Chesa Boudin on Progressive Prosecuting in San Francisco

type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Our guest today is Chasa Boudin. Chasa was elected the District Attorney of San Francisco in late twenty nineteen, running out of, you know, basically a progressive prosecutor's agenda, and served there for about two and a half years, and then was the subject of a well financed and well coordinated recall campaign in California it's one of the states where you can recall politicians, doesn't happen in most states, and landed up losing that.

So he is now the x d A. So, Chasa, I really appreciate you're getting on with me now and hope this is a good moment when you're not running anything, not in office, to be well be able to talk as freely as possible about all sorts of criminal justice issues. Absolutely, I'm happy to be with you, Ethan, and I've enjoyed listening to your pod in the past and honored to be a guest on the show. So Chisa, I mean, let me get start off by asking you this. You

came with a very strong reformist perspective. You were working in the public Defender's office. Why was it that you decided to throw your hat in the ring and actually run for, you know, the chief prosecutor job in San Francisco when that would be a job that involve putting people behind bars, as I imagine we'll talk about. I grew up visiting my own parents in prison. My dad

served forty years before he was ultimately released. My mom did twenty two years, and though I don't remember their arrest, I was too little. My earliest memories are waiting in lines at prison gates to go through metal detectors and to get searched, just to be able to see my parents, just to be able to give them hugs, and so as long as I can remember, I've been impacted by and thinking about this country's response to crime and how

we meet out punishment and what rehabilitation means. And I've been acutely aware of the tremendous carnage that the war on drugs has left in its wake. I've been actively witnessing the racial disparities that our criminal legal system amplifies.

And when I went to law school, I wanted to try to fight to change that system, the system that had done so little to invest in victims, and it was so disinterested in re entry and rehabilitation and was so focused on punishment in ways that we're not making our communities safer. And at the time I went to law school, UM prosecutors were really part of the problem. They were a driving force in mass incarceration, in what had led the United States to be the country that

embarrassingly leads the world in locking people up. And so I became a public defender of after law school. And it was only in that context that UM I saw professionally what I'd experienced personally my whole life. And I looked around the country and was witnessing a national movement that recognized we can build safety through decarceration and that prosecutors are a key part of that movement. And it was in that context that I decided to run for

San Francisco District Attorney. I say, you know, yeah, we just mentioned your parents for our listeners. Chases mother was Cathy Budan and his father David Gilbert, and they were part of radical, militant left wing organization of all the weather Underground. And on one day when Chase was just a tie Um landed up being connected with members of the Black Liberation Army driving a getaway car when an operation happened where two police officers and a BRINX guard

were killed. And so, as he said, his parents were sentenced and he was then adopted. I mean his legal guardians were two other well known members of the Weatherman Underground, Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dort. So he comes from quite distinguished what might be called radical royalty. In fact, his grandfather, Leonard Buddan, was the civil rights and UH civil liberties activists who represented Daniel Ellsberg in the Depending on Paper's case.

So I have to say there are probably a few other names or families that are as linked to the kind of radical left and contemporary American politics as yours. Well, I I didn't live through that whole history, but as you say, um, I have a lot of family members who have been actively involved in politics and in different ways, and student organizing and in litigating. And we could go

back even further. My grandfather's uncle, Louis Boudin wrote a number of really important scholarly works and books criticizing the Supreme Court's refusal in the nineteen thirties to accept the New Deal and the ways in which the Supreme Court was striking down the federal legislative initiative aimed at addressing the Great Depression. So yeah, we we have a lot of lawyers and scholars in the family, and a lot of people who have been very critically involved in responding

to fascism and imperialism and racism. And I'm certainly proud to have learned from some of the mistakes made along the way, and also to share a commitment to fighting to make the world a better place. Now. Were your

parents incarcerated in New York State prisons? Yes, both Kathy and David served the entirety of their prison sentences in New York State correctional facilities, and so As I recall, in the late nineties early nine New York State was either first or second among all the states in the country in terms of the proportion of people incarcerated for drug law violations. In fact, I think at one point in New York it came close to fifty of all

new commitments. So I imagine when you went to visit your parents, basically you must have been surrounded by families visiting people who were getting locked up, oftentimes on non violent, low level drug offenses, the notorious Rockefeller drug laws. Yeah, I vivid memories of talking to my mother, and you know, of course, I remember many of the women in my mother's prison were there serving time for essentially standing up for themselves in the face of horrific sexual violence and

domestic violence. But increasingly over the years it was people who were casualties of the War on drugs. And I remember one woman in particular who was one of my mother's best friends in prison and helped teach my mother Spanish and inspired me to go to Latin America and learned Spanish. And she was there for many, many, many years because of the role she played as a low

level mule for a bigger drug cartel. Another woman, the mother of a close friend of mine who I became friends within the prison visiting room, was serving a many decades long sentence under the Rockefeller drug laws. All of these folks had no violence, no history of violence, no weapons, and yet we're filling jails and prisons across New York State.

I mean, with your mom in the Bedford Hills prisons in New York exactly right, Bedford Hills at the time, maybe still today, but throughout her tenure there was the only maximum security prison for women in New York State, and so anyone considered maximum security um and it might seem odd to folks who aren't familiar with the American criminal legal system, but my mother was there serving a

sentence for the most serious offense on the books. She had participated it in an armed robbery that left three men, two of them police officers, dead, and though she wasn't personally armed and didn't personally hurt anybody, she was ultimately convicted of murder, and she was in a prison that was designed for people who were maximum security. Makes sense, given her charges and the violence in her case, for her to have been in that prison, certainly at the

outset of her commitment. But ask yourself, why would a maximum security prison be filled with women serving as long or longer in some instances for entirely non violent drug related offenses. So I mean your you know, your background is impressive. I mean Yale Road scholar, Yale Law School. You clerked for Judge Chuck Bryer, the little brother of the Justice Stephen Bryer, became a public defender, and then you get elected, what in your late thirties, to be

the District Attorney of San Francisco. I remember at the time, and I had people close to me who were working closely with you, and everybody was enormously excited. Did you anticipate, um some of the extent of the backlash that would happen? I remember, I think somebody like set up a website like the day after you were elected recall Chasy Bludan, before you've even been inaugurated. But did you anticipate how

significant and serious this backlash would be? Certainly we expected pushback and backlash, and folks like Kim Fox and Larry Krasner and George Gascon and others who are part of this national movement across the country Rachel Rowlins Marylyn Mosby had given me fair warning after I was elected that I would expect this kind of thing. But but no, there's no way until you've lived it and experienced it that you could be fully prepared for the intensity and

the vitriol and the dishonesty in the attacks. You know, it would be great if we could have honest policy discussions about climate change, or public schools or the drug war, and we could agree to disagree on some points. We could look at data, and we could let policy and practice and government institutions be driven by honest, nuanced conversations. That is not the way that the world works today, if ever, and instead we are seeing a tremendous amount

of intentional misinformation, vitriolic attacks. Um, it's a very intentional and explicit and frankly successful part of the broader republican playbook. And we saw Donald Trump and his allies us it extremely effectively for years, and we see it even in deep blue cities like San Francisco as a key part of the political discourse and the way in which public

perception is shaped about issues like drugs. Now, of course, you win office in late nineteen and just a few months later, COVID happens, and the kind of the world is in this bizarre, confused state. People are off the streets in many cities, including my home in New York. You see, you know, a disproportion number that people are out in the street to the time where people suffering from mental illness, people are homeless, I mean, a lot

of people not feeling safe anymore walking around. This obviously has happening in San Francisco, and some months later the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests and some of the violence that you know happened during that time as well. And then of course you're setting up and running an office when all of a sudden, nobody's coming into the office anymore, and you're all online. So what were those first three four or five months

like for you? And I was elected in November, I wasn't sworn into office until January, almost exactly two months after I was sworn in um the mayor declared a state of emergency and essentially shut down the city, and San Francisco has been one of the slowest cities in the country to reopen. People are still working remotely in higher proportions than in almost any other big city, and

so it's had a dramatic impact on our courts. Are courthouse remains partially closed, we never fully reopened, We never got back to full capacity for trying cases. The impact of COVID nineteen and the shutdown on crime trends was far more dramatic and long lasting than we initially anticipated.

UM And, as you pointed out, trying to run an office, trying to shape the culture of an office, trying to do training, trying to build trust and increase moral in an office when you're doing everything over zoom, including new job interviews and orientations for people you're on boarding, was

tremendously challenging. And there's no question that it was a huge, huge obstacle to my ability to build relationships with and trust with some of the constituencies in San Francisco who maybe hadn't supported my election in the first place, but in principle agree with the policies we were implementing UM, But we just didn't have any opportunity to get face to face in the same room with a lot of

people across the city because of the pandemic. Well, I'm curious, I mean you mentioned before Larry Krasny, or the district attorney in Philadelphia who ran on a progressive agenda and they got re elected. And I had him as a guest on Psychoactive last year, and I'm wondering, you know, in your office like his, part of what happened was tons of the old time prosecutors in the office left or were fired by you know him or by you. And meanwhile a number of people come in from the

public defender's office where you had worked before. I mean, there must have been a massive culture clash when that sort of thing happens. So can you describe what that was like? What you have to remember is that people who have spent five or ten or twenty five years of their lives working as district attorneys in a traditional carstoral prosecutor's office, the office that wholeheartedly and enthusiastically waged the war on drugs, are not doing it primarily for

the money. They're not doing it primarily for the glory. And so they believe on some core level that what they're doing is in the interest of justice and is

in fact promoting public safety. And so if somebody an outsider like Larry or myself comes along and runs a race in which were openly critical of the War on drugs or of many of the traditional ways that prosecutors have behaved, like seeking convictions at all costs, like covering up police misconduct, like refusing to consider the possibility that people have been wrongfully convicted of crimes and are languishing

in prisons. Those new approaches that are quintessential parts of the progressive prosecutor movement are not going to be well received by folks who have dedicated their lives and their careers to a very different approach to doing the job. And so yeah, there's inevitably a certain degree of distrust and disconnect, and bureaucracies are very effective at resisting change, digging their heels in, at simply refusing to follow instructions

or new policies. We see it with police departments all across the country when efforts at reform are implemented through state legislation or police commissions or police chiefs. Even and certainly we experienced some very active resistance and sabotage from

within our ranks. We also, though, and this is important, we also had a large number of staff who were excited and supportive and embraced the vision who had joined the office because it was San Francisco and it was known as a progressive town, and because my predecessor, die Gascone had certainly in his later years begun to implement a lot of reforms that again we see as part of the national conversation around progressive prosecutors. And so there was a mixed a mixed reception, I would say, a

lot of resistance and entrenched hostility. And yet also some of the attorneys were and some of the other staff were very open to the ideas um and I learned a tremendous amount from the people in the office over the two and a half years that I had the honor to service district attorney. What do you think in your interactions with the old time prosecutors in your office

who remained. Was there anything that you learned from them that really changed the way that you thought about criminal justice or about the role of the prosecutors A good away here, I'm talking about the old line prosecutors who chose not to leave. I learned a lot from from some of these folks, and some of them were public supporters of mine in opposition to the recall. Um, some of them helped me navigate my first ever grand jury indictment in a homicide case that I present to do

a grand jury. UM. So you know, there was a lot that I learned from folks both day to day, um nuts and bolts about running the office, about interactions with other agencies like the police and the courts from this side of the aisle. But I think big picture, one of the things that I learned is from these folks and from the job, and you know, is the disconnect between the way the Supreme Court describes the ethical

and legal obligations of the prosecutor Minister of justice. You know, we have to be um, justice seekers, not conviction seekers. You know, we're not advocating for a particular party in

the case. We represent the people, all of the people. UM. Either way it's described in Supreme Court opinions and in ethical treatises is very very very far removed from the day to day reality of the political pressures of the job, in which there's huge, huge incentive two mitigate political risk and and perceive public safety risk by blocking people up for as long as possible and doing that without regard to evidence or data or justice or even the wishes

of the victims. And it's easy to see why goodhearted, well intentioned people in this role would naturally lean and skew towards seeking pre child attention. Seeking incarceration and relying on incarceration is a primary response to the tremendously diverse array of social problems that get dumped on the criminal

legal system. I saw why and how that happens, and it made me all the more determined to ensure that my office would not fall victim, would not participate in that horrific aberration of justice and of the real constitutional duties of prosecutors. We'll be talking more after we hear

this ad reading about what you did, Junior. Two and a half years there was a piece in the Atlantic and it said Budan has ended cash bail for our listeners, basically the practice whereby your ability to get out on bail once you've been arrested depends on whether or not you can raise the money or not. Um He has ceased prosecuting cases in which the evidence came from quote unque pretextual traffic stops, such as when a police officer pulls over a car for a broken tail light and

ends up booking the driver after founding drugs. He you stopped using enhancements that add years to the sentences of gang members. He quit using the stakes three strikes law. He filed charges against the San Francisco police officer accused of brutality. He instituted a commission to identify and overturn wrongful convisitions. He cut the number of young people in car street in half and reduced the pre trial jail population. And he also expanded the use of diversion and restorative

justice programs. So accurate description of what you did, in fact do while you were there. Um, we did that stuff. Yeah, that's all true. We could keep going. Uh, there's a lot of work that I'm that I'm proud of that. Uh. We promised voters in we would work towards and which in fact we did work towards. Okay, keep going, what else? Tell me some of the other things so our listeners

will understand. We launched the Independent Innocence Commission that exonerated a man wrongfully convicted of murder after decades in prison. We created a worker Protection Unit because we recognize that wage theft is causing harm to far far more Americans than most of the property crimes that are traditionally prosecuted.

We UM dramatically expanded victim services, including appointing the first ever Chinese speaking head of Victim Services and increasing the number of Chinese speaking staff in our office by over fi UM. We expanded victim services into areas that had never gone before to begin offering services to victims of property crime. To UM work in partnership with both private and public stakeholders to create housing for domestic violence survivors,

for example. And we also really embraced our commitment to preventing crime and being proactive rather than reactive, with cases like our groundbreaking lawsuit against the manufact of ghost guns, illegal firearms that are designed to be untraceable and sold on black markets or over the Internet to people who intend to use them to commit crimes. We didn't wait for those crimes to be committed. We filed the major lawsuit against three of the biggest manufacturers of those guns

in the nat of California. Now I know that in part of the debate over what was going on leading up to the recall, I mean, you were putting out statistics about in fact, you were charging much more than people said, and other people and and of course you know the stats. Anybody can to some extent manipulated them one way or another. And then with COVID coming in, it's very hard to do, you know, year by year

comparisons in any real way. Um, but what's your some of your critics, let's start off with um, good old uh, what's her name? Brooke Jenkins? Right? Who worked in your day's office, who left, and who after you were recalled Mayor London Breed appointed to be your successor. I mean, sending a pretty clear message that she wanted to put a more tough on crime sort of person there. And what she said about you, I'm going to quote Chase has a belief that your approach should be defendant centered.

Everything should revolve around what's best for the defendants. He's never let go of his role as the public defender. But she said, a prosecutor's primary function as public safety, you have to serve as an advocate of the victim. So what was or what it would be a response

to that? Now? Well, first of all, my office, under my leadership, did more to expand victim services and to increase language access for non English speaking victims than any day in the history of San Francisco, and I am tremendously proud of my record when it comes to advocating for victims personally, meeting with families of homicide victims and

more cases than I can count. Asking in every single budget I submitted to the mayor to increase resources for our Victims Services Division is a primary request in my budgets every single year. UM. So, clearly what Brooke was saying in that statement was was political. It was designed to attack and to support the recall, and it was

part of an effective campaign. The thing that stands out at me more than just the dishonesty and the typical and traditional dishonesty of um of politics, is that actually our criminal legal system is set up around the defendant.

And that's not a choice that I made or one that I necessarily even agree with, but the way that the system works in this country, going back to our Bill of Rights, is that people accused of crimes written into the U. S Constitution in the Bill of Rights, have civil protections, have rights like speedy trial and right to council and the right to confront witnesses against them, have a whole series of rights around which the court

processes in this country have been developed over centuries. Victims do not have equivalent rights. They're not even represented in criminal cases. This isn't my interpretation or my view of how it should work. This is what every single criminal case in the state of California says. It says the people verse the name of the defendant. The victim's name is not in the charging document. They're not a party

to the case. District attorneys have an obligation under state law to provide services and information to victims, and there's no funding that comes with those obligations. I fought every day it was in office to increase funding so we could do a better job communicating with victims, informing them of their rights, empowering them to make their voice heard.

But the notion that I am somehow defendant centered and that is a criticism of me, is actually just an observation about the way the founding fathers designed our legal system, and one that goes back in fact to old England. People accused of crime we're facing deprivation of liberty, have a tremendous number of very strong rights written into our founding document. It is not equivalent. You can't find any equivalent for victims, and maybe that's something we should change.

But until we do, her criticism is a criticism of the system, and it's one that she now is responsible for running. M Okay, well, let's get into specifically the drug issue, which is the main focus of the of this podcast. You know, one thing San Francisco has had to deal with. I mean, on the one hand, there's this horrific rate of overdose fatalities, among the highest in the country, notwithstanding a whole lot of progressive public health policies. Um so, you know, far more people dying of of

overdose in recent years in San Francisco than died of COVID. Right. Then, secondly, you have an open air drug dealing scene where people can drive through the Tenderloin or some other parts of San Francisco and they see people openly selling drugs or if you walk down that street, you'll be offered drugs.

Right now, my understanding is that when it comes to the drug dealing piece of this, that you know, significant, maybe half of all the drug dealers, the low level dealers at least as far as we don't know about the higher level dealers, are you know, young guys coming out of Central America, mostly Honduran and you know, some of them are ourselves even being trafficked into the US. And one criticism of you was that you specifically charged many of these low level drug sellers Hondurans who are

not legally in the country. You charged in in such a way as to avoid them being deported and that really piste people off. So tell me more about that. Well, First, a slight technical correction. We did not make charges or charging decisions in ways designed to avoid deportation. We charged drug sales cases across the board, regardless of immigration status, based on the facts and the law. One usually violations of the Health and Safety Code for the relevant quantity

and kinds of drugs. What we did do, and we did this consistent with a requirement under state law, was we considered immigration status when negotiating plea deals. And that's a requirement of mandate. It comes from California state law predates my tenure. And what that meant is if we were negotiating a plea, which is how n of criminal cases are resolved across the country, and we were aware that the person we were negotiating with was not a citizen.

We were required to consider their immigration status and to try to mitigate any collateral consequences that the guilty plea would have. As it happens that with standard practice in the office before I took over again, because it's a mandate of state law. You are correct that I was attacked viciously by many people, including Brooke, for simply following state law and staying the course HIGN policy that had been implemented before my administration. So what do you anticipate

she's going to do differently on this? Is she going to not follow state law? Is she gonna try to charge people so they are much more likely to get deported? What do you think? Well, it's not gonna there's no way meaningfully to change the charging decisions on the front, and except for what she has already done, which I

guess is to charge simple possession. Um, we under my administration and frankly under my predecessor in his final years, we're declining to charge virtually all standalone misdemeanor drug possession or paraphernalia charges. The only cases that we filed were felony level possession with intent to sell. Our actual sales, and there's really not a meaningfully different way to charge those cases, but there is a different, meaningfully different way

to negotiate them. And it seems from the tough talk and rhetoric thus far that the new administration is determined to refuse to consider immigration consequences and to seek convictions that will in most cases not actually result in deportation directly, but which will make someone deeport of ball and have grave lifelong consequences for immigration status and adjustment of status without any increased benefit to public safe or other meaningful

consequences or sanctions that could possibly serve as a deterrent um. So you know, in some ways, it's funny we're talking about such a tragic topic. As you point out, the overdoses every single day are just devastating San Francisco and really communities across the country. But San Francisco has been hit uniquely hard and and I suppose it's it's the real human tragedy that we're experiencing that we see in

in certain neighborhoods in our city, Soma and Tenderloin. To be sure, that perhaps justifies in some minds doubling down on the war on drugs. Going back to a policy that I think, in our heart of hearts we all know has never worked and will never work. But these conversations and these surges of policing and arrests and pledges to be more punitive in response to drug dealing and the associated crime and the tenderloin in particular, or not

new to San Francisco. In fact, if you go back, I'm looking actually as we speak right now at a page from the San Francisco Examiner back in in an article about how horrible the tenderline is. And it's describing open drug sales and use. It's describing um people with multiple drug charges back on the streets. It's describing kids witnessing crimes and people saying the tenderloin has never been worse.

It's pushing for a strategy to flood the zone with police and quoting police officers saying in another two or three years, I do think we'll see some things turn around. Here. We're having exactly the same conversations today as though we didn't try this thirty forty years ago. It's the definition of insanity, and sadly it's being um. It's it's tragedies, and it's fear that's being exploited for cynical political gain

by folks like Brook Jenkins. M But so I mean, let's just open this up bigger jasa when you actually think about what's going on. There's a number of cities around the U. S. And certainly we saw this in other countries. You know, they really did find a way of significantly diminishing the open air drug scenes. I mean New York City where I live. Many other places had you know, major open air drug scenes, but those are

much less so. San Francisco is a bit distinctive in its being one of a smaller number of cities which still has this open air drug scene. And obviously it obviously has a homelessness issue, like Los Angeles and some other places with nice weather and liberal governments, you know, where there's a you know, a very substantial homeless population. So before we get to the homelessness one, though, the question is what I mean, if you had more power, if you weren't just a d a, if you were

the mayor, right, I mean Mayor London. Breed has been generally antagonistic to you. She's been balancing, you know, sounding like a progressive with being quite tough on crime and all this sort of stuff, and she appointed, you know, a kind of tough person to be your successor. But if you had, if you were in the mayor's position, and you know, you can't change state law, you can't change federal law. But what would you be pushing for to deal with this open air drug dealing thing? What?

What do you think the answer is, Well, first of all, let's be clear, talking quote unquote tough is not the same thing as having effective policies or even being tough. If if we want to be tough on open air drug use, if we want to be tough on overdoses, then we need safe consumption sites and we need treatment on demand. I mean, let's be very very clear. The so called tough approach is actually criminogenic. It's creating crime.

We know that. You don't even need to just look at UH narcotics, look at prohibition on alcohol and how that played out in this country. It created mafias, it created al capone, It generates a tremendous amount of crime. I was talking to my father about some of the men who were in prison with him, and some of them who were there for crimes unrelated on the charges themselves to drugs. Were there because they were doing two three robberies a week to pay for their drug abbit.

If you understand that addiction is a public health crisis, that overdoses and open air drug use our public health crises, then you see that district attorneys and police have a very very limited role to play and responding or solving these problems. Instead, we need to follow the strategies that have been successfully implemented in other parts of the world, places like Portugal, pit places like Vancouver, where you have designated safe consumption sites. And let me tell you why

that's important. First of all, nobody dies in safe consumption sites. Nobody dies of overdoses. In safe consumption sites, you dramatically reduce the human suffering and the loss of life from

this addiction epidemic. Second of all, you take some of the urban blight and the real devastating experiences that children and families with school aged children have stepping over people who are passed out in the streets, human feces, hypodermic needles, and you cansolidate the drug use in a safe, clean place where it doesn't need to invade the daily lives of small business owners. And immigrant families and so on,

and and third, and this is critical. Safe consumption sites are a place where we can connect people who have substance use disorders with harm reduction services so that when they're ready to engage with strategies to reduce dependence, when they're ready to try and redirect their lives and get housing or employment, they have access to services where they

can get that help. In San Francisco, there has never been a political commitment from city Hall, not from this mayor prior mayors, to make treatment on demand a reality, or to make safe consumption sites a reality. And until we have housing and treatment, we are always going to be reading those same stories in the San Francisco Examiner, whether it's two but on the safe injection site. So I think many of our listeners will know because we've

talked about this before. There are now dozens of safe injection sites, which are sometimes known as over those prevention centers, in dozens of cities around the world, in Europe, in Canada, in Australia. There's now one operating above ground in New York, and there's even some operating semi below ground in San

Francisco and some other cities. Right, And the evidence is, as Chase has says, right, these are essentially needle exchange programs with a bat with a back room and a nurse president where people can safely inject the drugs they brought with them. They're not provided with those drugs. And we know they reduce public new sense when they reduce over those fatalities, effect eliminate over those fatalities. They do all these good things. The question is what's been the

problem in San Francisco. I mean, as we speak, right, there's a bill that went through the state of the state legislature. I think it's sitting on Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. I have no doubt that he knows it's the right thing to do, and I have no doubt that he worries, like hell, how he's going to explain signing that thing into law if in fact he runs for national office. So he's in a andry he's going to deal with.

But the question I'd understand is why didn't London Breed do what de Blasio did, just say go for it. I mean a few years ago you had to worry about Trump prosecutors, you know, going after you, and they made a big thing of you know, the Trump Justice Department, We're going to go after anybody who approves these safe injection sites. But now you have a friendly administration, Biden administration, which hasn't said anything on the issue as yet, but

they're not going to go after people. You have a friendly guy in the governor's office who's not going to go after people. Why do you think London breed it? For that matter, some other California mayors just don't proceed now the way that de Blasio did. It's a great question. I wish I had the answer. It's something that I pushed for and called for every single day I was

in office. I was urgent our city to move in that direction, and I knew what a huge impact it would have had on reducing fail overdoses, on cleaning up parts of the city that were very difficult to live in,

and there was virtually no action from city Hall. And it's one of the tremendous frustrations that I have and that many San Franciscans have, And and you know, I think in many ways it was a strategic decision because it seems have been very effective and useful for the mayor to have an opportunity to blame me for the police department, to blame me and my policies for these age old problems that will never be solved until we invest seriously and the kinds of solutions that we know work.

But Chasi on that one. I mean, she's publicly on record of supporting safe injection sites, right, she has the model. To Blasio, do you understand is there a real legal argument or fear? I mean, there already is what a long standing safe injection side in San Francisco, at least one which is sort of operating with the understanding of the cops. Everybody knows it's there, right and it's doing good work. It's just a matter of doing what they did in New York and saying, Okay, it's going to

be legally sanctioned at this point. But any sense about what would be the argument that her legal counsel or anybody else would be telling her why she shouldn't move forward the way to Blasio, did you know the person who advises the mayor on legal issues and at least

formally is the city attorney. The city attorney is normally an elected position who represents all the city agencies, including the mayor, and if, for example, we were to open a safe consumption site, and if the Feds were to come in and try to shut it down, it would be the job of the city attorney to defend San Francisco against that federal incursion in the courts. The current city attorney was appointed by the mayor. It was her pick.

If this was a priority for her, if this was something she cared about, certainly it's something that the city attorney would defend her on. It's absolutely puzzling to me why we have not done more on this as a city. And I wish that, you know, the district Attorney's obviously the budget or the mandate to do these things. It's it's not really what we do. We need the mayor

and the Department of Public Health to step up. And and mind you, the mayor appoints the head of the Department of Public Health, and they have in San Francisco a budget that's well over two billion dollars. There's a massive budget, tremendous resources available, and it simply has not been a priority for people in the city. And it's to all of our detriment. Well, let's go bigger this.

I mean, when you look with part of what old saman in Europe beginning thirty years ago, and they were dealing with open air drug scenes and overdose as we were dealing with in the US. They didn't pull back

all law enforcement. I mean, they still had people getting busted and all this sort of thing, but there was a high level of coordination between They called it the Frankfurt system at one point in the early nineties where the mayor would call a meeting every Monday morning with the head of prosecution, head of police, head of Housing services, head of health services, and where if the cops said, well we have to crack down on such and such

a park, We're gonna do it Wednesday morning, somebody from Housing services will say, well, wait, wait a second, wait, can you wait till Thursday so that we can make sure we're set up to receive the people you're gonna be pushing out. But beyond that, they also did things, beginning in Switzerland thirty years ago, to start setting up heroin maintenance clinics for p both for whom method on

or drug free treatment was not working. They said, let people come into clinics and get pharmaceutical heroin and they can't take it home, but it will be like a well run method on program, but they can get pharmaceutical heroin. And that thing worked in Switzerland. It's spread to other European countries and to Canada. You know, reduce crime, reduce

over those reduced addiction, help people stabilize their lives. And now you see in British Columbia, especially Vancouver, you know more and more movement and support by first the provincial government and now the national government for what was called safe Supply, which is basically a policy that says, you know, if people are going to be buying drugs no matter what, from the illicit market, let's allow them to get it instead from illegally regulated source and either they get it

for free or they get it for a few bucks. Allowing people to get the drug they want from illegal source. Would you support all that sort of stuff. It seems they have worked really well in Europe, and I think there's a lot of evidence behind it. And on the other hand, what we in doing is far more costly, far less humane, and is not working. So yeah, I

would support those approaches. I think we need a radical rethinking of how we respond to addiction in this country and Frankly, I was sorry we didn't have more time to try and push those changes. We were continuing to file drug sales cases. In fact, we filed them at a higher rate than my predecessor did when the police brought us family drug arrests. Not because I thought it was in and of itself going to work, but because I recognized the need not to simply abandon the field,

abandon the space. And it was unfortunate that, as we talked about a moment ago, the city was not willing to do the work on the public health front that would have truly been necessary to decrease our reliance on cars roll police responses to these issues that are clearly public health issues and that have been dealt with effectively in other jurisdictions. Let's take a break here and go to an ad If you look at the issue of all the drug dealers, if that's not so much a

health issue, that's something else. And the question is, if you were in charge of the police department, if you were talking to the police chief, I don't know what your relationship with him was, what was like, but what would be that your your answer um giving current laws for that matter, about what to do with that. What do you think is actually the optimal answer giving current laws to dealing you know, with that situation, not the overdose, not the open droid use, but the drug dealing on

the streets. Well, I think in an ideal world, if you have the kind of policies you just described, you don't have a market for illegal street drugs because people who are seriously dependent on illegal drugs can go and get safe supply somewhere. In an ideal world, the role of police is far more limited when it comes to these sorts of public health crises. They're not responding to

try to reverse overdoses. Instead, they're simply ensuring that people are consuming in the safe consumption stites and not elsewhere. But even on safe consumption sites that people who use drugs there have to get them from some place else and it's an illicit source. So, you know, in Switzerland, back in the early nineties, before they started the heroin prescription programs, they had a place that became known as Needle Park. It was the plot Spits, a park behind

the main train station. It was somewhat set off from the rest of the city and basically at some point the you know, the city government said, you know what, We're going to let all the drug dealers and all the drug users use there in that park, right, and if they caught people on the streets, they say, get to that park or we're busting you. And for the first year or so year and a half it worked

really well. The public health services were there, the drug dealers, everybody could see that, you know, the whole thing was working. And then at some point they just got total, really out of control and they had to shut it down and start doing something else. I mean, some people thinks the Tenderloins like that, except zillion people drive through the Tenderloin all the time. It's highly visible. You know, it's embarrassing for people who live in San Francisco, not in

those neighborhoods, and it's bad for tourism. It's bad for the sense of public order and public safety. I mean, do you think something like that might work in San Francisco? Well, I think they, as you said, I mean, they've essentially done it with the Tenderloine for decades. It's been city policy and police policy to push open air drug used

into essentially a containment zone. As ironic as it is, It's not surprising to anybody who's paid close attention that when interim appointed District Attorney Brook Jenkins went to do her big press conference on how she was gonna take the war on drugs seriously, she did it in the Tenderloine and across the street from a press conference, people were openly using illegal drugs and selling them. The police were there. The police walked by drug sales and drug

use all day every day in the Tenderloin. And although they get a lot of overtime and do a few hundred operations a year where they do buy bust, the reality is there's virtually no meaningful enforcement efforts. I think during my administration, police were bringing us on average to felony drug arrests today in a city where if you read the national news and if you spend any time in the Tenderloin, there is a very very real, big problem. You'd think it'd be thousands and thousands of arrests, and

instead it's to a day. And and then the notion that somehow being tougher quote unquote on the two people that the police arrest each day is going to meaningfully solve problems that are decades in the making. It's just it's just dishonest. But the Police All Association was saying, well, why should we bust them all if you're just giving them all the same day release or things like that. In fact, even if they were arresting its thousand, they

would just be replaced with another thousand. So it seems like an entirely kind of you know, chasing one's tail sort of policy where the whole game seems to be about who can be blamed for. Was unsightly and not working about all this, and you ended up being the guy who got blamed. Well, everybody loves to have a place to point the finger. That's that's true just about anywhere you go in the world. Yeah, So for our listeners, just you're aware of what happened in San Francisco was

a KIPAI started going to recall Chase Uh. It was funded by some wealthy folks and Silicon Valley some Republican folks as well. You had activists in the Asian American community up at arms. You had wealthier people in San Francisco, some people live in the community, and everything started to coalesce around Chase of Boudan being the person responsible um,

for all of San Francisco's problems. In fact, it was I think the editorial paget of the San Francisco Examiner called it the chase of Boudin derangement syndrome, where anything and everything would be blamed on him. Even in Humboldt County, hundreds of miles north of San Francisco, the Border of Supervisors put out a release blaming Chaser for the fact that fentinyl was showing up in Humboldt. Now there was a lot of other stuff going on as well, right,

I mean, there was COVID and people going crazy. There was you know, this stuff around defund the police that got people's backs up, and a lot of things. But a lot of the things you had done were not radically different. I mean, but your predecessors, Terrence Hallinan Kamala Harris, George Gasco, and I've known all of them, they were oftentimes, you know, had had to deal with the same sorts of assaults and charges that you had to deal with. But somehow the stuff all stuck with you. Why do

you think I don't have an answer for you? Um. I mean, we certainly were living through really unprecedented times. The role of social media and shaping public consciousness, the resurgence of recalls as a tactic for those who can't win power through normal elections, the Black Lives Matter movement as you mentioned, and a whole series of factors I think shaped the the particular outcome. And I don't I don't entirely know. I mean it's I mean, it was

also kind of recall fever, right. You had those folks on the on the school board who got recalled, so there was a whole sense of recall recall. Recall is something that California has done. I remember when Governor Grey Davis got recalled exactly. And that's the key, I mean for folks who aren't familiar, you know, in many jurisdictions in California, where recalls are notoriously easy to get on

the ballot. If a recall does succeed in getting on the ballot, then other candidates throw their name in the ring and get their name listed on the ballot, and voters choose not only whether they want to recall, say Governor Newsom, but also if the recall succeeds, who do

they want to replace him? And looking at um Larry Elder for example, as the likely replacement for Gavin Newsom can motivate even people that deeply despise his role as governor his work as governor to vote against the recall um. The same thing is true in other jurisdictions like Los Angeles, if there's a recall on the ballot, other candidates for the office get their name listed and then voters have

to choose. In San Francisco, by contrast, where it's very easy to get on the ballot as a recall, there are no other candidates, and so the recall against me was able to spend unlimited political dollars. They spend more than seven million in the end, simply attacking and amplifying criticisms without ever advancing a single concrete policy proposal or candidate.

And in fact, when people pitched reporters on um criticisms of some of the people like Brook Jenkins who were in the running to replace me, if the recall succeeded, reporters would say, well, they're not running for office, they're not on the ballot. Nobody's interested in this story. It's a dynamic which very very few, if any, elected officials could serve. I've imagine if President Biden, for example, had to face an upper down vote yes or no. No.

He may well be able to win re election if he's running against Donald Trump or Rhonda's antis, but running against yourself is something that virtually no like an official could survive. Yeah, well, okay, so now there's somebody your predecessor, George Gascon, who's now the district attorney in Los Angeles. One of the things he said, and tell me if

you think this is fair or not. He goes, this is a quote one of the mistakes that chas the maide that I learned from it, and he will readily recognize. He says, is he was trying to talk to people about data. People don't care about data. This is about emotions. This is about how you perceive and feel, and you cannot use data to deal with feelings. And I think that was a failure, and by the time he kind of woke up to that, it was too late for him. Fair common by George Gascon or not and a great

fair comment. Um. I think it's important to have policies that are driven by data, that are informed by data, that are backed up by evidence and and and grounded in research. And as an elected official. It's important to meet voters where they're at and to understand that what

they're feeling matters, whether or not it's empirically supported. And we spent far too much time and energy showing people's statistics about crime rates being down by double digits, about prosecution rates being up, trying to correct mistakes and in in mainstream media coverage about the issues and remind them that it's not our decision if somebody is held in custody pre trial, it's the decision of the judge or all the different things, the nuances, and we spent way

too much time and energy trying to correct the record. And people needed to know that they were being heard, that their fears, however connected or disconnected to what you know, macro level data showed their fears were being listened to and taken seriously. And I think that's something we didn't succeed in doing, even when we tried our best. It was something that obviously we didn't get through to enough

people on I'm curious. I mean, when you think I'm not imagining if you run for office again for this position, let's say next year or some other time in the future, can you vision yourself getting really outspoken and angry about some vicious killing, about some homicide, about something in a way that taps into the anger and frustration that people who are piste off at their house or you know, just got broken into, or that their car just got

broken or stolen or whatever. I mean, was that something you did? Was it repellent to you to do that? Do you think you would do it in the future. I did do it, and I wouldn't do it in the future. People deserve to be safe and deserve to feel safe. And when that feeling of safety had violated, especially with violent crime, it's outrageous, it's offensive, it's harmful, it's destructive, and we need firm in quick response. We

need accountability, We need to ancients. I have absolutely no qualms or hesitation about saying that, and I said it loudly and clearly throughout my administration. But I wouldn't do it in ways that undermined the legitimacy of the jury trial process, that prejudged the outcome of the case or

the evidence. You know, there is often a tremendous amount of political and public pressure after a high profile crime occurs to come out and condemn the person that's been arrested and commit to punishing them to the fullest extent of the law, or what have you. And it's it's actually unethical to do that. We don't know the false

state of the evidence. A jury is going to decide whether this is the person and whether a crime was actually committed, and so by using the media in a way that tells the scales of justice, we violate a core ethical canon. We need to wait and see how

the case develops. We don't know what the mitigation will be, or what the defenses will be that will be presented, and so I think it's a very delicate balancing act to represent and and speak the outrage of the community and the outrage that I feel personally when looking at some of these heinous crimes, but not to do it in a way that could lead the defense to get my office kicked off the case for being biased, or or reversal or a change of venue because we've tainted

the jury pool case. Apart from all the concerns around crime in San Francisco, the issue of homelessness has been a huge one and it's apparent to anybody. I mean, I saw it when I was visiting their people who live there complained about it, and it seems like when people are throwing everything in the kitchen, think at you that homelessness was one of the other ones that was.

You know, you've got a lot of blame for Yes, I agree, and we did speak out about the need to build housing and to expand shelters, but it's not something within the perv of the district attorney. I have no mandate or budget or staff to address the issues of homelessness, and no law in this state or in this country allows me to jail somebody simply for being poor or unhoused, even if I wanted to do it, even if I thought it was the right thing to do,

which I don't. No law, no authority, empowers a district attorney to deprive someone of liberty because they're homeless. And so to the the extent that people in this city are frustrated with visible homelessness and they're looking to the district attorney to solve that problem, they're going to be sorely disappointed no matter who is named by the mayor in the future elected by the people to serve as district attorney. So chase that the overdose issue. I mean, San Francisco

is almost notorious in this regard. It's over those fatality rate is one of the highest in the country. It's much higher than the rate of death from COVID over the last few years. Uh. Now, this obviously is not an issue that falls directly in the responsibility of the district attorney. But were you able to do anything about this? Well?

I did. I'm back in February. I asked the city to implement an emergency supplemental budget to create a fentinale task force that could both provide some staff to my office, but more importantly resources to our public health partners, because we saw the ongoing horrific toll of human lives being lost overdoses, and we saw that the tools we had

were totally impotent to address it. And so yes, we asked the city to introduce a supplemental emergency budget to create a fentinal task force, and um, we didn't even

get a response from city Hall. You know, this makes me think about a coordinator approach that emerged in Europe thirty years ago, when you really saw harm reduction advancing at the municipal level, even in cities that were run by conservative politicians, And in Frankfurt was a good model where you had a major problem with the drug related street crime and drug related hiv A s and all these sorts of things, not unlike what you're seeing in

San Francisco. And the mayor convened what he or she called the Monday Morning meeting, where the head of prosecution and the head of the ops, head of housing, head of social welfare, they all were there to kind of we deal collectively with how to deal with a multi dimensional drug problem. And I wonder, was this something that was happening in San Francisco that Mayor Breed was orchestrating. Yeah, I have no I mean, I have no information suggesting

that that kind of a meeting occurred. It may have occurred, but um, you know, they were very happy to blame me in the District Attorney's office for the problems and then exclude us from conversations about solutions, if in fact

there were conversations at all being had. You know, it strikes me that in some of the cities where the progressive prosecutors taking a lot of flak, a lot of times it's really an issue involving the police more than it is the prosecutors, and I think about what happened, say in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died, where you had, you know, the police basically saying fuck it. You know, we're just not gonna put ourselves out there anymore. We're not going to come down and respond to crimes the

way we did before. And I wondered, I mean, did you have the same sort of phenomena that happened in San Francisco. Absolutely, we heard stories every single day of police officers responding to the scene of a crime and talking to a victim and saying to the victim, gosh, I'm so sorry this happened you. I wish we could help, but you know, this just won't prosecute, and then doing

zero follow up investigation. And the data is really telling if you look at if you just compare this is using police department data, their own statistics, the rate at which they solved or cleared cases in the first half of two during the final months the recall, and you compare that with the first half of the year before I was the district attorney, the rate at which they solved every single category of crime they report data and fell by high double digits. In fact, the category of

crime where there police arrest rate fell. The least was assaults and that fell by. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got things like arson, where the rate at which police solve those crimes fell by, and it was frustrating to see that. UM I had a good working relationship with the police chief, but I don't believe that he controls the department. I don't believe that any police chief controls the department in San Francisco. I think

the police union controls the department in San Francisco. With the recall, once you lost. The next morning, I remember the New York Times, the national media coverage. It was all about this show is a major transformation and public opinion, you know, public turning against progressive prosecutors. There was a piece by Alec Kara katsan As. He's the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps UM and he critiqued this front page story in the New York Times basically

saying it's bullshit. There is no massive wave against progressive prosecutors. In fact, if you look around the state, if you look at the race that the Attorney general was in, Robonta, who is a progressive if you look at the d a's races and Alameda and Contra Acosta counties, um, if you look at other cities that basically the notion that San Francisco voters were sending a message that was common around the rest of the country was basically bullshit. What

do you think? No I would agree? And you know, the the the irony and the dishonesty and the way that the media coverage, I mean it, pundits went such a rush to have some sort of national lesson learned from my recall, which was a tremendously unique in many ways to a generous kind of a race that's one of a kind that's not reflective. It wasn't a head to head where a you know, a Republican traditional prosecutor

was running against a Democratic reform minded prosecutor. It was, as I said, a race where it was a yes or no vote on me. After a two and a half year period in which we lived through a global pandemic, we'd uh seen the police department systematically refused to investigate cases, and in which a Republican group of largely Republican funders had spent over seven million dollars in attack ads that's what it was. It wasn't a head to head, it

wasn't a traditional election. And then a few weeks later when Steve Mulroy in Shell County, Memphis, Tennessee, wins a Democrat reformer out an incumbent traditional right wing Republican prosecutor who had been the d A for something like eight years, no mention of it in any of the national media. He won in a landslide against a very traditional police

union back UM old Guard prosecutor. And so you know, it's clear that there's a desire for whatever reason, maybe it sells papers, I don't know from many in in mainstream media sources to um to undermine the criminal justice reform movement in this way and to to to amplify attacks and criticisms, to blame high profile crimes on criminal justice reform in ways that they never ever do in jurisdictions where you know, we have more traditional punitive and

carstral responses to crimes. I think the movement is growing in strengthening, and it's going to keep going for years to coming. It doesn't mean that, like any movement, it won't have setbacks. We will will have some high profile defeats and will continue to grow despite those defeats and setbacks. So thank you ever so much Chase for taking the time to be on Psychoactive. I admire your courage in

running for office. I admire the work you did accomplish while you were districtor in San Francisco, and I very much hope that we and the voters of San Francisco will have another opportunity one day to put you back in office to continue the struggle. Thanks so much for your work, Ethan, then pleasure to be on the show. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear

from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman.

It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to ab brios f,

Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BB. Next week I'll be talking with Professor Nancy Campbell, one of America's leading drugs scholars, who co authored a book called The Narcotic Farm about a remarkable institution that simultaneously punished, treated, and researched drug addicts.

The Narcotic Farm was an attempt to separate out people whose sole problem was drug addiction, narcotic addiction, and narcotics was a catch all term at that time that did refer to both opiates and cocaine, which is a little bit hard for us to understand because they are drugs that do very different things have very different effects. However, it was basically um what became the illicit market. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it. Don't miss it