JUST IN: San Francisco Removes Progressive DA Chesa Boudin in Recall Election

San Francisco on Tuesday has voted to recall liberal District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

The heated campaign divided Democrats over crime and public safety reform.

While it’s a low turnout election, early returns showed 61% of votes in favor of the recall.

Critics argued Boudin’s progressive reforms were too lenient and made the city less safe.

BREAKING: Preliminary results show San Franciscans have voted to recall DA Chesa Boudin, 61% to 38%.

Story to come.

— SF Examiner (@sfexaminer) June 8, 2022

San Francisco voters tossed District Attorney Chesa Boudin from office on Tuesday, favoring a recall effort that argued his progressive reforms were too lenient and made the city less safe.https://t.co/5Fqc6sKwPQ

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) June 8, 2022

ABC 7 reported:

Boudin, 41, was a first-time political candidate who narrowly won office in November 2019 as part of a national wave of progressive prosecutors who pledged to seek alternatives to incarceration, end the racist war on drugs and hold police officers to account.

But his time in office coincided with a frustrating and frightening pandemic in which viral footage of brazen shoplifting and attacks against mostly older Asian American people drove some residents to mount a recall campaign of the former public defender and son of left-wing activists.

Recall proponents said Boudin was ideologically inflexible and inexperienced, often siding with criminals instead of victims. Recall opponents said the recall was a Republican power grab meant to undermine public safety reforms.

San Francisco has long struggled with open drug dealing, vandalism, auto theft and home burglaries. Political experts say the political newcomer who narrowly won in 2019 was in the crosshairs of outside forces that made him an easy target for public frustration.

Boudin was a baby when his parents, left-wing Weather Underground radicals, served as drivers in a botched 1981 robbery in New York that left two police officers and a security guard dead. They were sentenced to decades in prison.