Copaganda: The Recall of DA Chesa Boudin

Historical Essay

Chesa Boudin voting in 2019 when he won to become San Francisco's District Attorney.

Photo: Monthly Review online

[Chesa Boudin], the progressive district attorney in San Francisco, was elected at the end of 2019 on a detailed platform, including using diversion (i.e. steering people away from criminal punishment and toward other interventions) more frequently because it can reduce recidivism and other harms; prosecuting police misconduct; and going after corporations for wage theft and consumer violations. Police unions, corporations, and the real estate lobby mobilized against him before his policies went into effect, and the campaign was funded in large part by a Republican billionaire. But even though the point of the campaign was to preserve regressive and authoritarian policies, its public relations strategy was to portray itself as "progressive." One of the key players in this charade was a pro-police San Francisco Chronicle journalist [Heather Knight] who produced a series of significant copaganda articles leading up to the campaign. She was later rewarded by being named San Francisco bureau chief of the New York Times. In one memorable instance, she called Brooke Jenkins—a Black woman and the media star of the recall campaign who was eventually installed by the mayor to replace Boudin after the right-wing recall—a "progressive prosecutor." It was journalism designed to deceive.(32)

Jenkins was anything but progressive. She was a former corporate lawyer who had represented big business before she became a prosecutor. While the Chronicle was calling her "progressive," she was busy hiring a talent agent and appearing on TV news shows like Real Time with Bill Maher, spewing right-wing misinformation.(33) A local news outlet exposed that she committed egregious prosecutorial misconduct while prosecuting poor people. After a scandal in which she tried to violate California law by sending a legally insane person to prison against the wishes of the crime victim's family and medical experts, she resigned from the prosecutor's office before being found by an appeals court to have committed prosecutorial misconduct. In another instance, she publicly admitted to engaging in criminal conduct by illegally sharing confidential information about a teenager. As of late 2024, she still faces numerous pending ethics complaints filed against her by retired judges and prominent law professors. They set forth a litany of violations of her sworn duties, including instances alleging various crimes.(34)

Around the time that the Chronicle published the article holding her up as "progressive," she was signaling to police unions and Republican donors (who it turned out were paying her, a fact hidden in disclosures and the subject of one of the ethics complaints) that she supported regressive crime policies.(35) She made clear that she would seek longer prison sentences for the predominantly poor people her office prosecutes, cage more people whose families cannot pay cash hail before trial, use "gang conspiracy" laws to target young people of color and poor people, charge more children as adults, and prosecute more homeless people and people with mental illness. She later received praise from Fox News, Sean Hannity, and other far-right figures.(36) By every metric, she was planning to he not just more regressive than Boudin, but more regressive than previous authoritarian prosecutors in the city. And here's the key: she was being platformed specifically because she portended regressive actions. She would not have been newsworthy otherwise. Words have lost all meaning when Brooke Jenkins is called "progressive."

But it was precisely this label that the Chronicle chose for its headline, not as something up for dispute but as a fact. The journalist could easily have told Jenkins's story with the headline "Why This Prosecutor Just Left D.A. Chesa Boudin's Office and Joined the Recall." When you realize that adding the word "progressive" was unnecessary, you see that the point was to mislead people about how to interpret Jenkins's political intervention. It is designed to get readers to exclaim: "Oh, wow, even a progressive Black woman now opposes the DA!" That framing gives people who don't know much about prosecutorial policy and the punishment bureaucracy the rationale to support the recall campaign while still believing themselves to have progressive values. This is an important copaganda tactic in disorienting and winning over the large block of well-meaning people who may not know a lot about the details but who want to support changes to things that are ineffective and unjust.

Campaigning to recall DA Chesa Boudin in Portsmouth Square, May 2022.

Photo: Suiren2022, wikimedia commons

Community supporters stand with Chesa Boudin against the recall, May 2022.

Photo: 48hills.com

The political class in San Francisco engaged in a similar campaign for Matt Dorsey, the former head of public relations at the San Francisco Police Department. I noted earlier that Dorsey was caught sending scandalous texts to journalists encouraging copaganda. Shortly after the mayor appointed him to a vacant seat on the Board of Supervisors (without an election, as with Jenkins), a prominent Democratic Party political organization called him a "progressive activist."(37) His paid job had been to manipulate public perception of police to expand the war on drugs, increase surveillance, and minimize accountability for police violence, and he was now installed into the city's governing body as a "progressive."

After both Jenkins and Dorsey were in office, they spearheaded a reinvestment in the war on drugs in San Francisco. The city shut down a treatment center and saw huge increases in overdoses, and the Board of Supervisors approved new spending on incarceration and cops. The jail population rose over 30 percent after Jenkins's first thirteen months in office. In her first year, she dismissed every single prosecution begun by Boudin of a shooting by a police officer, and also began blocking future investigations.(38) At the same time, violent crime went up.(39) But there was a dearth of news stories blaming the rise in violence on the district attorney and the increased investment in punishment.

When it comes to designing the special copaganda recipe of authoritarian policy cake with progressive icing on top, San Francisco is a Michelin-star chef.

The Washington Post

Several days after the 2022 primary elections, the Washington Post editorial board covered the San Francisco recall election.(42) The Post's editorial copaganda is similar to the efforts I have tracked across the country against officials who propose reducing the power of the punishment bureaucracy.(43)

The editorial is entitled: "The San Francisco District Attorney Saga Set Back Criminal Justice Reform." Like the New York Times election-night stories, the Post attempts to use the San Francisco recall to create a consensus that "criminal justice reform" has gone too far. But the Post editorial board takes spreading misinformation to the extreme.

The thesis is that the progressive district attorney didn't serve the public "carefully" and that, therefore, his "tenure served to discredit more effective and humane approaches to public safety." This is a bold claim: that "humane" and "effective" approaches were "discredited." We would be in trouble as a civilization if treating people humanely had been discredited!

Nearly every factual assertion in the Post editorial either lacks a citation to support it or links to a citation that doesn't support the assertion. The leading claim that Boudin didn't give "attention to people's safety and quality of life" is striking for three reasons. First, at the time the article was written in mid-2022, total property crime (down 19.4 percent) and total violent crime (down 21.4 percent) had decreased under Boudin compared to before he took office at the beginning of 2020.(44) Second, as noted earlier, Boudin's major policy changes were popular, not discredited. His personal popularity did decrease after Republican billionaires and police unions spent $6 million on personal attacks, and the media spewed out a wave of misinformation.(45) But his popular policies reduced local incarceration, released wrongfully convicted people, saved tens of millions of dollars for families, saved a lot of children from adult prosecution, prosecuted more police misconduct, and pursued major wage theft and consumer protection cases. Third, as noted earlier, the scholarly evidence backs these progressive policies.

So, how does the Post support its thesis that the person implementing more humane and evidence-based policies had "discredited" those popular policies? Let's dismantle the charges line by line because they are revealing and somewhat funny.

“Mr. Boudin failed to address the fentanyl trade in his city.” First, the article omits that Boudin proposed a multi-agency fentanyl task force that would have included prosecutors and public health officials. But the mayor refused to fund it. The omission of that fact invalidates the Post’s charge. Second, and more importantly, the editorial board suggests a lone prosecutor could fix the opioid epidemic. It omits that other, non-progressive prosecutors had likewise not ended the fentanyl trade with more authoritarian policies. As always with copaganda, pay attention to whether the news identifies a different policy that could have been implemented. The Post does not offer any suggestions. Third, if the answer to addiction were more prosecution and prison—as it seems the Post is implying—then that means every prosecutor for the last fifty years failed.(46) Despite spending trillions on policing and punishment of drugs, overdoses are higher than ever, and dangerous drugs are more available than ever. The editorial board omits the consensus among public health experts that the government can't reduce drug abuse through criminal punishment.

“Burglaries climbed 45 percent during his tenure.” This is a good old-fashioned lie. I rarely discuss lies because I focus on more sophisticated copaganda, which is more effective than obvious falsehoods. But, as the data reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reported using actual information, burglaries were at "their pre-pandemic rates" (i.e., the same as the period before Boudin took office).(47) So, how did the Post come up with the figure of burglaries going up by 45 percent? It cited another Post opinion piece from the day after the election that made the same claim with no support.(48) This self-referential loop is the kind of Trumpian performance art that one finds in major news editorials when it comes time to discredit critics of the punishment bureaucracy. As Hannah Arendt said in her last public interview, "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer."(49)

“Businesses closed rather than face petty crime.” The editorial board appears to have fallen for a right-wing conspiracy theory promoted by recall campaign election ads. Although its citation for the business-closure claim was a May 2021 Yahoo! article, the claims were later debunked.(50) In the most prominent example of these false viral election ads funded by right-wing dark money, a local businessowner claiming to have closed his store because of Boudin had actually shut it down in 2019, before Boudin was either elected or took office.(51)

"Mr. Boudin oversaw an exodus of prosecutors from his office, some of whom left because they say they were pressured to relax charges on major crimes." This assertion is, to use a technical term from propaganda analysis, gobbledygook. First, offices see staff turnover when a new elected official with a different political vision takes over, whether conservative or progressive. Second, the Post doesn't explain its terms—"exodus" or "pressured"—and neither of them is supported by evidence. One of Boudin's campaign promises was to reduce unnecessary severity in sentencing and to end the use of certain racially biased sentencing enhancements. The single citation for the article's claim is not firsthand accounts from anyone with knowledge of the issue, but an opinion essay by Nellie Bowles, an heiress from one of the wealthiest families in California history, which, as I show later, is riddled with false claims and embarrassing errors.(52) Although the Post does not state why it links to this piece to support this factual claim, it appears to be referencing Bowles's anecdote about a single prosecutor, Brooke Jenkins, leaving the office. Remember, Jenkins resigned after Boudin refused to let her violate ethical rules in a case where she was later found to have violated the law. She went on to be a paid operative for the recall campaign, without disclosing it. This would be like me claiming that the Washington Post is widely considered the worst news publication in the world and supporting that assertion by linking to a blog post where someone explained that they had heard someone talk about a bad editorial the Washington Post published.

“San Francisco writer Nellie Bowles in a Wednesday article in the Atlantic [said] ‘the D.A. said from the beginning that he would. not prioritize the prosecution of lower-level offenses.’” The board's final reason for its thesis about "humane" and "effective" policies being "discredited" is that a random wealthy writer with no expertise on these issues said something in The Atlantic. But all prosecutors in the U.S. claim to "prioritize" the most serious cases. That's what everyone wants them to do. Imagine what would have happened if Boudin had said that he was going to prioritize the least important crimes? And Boudin's policy of not prioritizing some low-level offenses has been shown to reduce crime, as the Post’s own reporters previously reported.(53)

Overall, the editorial board is vaguely suggesting that expanding prison and prosecution is the way to solve drug abuse, homelessness, and petty crime without coming out and making that claim so explicitly that it could be accused of doing so or forced to back it up with evidence. This is like pretending to care about climate change while backing more fossil fuel extraction without noting the evidence linking the two. And the Post portrays brutal, discredited policy as enlightened, beginning by listing the progressive things it supports in theory:

Those suffering from drug addiction should be treated rather than incarcerated first. Early mistakes should not ruin the rest of a person's life. Fewer human beings should be warehoused uselessly in prisons on sentences that are too steep for their crimes. Police should no longer be the nation's default front-line mental health responders. De-escalation should be every officer's routine first response. Authorities should not use efforts to police petty crime and quality-of-life matters as cover to harass minority Americans. There would be less crime if the government better addressed root causes—poverty, poor civic services, substandard education and a lack of decent, affordable housing.

This is a common move by elites who want readers to support something terrible: they tell us up front they share our desire for equality and human flourishing. This is the moment M&Ms are placed delicately with tweezers onto the turd.

As the editorial board was assuring us what it likes in theory, it was common knowledge that the mayor, Republicans, police unions, bail companies, and profiteers behind the recall would pursue policies that frustrate each of those progressive values. Many more people would be jailed for mental illness, drug addiction, and being unhoused—which would do nothing for public safety. Then, as we saw with recall activists in California and the Harvard professors claiming to be progressive socialists, the Post assures us that it cares:

As longtime advocates for criminal justice reform, we are as frustrated as anyone at the seemingly slow pace of change in the face of police misconduct, racial disparities in the justice system and worsening mental health and addiction crises that call for innovative public safety solutions.

I cannot stress enough how important this tactic is for contemporary copaganda. Before promoting something with indefensible and authoritarian consequences, pundits preface it with, "Look, what I'm saying can't be bad because I'm a well-meaning person and I care about making things better too." Everyone knows these policies wouldn't be supported if they were portrayed with clarity for what they are: expansions of a profitable status quo. Pundits and institutions portray themselves as progressive while cynically opposing every attempt to implement progressive policies in practice. It's like when someone says every time you meet them at a dinner party that they'd love to hang out with you, but it turns out that they pretend to be busy every time you propose concrete plans.

Notes

32. Heather Knight, Why a Progressive Prosecutor Just Left D.A. Chesa Boudin's Office and Joined the Recall Effort, S.F. Chronicle (Oct. 27, 2021, 6:04 PM)

33. See Megan Cassidy and Mallory Moench, Who Will Replace S.F. District Attorney Chesa Boudin? Here's Who Is on the Short List, S.F. Chronicle (July 5, 2022)

34. David Greenwald, Chronicle Calls Her a "Progressive Prosecutor" but in 2019 the Vanguard Covered Brooke Jenkins Committing Egregious Prosecutorial Misconduct, Davis Vanguard (Oct. 25, 2021); Bob Egelko, DA Brooke Jenkins Committed Misconduct in Case That Launched Her Recall Efforts, Courts Find, S.F. Chronicle (Aug. 30, 2023, 1:20 PM); Lana Tleimat, DA Jenkins Committed Misconduct in Murder Trial, Court of Appeals Finds, Mission Local (Aug. 29, 2023); see, e.g., State Bar Complaints Filed Against SF Interim D.A.Jenkins by Retired Judge, KTVU-2 (Oct. 13, 2022, 8:58 PM); Jonah Owen Lamb, Claim Accuses San Francisco District Attorney of Lying to Protect Cop, S.F. Standard (Aug. 24, 2023, 7:50 PM); Public Defender Accuses SF DA of Violating Juvenile Records Law, KTVU Fox-2 (Jan. 11, 2023, 11:41 AM). See also Peter Calloway (@petercalloway), TWITTER (Aug. 24, 2023); Peter Calloway (@petercalloway), TWITTER (Jan. 12, 2023, 9:33 PM); Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityalec), TWITTER (June 1, 2022, 12:19 PM).

35. Christien Kafton, San Francisco DA Cracks Down on Drug Dealers; Public Defender Calls Policies "Regressive," KTVU (Aug. 4, 2022).

36. Sean Hannity (@seanhannity), TWITTER (July 18, 2022, 11:02 PM).

37. Alice B Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club (@AliceLGBTQDems), TWITTER (May 9, 2022, 3:46 PM).

38. Jonah Owen Lamb, Is San Francisco DA Obstructing Police Shooting Probes? Watchdog Says Yes, S.F. Standard. (Dec. 13, 2023, 9:00 AM).

39. David Menschel (@davidminpdx), TWITTER (July 7, 2023, 7:18pm); David Menschel (@davidminpdx), TWITTER (May 31, 2023). Not only was San Francisco less safe while spending far more on the war on drugs, but the office was so incompetently managed that Jenkins managed to convict fewer people of drug dealing in her first year on the job than Boudin had in the year prior. Joe Lancaster, 1 Year After Chesa Boudin's Recall, Is San Francisco Safer Under His Successor's More Punitive Policies?, REASON.

42. Editorial Board, The San Francisco District Attorney Saga Set Back Criminal Justice Reform, Washington Post (June 12, 2022, 8:00 AM).

43. I followed the news coverage of San Francisco closely because I became friends with Chesa Boudin years before when he was a public defender. We worked together to represent indigent people who could not pay enough cash to get out of jail. Boudin sat with me when I argued the case of Kenneth Humphrey in the Court of Appeal, although Boudin had left the case and been elected district attorney by the time we won the case in the California Supreme Court. It was a landmark ruling striking down the cash bail system as it was practiced every day in California. I had also asked Boudin to serve on the board of Civil Rights Corps when it was founded in 2016, which he did until he ran for district attorney.

44. See SFPD Crime Dashboard. These trends were relatively stable. Even setting aside the 2022 crime declines under Boudin, both property crime (down 11 percent) and violent crime (down 19 percent) decreased between 2019 and 2021. See Peter Calloway (@petercalloway), TWITTER (Apr. 1, 2022).

45. Jon Skolnik, GOP Billionaires Bankroll Effort to Recall SF's District Attorney, Truthout (June 7, 2022). See, e.g., Mallory Moench & Kevin Fagan, /article/drug-dealers-in-the-tenderloin-come-out-in-force-17049710.php Drug Dealers in the Tenderloin Come Out in Force at Night. What Can S.F. Do to Stop the Chaos?, S.F. Chronicle (Apr. 4, 2022, 5:45 PM) (ignoring that crime rates were down in the Tenderloin at the time of the article's writing). See also Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityalec), TWITTER (Apr. 2, 2022, 11:53 AM), (collecting examples of misinformation from the Chronicle).

46. Roni Caryn Rabin, Overdose Deaths Reached Record High as the Pandemic Spread, N.Y. Times (Nov. 17, 2021).

47. Peter Calloway (@petercalloway), TWITTER (Apr. 1, 2022).

48. James Hohmann, Boudin's Recall Proves Democrats Have Lost the Public's Trust on Crime, Washington Post (June 8, 2022, 6:21 AM).

49. Roger Berkowitz, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, available here.

50. Adam Johnson, 4 Major Plot Holes in the “Organized Crime Rings Are Closing Walgreens!” Narrative, COLUMN (Oct. 15, 2021). See also supra chapter 2, note 13.

51. Eric Ting, New San Francisco Ad Blasts Chesa Boudin over Drugs. There's Just One Problem. SFGATE (May 5, 2022).

52. Nellie Bowles, How San Francisco Became a Failed City, The Atlantic (June 8, 2022). See Chris Herring (@cherring_soc), TWITTER (June 16, 2022, 3:58 PM), (summarizing the article's major false claims and omis sions about homelessness in San Francisco, including using incorrect statistics). See also Yasha Levine, Private Islands, Forgotten California Oligarchs, and Jewish Converts. Say Hello to Our Ruling Class, WEAPONIZED IMMIGRANT (Nov. 19, 2021).

53. Amanda Agan, Prosecuting Low-Level Crimes Makes Us Less Safe, Washington Post (Apr. 6 2021).