Lord, the two of them partnered to make motherhood a reality and a possibility for so many of the women who were incarcerated, who had children left behind. My father’s prisons by and large, and I say prisons plural because he moved around the state of New York from different prisons, maximum security prisons over the years. Almost all of his prison visiting rooms were devoid of anything remotely approaching a child-friendly environment.
So, visits with my father were much more akin to sitting across a big wide table, usually shoulder to shoulder with other incarcerated people and their visitors, trying to have a conversation. And, you know, Chris, I know you have kids in your life. I’m a father. The notion that I could sit across a big wide table from my 2-year-old son and have any kind of a meaningful conversation or build any kind of a relationship, it’s just preposterous. And yet, that’s exactly what the millions of children with incarcerated parents in this country are forced to do every day.
I was tremendously lucky that many of the prisons my father was in, in addition to that regular visiting room, visit experience, also had an overnight visiting program. Very few states in the country and very few prisons in those states have an overnight visiting program. But from the time I was 5 or 6-years-old, I spent usually two weekends a year in my father’s prison, cooking and doing homework and throwing a ball back and forth in the small yard in front of the trailer homes. As intense emotionally as it was for me as a child to get searched and bring my homework into a prison and be totally cut off from missing the bar mitzvahs and the birthday parties that my classmates were going to, it was also a critical part of what enabled me to not only build a relationship with my father, but learn to forgive him for the harm he’d caused and to forgive myself for the sense of guilt that I and so many children with incarcerated parents feel.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about that. First of all, you mentioned Sister Elaine and Elaine Lord. I just want to emphasize my beloved aunt, Linda Loffredo, who we lost more than a year ago, worked in women’s prisons in New York State, and both of those women are just incredible heroes, like just incredible. It changed so many lives, and the Osborne Association, which functions in New York, which is an organization that I support and really believe strongly in. If you’re listening this, they do amazing stuff around that too.
Forgiving your father, that part about it, I mean, how did you process that? I mean, you know, three people lost their lives in that crime. Neither of your parents fired the shots, but they were, you know, part of the scheme. Obviously, it’s a horrifying and horrible evil that was done and I think some of them had children as well. And how you came to process that through as a kid growing up, like when you learned about that and how you thought about it?
Chesa Boudin: Well, Chris, there’s a couple ways I can answer, right? I’m a lawyer, I’m a criminal lawyer. I could talk about some of the technical aspects of what happened and what felony murder is and the sentencing issues at play. But I didn’t become a lawyer or even have the potential to take that lens until much later in my life. As a kid growing up, I was trying to make sense of why my life was so different from my classmates in school and from my brothers in my own home, from why my parents, who I knew to be kind and loving people, would have participated knowingly in a crime that risked not only their relationship with me, but also the lives, as you said, of husbands and fathers.
The people killed in their crime were, as you point out, they were fathers. One of the people killed was the first ever black officer in the NIAC Police Department. One of them, you know, was a father and a husband who left young kids at home, not much different in age than myself. So, the costs were very real to an entire community, not just to the people killed, but to the entire police department, to civilians. And that’s something that I grappled with and I know my parents grappled with every day that they were behind bars and continue to grapple with today.
It was a process. You know, it wasn’t flipping a switch. It wasn’t asking a question and getting an answer that sort of had it all make sense. It was something that I had to continue to revisit to this day with my parents. And every year as I got a little more mature and a little more informed about the world, I remember when in high school I found that our library had microfilm and I could go back and read “The New York Times” front page article about my parents’ case.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Chesa Boudin: And sort of for the first time in my life as a 15 or 16-year-old, I was reading not just a version told to me by my parents and extended community, but actually one that was reported by the “New York Times” the day after the crime was committed. And I went back for my next prison visits full of questions, and some of them were angry questions. I was frustrated with my parents. I was disappointed in their lack of judgment, both around the harm it had caused me and to their own lives and most importantly, of course, to the families that permanently lost a loved one.
There was no easy way to solve that. I think I benefited tremendously from a really broad, loving support network, from stability in my home family life, from therapy in my early years, also from academic support, academic tutors. And from the second and third chances as a kid that we know all kids need and deserve, but far too few children with children of incarcerated parents get those second and third chances.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, just to your point about felony murder, if people don’t know, if you participated in a crime in which there’s a murder, even if you’re not the person that commits that murder, driving the getaway car is the kind of iconic example, you can be charged as if you were the person basically that fired the trigger. And there’s insane cases across the country of people that got pulled in by a buddy who’s like, yo, drive the car, come with us and they go knock off a gas station. They shoot and they kill someone.
The person who drove the getaway car literally had no idea what was going to happen. They get life sentences. I mean, it is a means of punishment that can lead to tremendous abuses across the country. It’s very common if people don’t know that.
Chesa Boudin: That’s right, Chris. Let me just add on a technical point to add on.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: You know, what you said, felony murder is a legal doctrine that basically doesn’t exist anywhere outside of the United States.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: And even within the United States, only now exists in a handful of states. And part of the reason for that, I want to just zoom out, you know, prosecutors like to have extra tools to prosecute, to punish, to hold people accountable. And they don’t always want to have to prove who did what in a crime. That’s one of the reasons why prosecutors like felony murder laws. The problem with it, is among others that it leads to grossly disproportionate punishments relative to the conduct of the individual.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes. Yeah. And this actually brings us up to your decision to run for, it’s called district attorney, right, in terms of —
Chesa Boudin: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: So, I want to talk about the category of reform prosecutor because there’s something I think profoundly counterintuitive and I want to kind of give you a little bit of a cheeky caricature of it. And then you could respond, which is like, look, you know, let’s say you’re a vegetarian and you’re just like, look, I don’t believe in meat. I think it’s bad. We need to reduce it. And then you show up, you know, to be the manager at the, you know, slaughtering floor. You know, and you say, look, I want to like rethink how we do this. There’s some level which you might be like, I don’t know if you’re the right person for this job, right? Like, there is this kind of like mismatch, at least that I think it’s sort of when you first hear it, right?
It’s like we want the people in that job who are like the dogged, you know, nothing goes unpunished in my town sort of personality and the like bleeding hearts like you, Chase, and all your liberal buddies, like you guys go be public defenders. Like, you stay on that side of the line. We’ll stay on our side of the line and that, you know, we’ll each sort of do our thing like, you know, the coyote and the road runner. The move to running for prosecutor with your politics perspective and background is not just you but a lot of people. And how do you explain that to someone who has my view of it?
Chesa Boudin: Sure. Let me make two points, Chris. One is a sort of personal one about my own decision, and the second one, which I’ll start with, is a broader point about the sort of so-called progressive prosecutor movement and why it makes sense to have people in these offices, in these roles who have backgrounds that are nontraditional. So let me flip the script on you for a moment and say –
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: — if you or someone you loved was accused of a crime, or let’s take a more real example, not hypothetical. Let’s take people with tremendous resources and power who are currently being prosecuted. Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani.
When folks like that, politicians, corporate crooks, are being prosecuted criminally, the lawyers that they hire with their unlimited resources to defend them are almost always people who have spent time in their career as prosecutors.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chesa Boudin: Now you could say the same thing. Well, why would you hire someone who’s a prosecutor to be a defense attorney? I’ll tell you why. Because having perspective and relationships and understanding the way that an adversary in the courtroom thinks and the strategic incentives they have is critically valuable. So, when the voters of a city like San Francisco are electing somebody to run their district attorney’s office, they’re not electing someone who’s going to primarily spend their time in the courtroom handling cases. They’re electing someone who’s going to have a strategic vision for the office, and they will do a better job, a more effective job, a more ethical job if they understand how all the players in the justice system think.
That’s the advantage to bringing someone in with a different outside perspective. For me personally, I don’t see myself as a narrow, dogmatic abolitionist. I believe that the role of the prosecutor is a critical one in our justice system, that we have a long way to go to get to a world without crime. We all want to live in that world. I don’t expect it’s going to happen in my lifetime. And until then, we need to have consequences for people who commit crimes. And we need to make sure that those consequences are actually advancing the public interest, doing justice, promoting safety, not simply fake tough talk, which is unfortunately what we get an awful lot of from red jurisdictions.
So, for me personally, I went to law school because I wanted to fight against mass incarceration. And when I graduated, it made sense to go become, after a couple years of clerking for federal judges, to go become a public defender. It was how I felt I could best do that work, work that was consistent with my values. But over the years, I got frustrated with the limitations of that job and I watched with admiration and was inspired by a national movement from coast-to-coast, from north to south, of people running for and winning the Office of District Attorney in cities like Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago and Atlanta and so many other places with explicit promises to voters not to send as many people to prison for as long as possible, but rather to recognize that we can advance safety and justice in ways that don’t exclusively rely on increasing punishment or criminalizing poverty.
That movement inspired me. And in 2019, when for the first time in over a century, San Francisco had an election for the Office of District Attorney with no incumbent on the ballot. Imagine that. Democratic elections, but for over a century, there had always been somebody on the ballot with the title district attorney next to their name. Not in 2019.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chesa Boudin: Right? So, I stepped up, I was the last candidate to get in the race, and I was the one who won the most votes.
Chris Hayes: That’s great. I mean, that point about the sort of revolving door moving the other way around is great, right? Like Bob (ph) Terwilliger, who’s representing Mark Meadows the other day in the hearing down there, like he was a U.S. attorney for years. Like they’re every single last one high profile defense lawyer is almost always a former prosecutor. So, let’s talk about San Francisco and your term there.
So, there’s a bunch of things going on, right? And I want to try to disaggregate them. So, one thing that has always struck me is interesting about San Francisco, and I wrote a book, my last book was about criminal justice and sort of law and order. The broken windows theory, which I don’t think is like a ludicrous theory, though I don’t think it’s actually borne out, but the broken windows theory is basically forms of public disorder produce an environment that is criminogenic, that produces more people acting anti-socially all the way up to and including the worst thing like murder, right?
And one thing that has always struck me about San Francisco is that it’s sort of disproven that for a long time, because long before Chesa Boudin had anything to do with the criminal justice system in San Francisco, when you go to San Francisco, there was a fairly high degree of what I would call public disorder. I mean, there was certainly more than I was used to in New York, I mean, in terms of people living on the street, or even like seeing people use drugs out in the open. Like all those things seem more common there. And yet, if you look at like the FBI or the UCR crime stats, right, it’s a very low crime place, you know, compared to other places that, you know, it was fairly low.
So, one of the things I want to start with is your understanding of these two categories, how you approach them from a policy level and what that meant in public perception. The category of disorder, right, which is in the eye of the beholder, but can be everything from people using intravenous drugs outside to sleeping on the street to breaking windows, things like that, and then like violent crime and safety, and your understanding of those two things and their relationship and how you kind of theorized and approached it from a policy perspective walking in that door.
Chesa Boudin: You know, Chris, being elected and serving for two and a half years as district attorney in San Francisco was unbelievably humbling. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. It was a challenge of a lifetime. And it didn’t help that I was sworn into office almost exactly two months before the first COVID-19 shelter-in-place order hit. But, you know, your point is a really good one about the kind of the disconnect in some ways between what people see and feel and how that makes them perceive public safety, and then what the data shows us about violent crime or even property crime.
There’s often a huge gap between public sentiment, public perception, and what best evidence shows us is the reality on the ground. It’s also another distinction that I think is really important to make, which seems to curiously disappear, particularly in jurisdictions with reform-minded prosecutors. And that is the distinction between what is the role of law enforcement and the D.A. in particular, and what is the role of other areas of government, say homeless services or the Department of Public Health? So let me kind of address both in turn.
One thing is we all want and deserve to live in communities that are safe, and we also deserve to live in communities where we feel safe. Now those two things may be very different. Let me give you an example. We know from polling and tons of media coverage that, you know, in the last several years in San Francisco, people have increasingly felt unsafe. We also know that during my two and a half years in office, crime rates hit near record lows. Overall, violent crime and property crime were both down nearly 20 percent during my time in office as compared with the same two and a half years prior to my administration.
But those numbers don’t mean a whole lot of people feel unsafe. So, we in public office and who are doing public policy advocacy need to find ways to make sure that people feel safe and that we’re continuing to drive crime rates down. The second thing is we need to be clear about whose role in government it is to do what. It is not and should not be the role of the district attorney to go out and reverse overdoses or to build homeless shelters or to administer drug treatment programs.
There is a role the district attorney can play as having a soapbox and advocating for good policies and perhaps using the leverage of criminal charges and the criminal court to incentivize people to avail themselves of programs if those programs exist. But we cannot and should not demand or expect that district attorneys are going to singlehandedly solve poverty. And the problem, as you point out, with the broken windows theory, is that it suggests that poverty in and of itself is the same thing as or commensurate with violent crime. It is not true.
Police and district attorneys have limited resources. And my view, and this is a view, by the way, that is overwhelmingly shared by the progressive prosecutor movement, is that we should use those limited resources to prioritize serious and violent crimes, and that we should encourage other agencies, social workers, health care workers, homeless shelters, departments of public housing, to take the lead on solving so many of the other problems that all too often lead people to feel unsafe while not actually involving violations of criminal laws or being an appropriate use of limited law enforcement resources.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, you know, I think people broadly, I think you know, and the people listening know that I’m essentially broadly in line with your perspective on this and your approach and philosophy. But I want to sort of examine a few points. I mean, one on the stats level, and there was a lot of back and forth during the recall effort about those stats. It’s hard, I think, because of the level of disruption around COVID, there was a lot of difficulties in making apples-to-apples comparisons statistically. You know, one of the things that people would say was that to the extent that the numbers were down in certain record-keeping areas of crimes that were being tracked, it was because reporting was down and because arrests were down, because the police were like, well, the D.A. is not going to prosecute anyway.
So, I just wanted to get your response to that because you mentioned like, you know, crime was at historic lows but I looked at some stats that showed some crimes did appear to go up, which again, to be very clear, would be totally in line with basically every jurisdiction in America during this time. Like this was definitely a national trend. But just in terms of that, like that is one of the things people said about what the state of San Francisco’s public safety was when you were D.A.
Chesa Boudin: Yeah, I mean, look, we can talk about statistics, Chris, all day long, and it’s important. We want to have public safety policies that are evidence-based.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chesa Boudin: The reality is that the dog whistle used in San Francisco around the recall and since then, frankly, was one around crime and public safety. People were pretending that crime was spiraling out of control. And they were saying, including our current appointed district attorney who was leading the recall effort against me, were saying that crimes were a direct result of my policies. We see similar dog whistles being used across the country. Let’s be very, very clear. The people behind these attacks on elected reform prosecutors do not care about safety.
They don’t care about victims; they care about politics. Let’s look at the attacks on people like Andrew Warren and Monique Worrell in Florida, who were summarily removed from office by Governor Ron DeSantis. Let’s look at the ridiculous impeachment attempt led by state legislature Republicans against Larry Krasner, allegedly for dereliction of duty, while another much more conservative elected district attorney in Pennsylvania was being prosecuted for rape allegedly committed while he was in office, or in Illinois where state attorney Kim Foxx in Chicago, after being re-elected to a second term by a substantial majority, the more conservative members of the state legislature introduced a bill that would have made it possible to recall her and only her of all the elected officials in the state of Illinois.
This is not about safety. It’s about politics and its undemocratic attacks on elected officials who are implementing policies that they promised voters they would implement and which are wildly popular because they are evidence-based and they’re proven to make our communities safer.
Chris Hayes: Well, but wait a second. I mean, let me just say this. I’m like, Krasner is a great example and I’ve had Krasner on the program. I think he’s a fascinating guy, right? But like violent crime has really gone up in Philadelphia. This is not like, that is pretty established. I mean, again, I think, you know, homicides are one of those things that they’re the hardest to, you know, they get reported. They’re like, if you’re going to like, you know, look at what’s happening. And I’m not saying they’ve gone up because Larry Krasner’s policies. They just have gone up and it’s a huge problem.
But I guess what I want to zero in on here, I sometimes feel like there’s a little like, I totally agree with you that these attempts, your recall, Krasner, all this stuff, there’s an obvious political edge there. But one of the things I think is worth clarifying here in a discussion with you is that there’s two ways you can think about the reform model, right? One is that like all policy choices, there’s going to be some tradeoffs, and we’ve been making the tradeoffs in the wrong direction. Right?
So one is, look, we’ve been making trade-offs where we err on the side of incarceration and we err on the side of punitiveness that has unbelievable human tangible costs in incarcerated populations and those adjacent to those incarcerated populations that are primarily black and brown, and they tend to be much poorer in the city, and they have all sorts of ripple effects, kids, family members, right? And that’s a messed-up trade-off and we need to recalibrate. That said, it is a trade-off.
And when we make these policies that center the humanity of those people, those communities affected by incarceration more, it may be the case that there’s more crime or more violence, that is a tradeoff, right? That’s one way of looking at it. The other is there is no tradeoff, that this is all win-win, that the system that we have of policing incarceration doesn’t actually reduce crime, it doesn’t actually make communities safer. And there is essentially like a free lunch, so to speak, in sort of humanitarian terms, out there for the taking by reform prosecutors or reformers in (inaudible). And I feel like there’s a little confusion between those two.
What I feel like what ends up happening is for political expedience, obviously, if you want to get elected, you want to make the second case. Don’t worry. There’s no trade-offs. No one’s going to have to like pay any price here. There’s a free lunch to be had that actually makes everyone safer and everything more equitable and just. But it seems to me possible that the actual reality is really that it is the first case and would still possibly be justifiable on the merits in a normative sense, but is a harder political argument to make to people when you have to get elected.
Chesa Boudin: Well, I agree in large part with what you said, but I’m going to perhaps disappoint you Chris and not fall into either of your two options there. I’m somewhere in the middle. And let me explain why. First of all, and this is, as you point out, not a popular thing for people in campaign mode to talk about. But the reality is, and this is supported by a wealth of empirical research, district attorneys are powerless in the short term, and perhaps even in the medium or long term, to meaningfully influence crime trends.
That’s a difficult thing to get our head around because we’re electing these people with the hopes that they will keep us safe and administer justice. But the reality is the things that drive crime trends, especially in the short term, are way beyond the power of an individual elected district attorney. Let me illustrate that point a little bit differently.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: And I think this ties directly into the framing of your question. The National Institute for Justice has summarized a vast body of research related to deterrence of crime. In other words, what is it that makes it less likely for a future crime to be committed? Is it a harsher punishment? Is it a tougher talking district attorney? Is it more police? Is it the death penalty, right? All of these different things. Is it drug treatment programs?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: Is it education? Is it diversion? Is it housing? What the National Institute of Justice says in their summary, the number one most important takeaway in their summary of all the research on deterrence is that the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chesa Boudin: — than any punishment. The second thing they tell us is that sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison is not a very effective way to deter crime. I could go on, but my point is the tough talking rhetoric that we hear from Ron DeSantis when removing two democratically-elected district attorneys from the Republicans and the Pennsylvania state legislature when trying to impeach Larry Krasner and pointing to the real and tragic rise in gun violence in Philadelphia is dishonest, hypocritical and manipulative because nothing that those district attorneys did —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: — has any causal relationship with crime trends. And if we want to know that it’s dishonest political hypocrisy, all you need to do is look at red jurisdictions across the country and see that crime rates —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chesa Boudin: — including violent crime rates are going up by far more and are at higher levels. The most dangerous city in America is Oklahoma City.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Chesa Boudin: Nobody on FOX News is criticizing the district attorney in Oklahoma City. Why not, if they really care about safety?
Chris Hayes: No, I mean, all of that is completely true, right? I mean, I don’t disagree with that. In fact, we did an Oklahoma City bit on my show on precisely that point, right? I mean, one of the things you’ve seen is these trends in crime and particularly violence, I mean, I think it’s crime is a hazier category to me than violence, which is like, that’s really what I tend to focus a lot on because that’s like the most destructive part of what we call crime. Although, you know, other things can be really bad for people, but you know, it went up everywhere, right?
Rural jurisdictions, red, blue. Like the COVID disruption disrupted a lot of people’s lives and produced, I think, a lot of like really intense antisocial behavior and consequences as a cascade from it. That’s my working theory. I think that’s basically been poured out. To your point about specific cause and effect, I totally agree with that. The point about, well, D.A.s can’t actually control that, I think, is a really important one. In some ways, that’s an even more radical thing to say than either of those two buckets, right? It’s just like, it’s not really under control.
Now, the next question that becomes, and this I think gets a little bit to the experience you’ve had in others, which is, can police control it? And one of the things that I think has been really fascinating in your experience, Kim Foxx, Philadelphia, is that what you end up having in these situations when a person such as yourself is elected is that obviously, generally, prosecutors and police officers work hand in glove. You basically get the police turning as an institution against the prosecutor’s office.
I mean, I have had multiple people in multiple cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York, all of them, who have had something happen that they’ve talked to the police about, to be told by the police officer, the guy showing up at the pad, you know, we can’t do anything about it because of this new reform prosecutor.
Chesa Boudin: They said all over the country, Chris, all over the country.
Chris Hayes: You know, I’d love to do something for you, but this Chesa Boudin man, this Kim Foxx, we can’t —
Chesa Boudin: Yeah. Hey, and don’t forget to vote. They slip that in there, too.
Chris Hayes: No, I mean —
Chesa Boudin: Don’t forget to vote they’ll tell you. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — it’s so wild, but it’s also like, how do you get your head around that? Because like I do believe that policing can matter in public safety.
Chesa Boudin: Absolutely.
Chris Hayes: I think how a place is policed.
Chesa Boudin: Absolutely, I’m with you. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But then you’ve got this situation where it’s like almost to a city, the police essentially —
Chesa Boudin: Blue flu.
Chris Hayes: Blue flu, open rebellion, and then you get this thing. One of the stories, I mean, I saw this in Baltimore firsthand because I did a lot of reporting there after Freddie Gray. What happened in Baltimore was after Freddie Gray and after Mosby, you know, indicted those officers, BPD was like —
Chesa Boudin: We’re done.
Chris Hayes: We’re out. You guys, go look after yourselves. And what you saw was an enormous uptick in violence in Baltimore afterwards. They basically said, screw it. We’re done.
Chesa Boudin: Yeah. And in San Francisco, when I was in office and, you know, as we got closer to the recall, we had videos that surfaced of police officers in patrol cars watching, standing by and watching as businesses were being burglarized, making no attempt whatsoever to intervene to arrest suspects on video. Just, I think last month, the head of the Portland Police Department had to publicly tell his officers to stop telling residents they were powerless and to stop blaming elected district attorney Mike Schmidt for their refusal to do their jobs. So, you’re absolutely right, Chris. This is a nationwide problem.
And let me just zoom out for a minute. I want to make two points. The first one is in any area of work, let’s take a different example. Let’s take, you know, media. You’ve got a team of producers that work with you on your show. Imagine for a moment that your producers said, you know, I don’t think Chris is going to do a good job today. I don’t really agree with his analysis. So, I’m just not going to do my job.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: It doesn’t work that way, right? I mean, imagine if a host in a restaurant said, you know, the chef is not on his A game today. I’m just not going to seat anybody at the tables, right? I mean, look, you can’t go through life doing that, and especially when you are paid by taxpayers, tax dollars to do a job, in a political job. Police chiefs are not elected. They are not a political branch of government. They are supposed to do their job.
And here’s the other critical part of it. If they don’t, then it doesn’t matter what policies or practices you prefer your district attorney to pursue, they can’t do it. In other words, imagine for a second, just hypothetically, you got one person who says, I believe in the death penalty. And another person says, I believe in diversion programs and restorative justice. Well, the D.A. can’t pursue either of those paths or anything in between if the police refuse to do their job.
Chris Hayes: Well, okay, I agree with that. I think we’re on the same page here. And I think to come back to your certainty, not severity about deterrence, which is, you know, Italian criminologist, Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century basically writes that down and has an insight that has been borne out by centuries of both ruminations, philosophizing and empirical work, right? You’re not sitting there thinking, I’m going to do this. If I got 17 years, I don’t want to do it, but if I got 12, I would do it. It doesn’t work that way at the margins. America gets this totally backwards and wrong. We have way more severity of punishment than any other place, but certainty is a real open question particularly when you look at homicide clearance rates in major cities where a third to a half of people that kill other human beings, there’s no rest, right?
Chesa Boudin: Totally.
Chris Hayes: So, I think you and I are on the same page on that, but then that comes back to the role of policing, which is distinct from what you as a prosecutor doing but it’s not distinct in terms of the overall analysis, right? And I think one of the things I run into a little bit, and again, like I’m on the reform left here in this debate. That’s clear of anyone that listens to the podcast. There’s a little bit of the old vaudeville joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible and the portions are too small, which is like the left complaint about policing sometimes sounds like that, which is like it’s bad and there’s not enough of it, right?
And you see this all the time where people will say like they’re sitting there and letting the burglary happen, but also there’s too much policing. There’s a little bit of confusion about like what we want from police so that we have constitutional governance where people aren’t being harassed, right? People can live lies of freedom and dignity where they don’t feel like they’re under the boot of like an occupying foreign power, which is how a lot of our fellow citizens feel. And also, if someone in broad daylight goes into a store and starts stealing stuff, there’s got to be the consequence of a cop outside who arrest them.
Chesa Boudin: Yeah. No, I think you’re right. I think, you know, in many ways, if we zoom out, I think we collectively, not progressives or people on the left or of any political persuasion, but we in this country are asking police to do the impossible in many ways, and it’s not fair. Look at the role that police play in most big urban settings. And on the one hand, we want them to solve homicides and property crimes at high rates. We want them to have very quick response times when there’s a call for service. We also want them to not use excessive force, not engage in high-speed chases, not use surveillance technology, and they have become the frontline response to a public health crisis around fentanyl overdoses, around lack of affordable housing, and they’re spread too thin.
And so, part of the answer from folks on the right has been, we need to double the number of police officers.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: And, you know, there’s a couple problems with that. One of them is, let’s just take an example in San Francisco, which is the single most common category of crime, auto burglaries. Car break-ins, right? Smash and grabs. Huge problem in San Francisco, peaked at 31,000 reported auto burglaries back in 2017 and still remains unacceptably high.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s wild how often that happens in that city. I mean, it’s really wild.
Chesa Boudin: Yeah, huge problem, huge problem. You don’t see that in other major cities in the country, right? The Bay Area, it’s a phenomenon, it’s huge. We can talk about what effective strategies are, but let me be very clear. The police solve about 2 percent of reported auto burglaries. So, let’s say hypothetically you throw another billion dollars at the police department and you can recruit enough officers that you double the personnel power on the ground. Okay, so maybe you’d go from 2 percent clearance rate to 4 percent clearance rate. Remember deterrence, certainty of arrest. If 96 percent of people are getting away with it, right now it’s 98. But if you move that needle to 96 percent, guess what? You’re not meaningfully deterring the crime. Doesn’t matter how severe the punishment is, people are getting away with it.
Chris Hayes: Right. So, this is a great example where I think we could all agree across the political spectrum, right? It’s like my commitments are, I do not want the person who does a smash and grab to go away for a long time. I don’t want that.
Chesa Boudin: But you don’t want them to get away with it either.
Chris Hayes: I don’t want them to get away with it. What I want more than them not to get away with it is for there not to be smash and grabs, right?
Chesa Boudin: Totally.
Chris Hayes: Like, I think that’s a shared consensus view across all different sort of stripes, right? So, then the question becomes, how do we get there?
Chesa Boudin: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the right has a theory of the case, right, and I don’t think it’s accurate, but the theory of the case is general disorder and lawlessness, toleration of small bits of law breaking, public urination, recreational drug use outside, things like that.
Chesa Boudin: Broken windows.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, broken windows, right? It leads to a criminogenic environment when people do this, right? The left sometimes will have a very broad and I think utterly accurate analysis of the problem, which is like people are doing smash and grabs because like they’re in kind of dire straits. They’re often, almost in all cases, enmeshed in substance use disorder of some kind often or adjacent to it. But the question of like at the point of the system, what do you do to bring down smash and grabs?
Chesa Boudin: Right.
Chris Hayes: It’s like, yes, it would be awesome if people were not hooked on drugs and if they had homes, that’s not what you could do as the D.A. That’s not what you could do as the chief of police. So that becomes a question, right?
Chesa Boudin: So, yeah. So, there were two very concrete things that I did as D.A. and that I think we, across the country, need to see more of in this space. And I’ll just use the example we’re working with, right? But at a high level, we need police to spend the limited resources they have, the limited hours that they have to patrol, to respond to actual crime in progress, not to play the role of social worker or case manager or public health officials. In other words, we need to invest not just in adequate staffing for police, but adequate staffing for our social safety nets and for our public health response to what are, in many cases, public health crises.
That will free up police resources to do a better, more effective job in the areas where police are uniquely positioned to respond, like violent crime in progress or auto burglaries. When it comes to auto burglaries in San Francisco, what we did, recognize it, then no increase in police staff and was ever going to meaningfully or adequately solve the volume of reported auto burglaries that were going unsolved.
What we did was we developed a bait car program where we used rental cars with expensive electronics that had implanted GPS devices. And my office set them out there and waited for them to get broken into not to arrest the burglar, but to map the flow of stolen goods through fencing operations. Why did we do that? Well, supply and demand, right? This is where —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Chesa Boudin: — I can agree with all the conservative economists in the world. The supply and demand is a real phenomenon. And if we can disrupt the demand for stolen goods, we will see the number of car break-ins go down quickly. And we have, in that operation, before I was recalled, we had a laptop that went to Vietnam. We had one that made it to Eastern Europe. We had a whole series of them that were shipped overseas through international companies around the United States.
This is a major multi-billion-dollar online operation. And if you think you’re going to solve the problem simply by having more police officers on the corner, arresting more poor kids breaking into cars, you’re wrong. And we have an abundance of evidence and experimentation over many years to see that that simply has not worked. But what can work and what we were trying to do and what we should see more of across the country is upstream investigations that actually dismantle the incentives for people on the ground to commit crimes.
And if we’re doing that while investing in social safety nets, we’re all going to be safer, and we’re not going to have to make some of these difficult decisions that the Republicans and the police unions keep foisting on voters.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You’re obviously a very good communicator. You won this election. You got, I think, sort of a little bit of wrong place, wrong time of the sort of backlash of what was happening after COVID. There was a very like kind of reactionary moment that was happening. You saw it in a lot of places. You saw it in school board meetings. You saw it in opposition to mask mandates. It’s kind of like, there’s just a real reactionary moment at the moment that you were recalled. Is it like an athlete like the day after who sits down with the tape and you’re like, ugh, I should have seen that corner back when threw that pass. Like, do you have moments like that about that race?
Chesa Boudin: You know, Chris, I learned a tremendous amount during my time in office and while fighting off successfully a first recall and then unsuccessfully a second recall. As you point out, I mean, a lot of its timing. You know, I took office two months before COVID. I was forced to try to lead my office and get to know all of the people in San Francisco who hadn’t supported me, not just my base, but people who voted for other candidates. I had two months before COVID shut us down. And so, some of that was just really bad timing and dramatic shifts in crime trends, as you’ve talked about, that had nothing to do with and were far beyond my control, that were a result of COVID and changed the way people felt about safety in San Francisco.
At the same time, I take solace in both the work we did, the achievements that we logged during my time. I think we made tremendous progress. I’m proud of my team and of the work we did. And also, of the fact that despite a $10 million recall campaign amplified by local media in a way that’s never been seen before, we actually got more votes opposing the recall than I did to get elected three years earlier. Literally, we had about 82,000 votes in 2019. We had 100,000 votes in 2022. We had about 42 percent of the vote to get elected. We had 45 percent opposing the recall.
So, despite all of the attacks, all of the fear mongering, all of the undermining by state corrupt politicians in city hall and by the police department, officers’ association union, and their refusal to do their jobs during my administration, we actually grew our base of support in percentage terms and absolute terms in San Francisco.
Chris Hayes: I feel like you are due given what happened this next moment in the conversation, which is like my reading of crime statistics in San Francisco is that they have gone up after a year. And I think like, not in a way that’s necessarily on trend. I mean, things nationally, I think in that post-COVID period all moved fairly uniformly. Like we saw, again, like I was saying, big jurisdictions and small, we saw increases in particularly interpersonal violence. That was really the worrying thing, with real, real big homicide uptick, 20, 25 percent. That wasn’t happening in San Francisco, as far as I can tell under your time there.
Chesa Boudin: No, we were at record lows.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you were an outlier on the interpersonal violent stuff. We’ve seen those trends get more complicated and more disaggregated in some places. Like New York, thankfully, where I live, we’ve seen homicides and shootings come like way down, you know, 25, 30 percent drop, which is wonderful to see. We’ve seen some property crimes go up, you know, they’re sort of all over the map. My read of the San Francisco data is that almost any way you look, things have gotten worse since your departure?
Chesa Boudin: Yeah, no, that’s right. And look, I live here. I raised my son in San Francisco. So, it’s not like this is something I can celebrate. We were doing the work we were doing because I live here. We want this to be a safe city for all of our communities. And the policies and practices and dishonest, unethical rhetoric from the top of the district attorney’s office and the mayor’s office around this issue have absolutely made our community less safe and they’ve damaged our image in the eyes of the world.
Look, this year alone, homicides, the most serious crime, up 12 percent.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: Robberies, one of the most common and serious violent crimes, up 16 percent. Car thefts, up 11 percent. I mean, we are seeing property crime, violent crime, we are seeing them go up. In addition to that, when we broaden the lens a little bit, San Francisco has focused its resources in the last year on relaunching the war on drugs. They’ve distracted police from things like homicide and robbery to focus on arresting drug users, not just drug sellers. Not only are we seeing those crime rates go up, but we are also seeing tragically the number of fatal overdoses skyrocket up by more than 40 percent this year compared with last year.
Chris Hayes: In San Francisco?
Chesa Boudin: In San Francisco. And we already had unachievably high rates of fatal overdoses.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s very high. Yeah.
Chesa Boudin: But relaunching the war on drugs and using the tragedy of the public health crisis as an excuse to build momentum for the recall against me and to relaunch the war on drugs has had the predictable tragic consequence of more people dying unnecessarily.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, the fentanyl situation is so, I mean, the numbers are truly shocking nationwide. Again, this is a thing that it’s so horrible and it’s touching so many lives. I mean, 77,000 I think last year was the total overdose number. But if you look at the chart, it’s like fentanyl is like eating up the whole pie chart increasingly. Like it’s just more and more it is fentanyl poisoning basically that’s killing people by the tens of thousands of this country. And it’s so devastating. It’s so ubiquitous. It’s touched so many lives. I mean, if you are in a room, it’s like the thing with like, if you’re in a room with 20 people, two people have the same birthday. It’s like that with overdoses, like you just can’t, you know.
Chesa Boudin: We all know somebody who’s directly impacted, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And there’s such this desire to find the enemy, the magic bullet. It’s like, it’s the border, which it’s not the border. It’s China, which is like, yeah, China is shipping a lot of it. Like some of this is true, right? Like it is coming in through ports of entries. It’s being smuggled. China is shipping a lot of it over. Like all of that’s true, but there’s something much deeper.
And it feels to me like it’s very hard to come up with a satisfying, one sentence solution. You want to wave some magic wand to say like, this is nuts. There’s no other country this is happening in. None. Like it’s just completely off the charts compared to everyone else. It’s absolutely devastating. And it’s like, you want there to be some one sentence you can utter or a policy you could do to say we have to stop this. And I just don’t think that one policy exists.
Chesa Boudin: No, I agree with you. I think this is frankly one of the big problems we have with, you know, folks like Elon Musk and David Sacks weighing into politics is they think that they can snap their fingers and solve problems that are, you know, centuries in the making, that are deeply rooted. And public policy doesn’t work that way. I mean, these are complicated, longstanding issues that require deep thinking and collaborative work to solve, not just sound bites on Twitter.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and the thing about San Francisco, and I haven’t been there in a while, so I’m sort of saying this. I’m afar, so I’m asking you what you think of this theory.
Chesa Boudin: Yes, come on. Come visit us, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Oh, yeah. Well, it’s been a little while, yeah. I mean, COVID has sort of, you know, after this, like less traveling has happened since then. So, one observation I had in New York, and this gets us back around, I think, to that sort of COVID dislocation/sense of social disorder. One experience I had very intimately in New York, which is where I was born and raised, I’m a city kid, I grew up in the Bronx. I was going to Manhattan during ’91 and ’92 when there are 2,300 homicides a year in New York City. There’s like 350, 400 now. We got mugged all the time.
It’s like I’ve been in different eras of public safety in New York City and I’m a city kid and I love it. And I was going into Manhattan every day, even pre-vaccine that fall of 2020. One of the things you really saw was, you know, Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist, has this concept of eyes on the street, which is what brings like vibrancy to a neighborhood. It’s like who’s out and looking around, right? And like a lot of public safety is eyes on the street and those eyes aren’t just cops. It’s people, citizens, business owners, all the people that are out, the priest. Like COVID dramatically reduced eyes on the street.
Chesa Boudin: Especially in San Francisco. I mean, across the country, but —
Chris Hayes: Especially in San Francisco.
Chesa Boudin: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But in the parts of New York, like Midtown, where I was going every day, that were the most traumatic of this, right? People are not going to work.
Chesa Boudin: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It felt sketchy and it felt disordered and it felt weird. And if you’re on a block and there’s one person in mental distress, but you’re the only other person on that block, it’s very different if you’re on a block with one-person mental distress and 200 other people on that block. And so, like, I saw this happen —
Chesa Boudin: No, you put your finger on it.
Chris Hayes: I saw this happen in New York where it was like it wasn’t even, I think, that anything had changed actually. I think it was people who were in mental distress and in the grips of substance use disorder, but those were the people around because they had nowhere else to go. And eyes on the street had gone from 100 a block to two. And all of a sudden you got this vibe that is a bad vibe, like –
Chesa Boudin: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — a real bad vibe. And that was the New York experience. And from afar, as I look at San Francisco, given the work from home, given the concentration of an industry there that is most amenable to work from home, it seems to me like a big part of what that city is wrestling with is that issue.
Chesa Boudin: Oh, that’s exactly right. And San Francisco has been very slow to kind of, you know, rejuvenate, reenergize our downtown area. So many tech jobs continue to be remote. And you’re exactly right. I mean, with tourists disappearing, with commuters disappearing, with people who were, you know, maybe living in San Francisco, but going to work downtown, going out for coffee or for lunch or for happy hour, the energy just felt different.
And the eyes on the street disappeared and it meant exactly as you say, that the perception of public safety, separate and apart from the data, changed dramatically in ways that nobody could individually control. And that was weaponized, not just against me personally, but against criminal justice reform. And we are seeing that across the country.
Chris Hayes: Also, against the city in a really disgusting way. I mean, I hate this thing of like Chicago’s a hellhole and Portland’s a hellhole. San Francisco’s a hellhole. And it’s like, you just see this like propaganda and sometimes you see the propaganda from the people in the city. It’s like, why are you doing this to your own city?
Chesa Boudin: Yeah, our mayor did it and members of our board of supervisors did it. It was crazy. And now they own this narrative about a doom loop and it makes no sense. Except if you zoom out and think about the fact that they are literally taking talking points from FOX News and from the “New York Post” and from the “Daily Mail.” I mean, that is what’s driving the narratives around public safety. You don’t see the same kind of critical coverage of traditional so-called tough prosecutors. When people claim to be tough, Chris, beware because it is dishonest. It is manipulative. They are exploiting fear to drive a racist agenda that empowers police unions and that undermines democracy and public safety.
Chris Hayes: So, what do you do now?
Chesa Boudin: I’m the founding executive director of the Criminal Law and Justice Center at Berkeley Law School and other than the commute, it is an awesome job. I love Berkeley. I love being surrounded by brilliant scholars doing interdisciplinary research. I love the energy of the students, our future judges and future criminal lawyers and advocates. It’s an amazing community to be part of and to have this space to actually do deep, meaningful work in research and education and advocacy without being beholden to the 12-second news cycle. It’s a breath of fresh air.
Chris Hayes: Do you think you’ll ever run for office again?
Chesa Boudin: Never say never.
Chris Hayes: That’s a very politician answer, Chesa.
Chesa Boudin: Well, I learned a few things while I was in office, Chris. I learned a few things.
Chris Hayes: Chesa Boudin is the founding executive director of Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center. He’s a former district attorney of San Francisco. He’s done a whole bunch. I could read his CV for a very, very long time. That was such a great conversation. I really appreciate you engaging at the level you did. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much.
Chesa Boudin: My pleasure, Chris. Always fun to talk to you and look forward to coming back sometime soon.
Chris Hayes: You bet.
Once again, great thanks to Chesa Boudin. I would love to hear your feedback on that conversation. There’s a lot more that we didn’t get to. You can get in touch with us on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, using the hashtag WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on threads at Crystal Haze and on BlueSky, where I’m under the same name. “Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Fernando Arruda, Harry Culhane, and Bob Mallory. It features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?
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