WSJ launches editorial broadside on San Francisco and new DA Chesa Boudin

Last week San Francisco voters said, “more, please.” Weekend ballot counts clinched the election by a thin margin of far-left public defender Chesa Boudin as district attorney. Mr. Boudin has been described as part of a wave of “progressive prosecutors,” like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, who are winning elections in liberal cities. These prosecutors lecture the public about racism, take an adversarial tone toward police, and often oversee a spike in crime, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods.

The press fixated on the 39-year-old Mr. Boudin’s “remarkable biography,” which it certainly is for a prosecutor. His parents were members of the left-wing terrorist group Weather Underground. They were imprisoned for felony murder for their role perpetrating the Brinks heist of 1981 in which their accomplices gunned down two police officers and a security guard.

Mr. Boudin says rightly that he shouldn’t be judged by his parents’ actions. Yet he made their incarceration a centerpiece of his campaign, explaining that it showed him the injustice of the criminal-justice system. He rarely if ever expressed sympathy for the murdered officers, and San Francisco’s police force was a major target of his campaign. At his election party last week supporters erupted in profane chants about the Police Officers Association.

After college Mr. Boudin moved to Venezuela to work for Hugo Chávez’s dictatorship and in 2009 wrote an article hailing Chávez’s successful elimination of term limits. A Marxist can in theory faithfully enforce the laws of California, yet Mr. Boudin says he won’t. “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc should not and will not be prosecuted,” he said in an ACLU candidate questionnaire.

Mr. Boudin has blamed San Francisco’s homelessness crisis on evictions and vows to crack down on “corporate landlords.” Most homeless are mentally ill and the crisis has grown worse despite the city’s massive investment in public housing. Harassing property owners will further increase rents and inequality.

Left-wing prosecutors sometimes denounce overly-aggressive prosecutions when they really want to turn their powers against ideologically disfavored groups. In addition to landlords, Mr. Boudin promises to prosecute Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents if they “kidnap” San Franciscans.

Voters can afford to indulge experiments like Mr. Boudin’s partly because they benefit from protection by the federal authorities. U.S. Attorney for Northern California David Anderson in August launched a major initiative to “combat endemic drug trafficking” in the Tenderloin. Yet Mr. Boudin’s commitment to turn a blind eye to nonviolent crime will test the limits of livability in remaining middle-class neighborhoods.

Californians look like they’re intent on empowering a leftist leadership model that is worsening living standards for all but the most privileged Silicon Valley and Hollywood residents. We hope one day they come to their senses. In the meantime we hope that, in the interest of residents’ safety, Mr. Boudin can come to a modus vivendi with the police officers reeling from his radical campaign.