In San Francisco, public defender Chesa Boudin has been declared the winner of the district attorney’s race. Boudin is the child of Weather Underground activists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, and he learned the news that he’d won the race by a razor-thin margin while he was on the plane flying back from visiting his father in prison. Boudin ran on a platform of ending cash bail and dismantling the war on drugs. Some San Francisco leaders had accused the Police Officers Association of trying to buy the district attorney race, accusing the officers’ association of spending up to $650,000 on ads attacking Boudin. This is Boudin speaking on Democracy Now! ahead of the election.
Chesa Boudin: “Being a progressive prosecutor, Amy, is not just about decarceration, reducing racial disparities and so on. It’s also about making sure we are using the tremendous power and discretion of the District Attorney’s Office to enforce the laws equally. That means prosecuting corporate landlords when they commit fraud. It means prosecuting police when they commit murder or perjury. It means prosecuting corporations when they dump toxic waste into our communities, as they did in the Hunters Point shipyards. And it means having a broader vision of using the District Attorney’s Office to actually keep our communities safe, not simply wage a racist war on drugs.”