Myth vs. Fact
D.A. Chesa Boudin’s Record & Crime in San Francisco
The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin has propagated an avalanche of misinformation about him, the District Attorney’s Office, and crime in San Francisco. This fact sheet corrects their most pernicious myths.
Myth:
Boudin ignores police investigations and refuses to prosecute cases, particularly property crimes like retail theft.
The Facts
Boudin’s case filing rate is on par with some of his loudest critics, including Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert. According to data obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, as of June, Boudin’s prosecutors have filed charges in 56% of cases brought by city police; compared to Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s office filing in 45% of cases, and 59% filed by D.A. Schubert.
Boudin charges the bulk of organized retail theft cases that police bring to his office. According to records produced by the District Attorney’s office in response to a public information request, the office has charged 82% of cases this year and charged 83% last year,1 while charging over 55% of larceny cases overall.
Myth:
Since Boudin took office, there’s been a “crime wave” in San Francisco.
The Facts:
Overall, crime has decreased since Chesa Boudin took office. For example, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “In Boudin’s first year in office, overall reports of crime in San Francisco fell 23% compared with 2019, driven largely by a pandemic drop-off in opportunistic thefts such as auto break-ins. Reported robberies dropped 23%, assaults 14% and rape 45%. This year, overall crime reports are essentially flat—down an additional 1% through early August.”
And to take retail theft in particular—a favorite example of “disorder” and “lawlessness” by Boudin’s detractors—it’s actually down 36% from this same point in 2018, according to SFPD data.
The reduction of San Francisco’s jail population has had no measurable impact on crime, according to data reporters at the Chronicle, while other research has shown that such reductions during a pandemic almost certainly reduced Bay Area infections and saved lives.
Source: SFPD Incident Data, Graphic by The San Francisco Chronicle
Myth:
Even if the data shows that crime rates are down, that’s only because everyone knows that Boudin doesn’t prosecute cases and so no one bothers to report crime anymore.
The Facts:
There is no evidence that supports any San Francisco specific decrease in crime reporting. However, even if one took that claim seriously, this “lack of reporting” would have to account for a nearly 40% reduction in crime rates—which experts have noted is a totally implausible number.
That’s not the only problem with this strawman argument, though. Boudin has charged the vast majority of these cases police bring to him, so for those who believe that more criminal cases is the answer to shoplifting, San Francisco has a policing problem, not a Chesa Boudin problem. Moreover, if people are reporting less crime based on a perceived lack of prosecutorial will, that perception is based on a false narrative created by Boudin’s political opponents.
Myth:
Boudin’s leniency has led to a spike in murders and has generally made San Francisco less safe.
The Facts:
In 2020, as the pandemic gripped the nation and gun sales surged to record highs, homicides jumped significantly in cities across America—including cities led by Democrats and cities led by Republicans and in cities with status quo, tough-on-crime prosecutors. But San Francisco was an exception to this trend. According to a Chronicle analysis of SFPD data: “while San Francisco’s crime rates did deviate from previous trends in 2020, most types of violent crime actually plummeted — and all violent crime rates remain near their lowest levels since 1975.”
More specifically, in 2020 violent crime overall dropped by 21%. So far in 2021, violent crime overall is down 18% from this point in 2019, according to police data.
There were 7 more San Francisco homicides in 2020 than in 2019, but that number is neither surprising nor statistically significant—the 41 homicides in 2019 were the fewest since 1963, when SF had around 140,000 fewer residents.
Compare these numbers to Alameda County, home to Oakland just across the Bay, where the far more traditional Nancy O’Malley is District Attorney. There, homicides went from 96 in 2019 to 143 in 2020—a nearly 50% jump. In SF, homicides remained largely flat: 58 in 2016, 56 in 2017, 46 in 2018, 41 in 2019, 48 in 2020, and 35 so far in 2021.
Zooming out a bit further, an August report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice found that California’s Republican counties (based on the 2020 presidential election) have seen both a slower drop in crime and higher crime rates—especially for homicides and violent crime, but also for property crime—than Democratic counties. These Republican counties also arrest and imprison people at higher rates than Democratic counties.
While both violent and property crimes have dropped more precipitously in Democratic counties since the 1990s, homicide rates in Republican counties are now 28% higher than in Democratic counties—which include major urban centers such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.
And finally, setting aside Boudin and San Francisco in particular, there is newly published research and an investigative report aptly titled, “Don’t Blame Progressive Prosecutors For Rising Crime,” that further discredits the broader fear-mongering around “progressive” prosecutors like Boudin.
Based on arrests and cases filed for Penal Code 490.4 (Organized Retail Theft); PC 490.2 & PC 182 (Petty Theft & Conspiracy); PC 666 & PC 182 (Petty Theft with a Prior Theft Conviction & Conspiracy).