SAN FRANCISCO – Tamara Freedman has always considered herself a true San Francisco Democrat.
The frame shop owner is a proud environmentalist and pro-choice supporter and believes in the city’s status as a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.
But with addicts using city-issued straws and foil to inhale fentanyl and needles to inject it, then slumping over in a stupor for the rest of the day in front of her Russ Street shop, she and her friends are having something of a political identity crisis.
“All of my friends considered themselves fairly progressive,” she said. “But they’re speaking now of this new term of ‘I guess I’m not as liberal as I thought.’”
With a backlash brewing against far-left politics, this city once known for its Summer of Love appears headed for a Summer of Tough Love.
The battle is playing out in Tuesday’s primary with a recall campaign targeting San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a former public defender who promised to divert nonviolent criminals away from jails and into rehabilitation programs and, fairly or not, has become the symbol of everything wrong with San Francisco. Recent polls suggest a bleak outlook for Boudin’s chances, with most showing support for him trailing by a significant margin.
The country is watching; even the Wall Street Journal weighed in to endorse the recall. Symbols of San Francisco as a city of “extreme tolerance run amok” are frequent fodder for conservative media and late-night comedians. And they’re fueling political reckonings in other Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles, where progressive District Attorney George Gascon – San Francisco’s former DA – is facing his own recall movement amid a crime surge there.
The San Francisco recall is the latest in a string of political tests for progressives here. In February, voters ousted three board of education members portrayed as more concerned about renaming schools they considered symbols of oppression than reopening them during the pandemic. Just last month, Pride Parade organizers came under fire from the mayor and others for a plan to ban police officers from marching in uniform, a lingering symbol of brutality to some in the LGBTQ community. Even San Francisco’s Archbishop, a Catholic leader whose conservative values rarely jibed with the city by the bay, is piling on with his refusal to give communion to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her support of abortion.
And you can barely tune into a Golden State Warriors playoff game without NBA analyst Charles Barkley disparaging the city, quipping last month that a good rain storm might “clean up those dirty ass streets there.”
On Thursday, the day the Warriors hosted the first game of the NBA Finals, clean-up crews appeared in force in some of the grittiest parts of the city’s South of Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods.
That was too late for Colby Boles, whose wife and son moved fulltime to their vacation home near Lake Tahoe two years ago when addicts set up tents on his street and his wife announced that “we can’t live here anymore.”
He’s always considered himself a liberal Democrat, but these days, he’s not sure what to call himself.
“I don’t want to call myself conservative, but I think there are some overly liberal approaches that aren’t really working,” said Boles, 52, who returns to the family’s San Francisco home for work every two weeks. “It’s kind of like all carrot and no stick here – and things seem to have gotten progressively worse.”
It’s difficult to imagine that just two years ago, when George Floyd protesters were gassed in Lafayette Park in front of the White House shortly before President Trump posed with a Bible in front of a church across the street, that any San Francisco Democrat would be questioning their liberal bonafides.
So much has changed.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat who proposed cutting the police budget $120 million at the height of the Defund the Police movement, ordered increased funding for police and a crackdown in the Tenderloin after brazen lootings in Union Square, smash-and-grab crime sprees and a critical opioid crisis on the streets.
It’s time for the “reign of criminals” to come to an end, she said in a fiery speech at the landmark City Hall in December, as an oblivious bride and groom posed for photos on the marble staircase behind her. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bull — that has destroyed our city.”
In laying out her new budget this past week, she called public safety her top priority and proposed adding $50 million to the police department, with a focus on hiring and retaining more officers.
While nearly two-thirds of the city’s registered voters are Democrats – and another 27% are unaffiliated with a party – San Francisco is far more than a one-size-fits-all liberal monolith.
In 2019, Breed was among the city’s long list of big-name establishment Democrats – including Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and then-future Vice President Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco DA herself – who endorsed one of Boudin’s more moderate opponents, Suzy Loftus, the interim DA. Boudin’s biggest endorsement wasn’t local. It was Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
If the Boudin recall succeeds Tuesday, San Francisco-based public relations crisis specialist Sam Singer says it might be just what the city needs to rebuild its reputation nationally.
The recall “will be a bellwether moment as to whether the image of San Francisco changes or whether the city continues to be mired in a reputation of being soft on criminals, soft on crime, and anything goes at any time.”
But to progressive political consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio from Oakland, homelessness and addiction and Boudin aren’t the real problems.
“I think that 22-year-old multimillionaire-slash-billionaires is everything that is wrong with San Francisco,” she said. The problems on the streets “are a symptom of a gilded age that is very alive and well in San Francisco. It’s very hard to deny that inequality in income is catastrophic, and it’s destroying people’s lives.”
The Boudin campaign likewise says homelessness and drugs were a crisis long before Boudin took office, and it’s unfair to blame all the ills of the city on one man. And campaign spokesman Jim Ross disputes the idea that the recall effort is a centrist Democrat uprising, instead calling it a Republican-driven ploy that is “purely a political power grab by forces that want to redo the 2020 election.”
Indeed, as in other major cities across the country, voter perceptions aren’t truly aligned with crime statistics. In San Francisco and elsewhere, murders are up but most violent crime has stayed near historic lows. Shoplifting and motor vehicle thefts, however, did spike in San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic and remain high.
But the pervasive drug use, which Freedman encounters in front of her frame shop, rarely results in arrests.
“San Franciscans have a right to be outraged,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in an editorial, opposing the recall. “But prematurely sacking the district attorney won’t be a magic fix.”
Voters signed up for Boudin’s rehabilitation-rather-than-incarceration plan, the editorial reasoned, and should give it time.
Adam Mesnick, the owner of the Deli Board sandwich shop on Folsom Street, is tired of waiting. Known as a “video vigilante” for posting images of drugs and despair along his walk to work, he now gives blight tours through the SOMA and Tenderloin to TV crews from CNN and the BBC.
“Things have to get really awful,” he said, “for there ever to be any movement forward.”
He’s not so much upset that the city hands out free, clean syringes as part of its “harm reduction” plan to prevent disease and death, but the idea that the centers would corral the users into a safe, fenced-off space isn’t working. They’re still spilling throughout the neighborhood – and taking the free needles and straws with them.
“I just think a lot of people stayed in their homes for an entire two years through COVID and then realized the decimation that happened in the city,” he said. “I call it the Great Reset.”
But the Rev. Amos Brown, who heads the local NAACP, says if anything, the crisis on the streets and recall effort that followed is less a realization and more of a revelation that “so-called progressives” buckle when put to the test.
At least Boudin, he says, “listens and he’s attempting to do something that most of this criminal justice system has not been about, restorative justice.”
Whatever Boudin is doing, however, is not working for Freedman or, she says, the people on the streets in front of her shop.
“Right now in San Francisco, it’s all about being nice,” she said. “But all it does is allow this certain level of inhumanity that’s existing in any tent community or anybody who’s just lying there with a blanket over their head.”
On Thursday, clean up crews removed metal planters on Russ Street that Freedman and her neighbors had hoped would discourage addicts from setting up camp in front of their businesses. The city had cited the business owners for obstructing the sidewalks, but Freedman shrugged it off: the containers, after all, had become de facto toilets anyway.
Fortunately, she said, not all of San Francisco looks like this. Her own neighborhood across town doesn’t have this problem.
“A lot of it is very, very beautiful,” she said. “It’s totally lovely and beautiful and untouched.”
She stopped and thought for a moment.
That is, she said, “except for the people driving around at night trying to break into your garages.”
