COMMENTARY
Anyone who lives in wildfire country knows the importance of “defensible space,” a buffer between a structure and the organic (aka flammable) material that surrounds it. The past few years have seen properties never before in harm’s way burned to a crisp, and those that survived know they’re now in a precarious position of being susceptible to wildfires.
How do you get rid of years, decades, eternities of flammable brush and grass around your property?
Here in the city, it’s not uncommon to see a herd of goats roaming around an open space, clearing the brambles to make way for a construction project or new landscaping. They’re adorable and hilarious, and for anyone who has only ever seen goats eating corn out of visitors’ hands in a petting zoo, it’s a reminder that they actually have a job.
Up north outside of Guerneville, my husband is helping a friend clear space on a property that narrowly escaped an inferno last year. There are still tracks from the firefighting equipment that moved in to respond to whichever way the wind might blow.
My husband and friend are in charge of eight goats on loan from a nearby farm. They’ve already nicknamed several of them: Butthead, Beavis, Peggy, and Bobby. A few days ago, checking in via video chat surrounded by the goats, my husband commented that if anything went awry, they’d blame it on the scapegoat.
A scapegoat is not a biological thing. It’s a Torahic reference, an odd translation for the second of two kids: the first sacrificed on Yom Kippur, the second sent into the wilderness to carry away all the sins of humankind.
I’m writing this as my husband herds goats, and in the aftermath of the recall of SF district attorney Chesa Boudin.
Boudin ran on a progressive platform to limit incarceration, won on a ranked-choice ballot, and took office immediately before the pandemic hit. For all these reasons and more — such as the open hostility of the police union during the campaign — cards were stacked against him, but Boudin would have four years to show how his ideas could have an impact.
Or not. For the third time in about 12 months, critics spent enough money and collected enough signatures to put a recall on the ballot rather than waiting for the next election to vote someone out. A statewide recall effort failed to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a local effort succeeded in removing three SF Board of Education members.
When the early returns showed a 60 percent vote to recall Boudin — a percentage that shrank in the following days — I admit my first reaction was to imagine excuses from the pro-recall folks when all the problems they are so desperate to solve, the same problems all San Franciscans are desperate to solve, don’t disappear. (Boudin’s term will officially end after the Board of Supervisors certifies the recall results; Mayor London Breed gets to appoint a replacement.)
I’m open to being proven wrong — that with Boudin gone we’ll see a decline in the broken glass from car windows and Nextdoor posts about home break-ins.
But on a structural level, what now happens to Boudin’s platform that won him the election: limited incarceration, justice reform, and holding bad cops accountable? Does his recall mean that San Francisco voters no longer want those things? Or did voters forget about those long-term goals when they were tempted with the idea of a scapegoat for San Francisco’s sins?
I’m not going to paint a rosy picture of these problems. People are rightly frustrated with petty theft, car break-ins, and finding their garages broken into. There is the chronic occurrence of drug dealing in neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin, where open-air fentanyl markets are killing hundreds of people per year and creating unsafe and unclean conditions for anyone walking by. There are some more egregious crimes too that many feel have been under-prosecuted, including a case in which Troy McAlister had been arrested several times before apparently driving a stolen car into two pedestrians, without having charges pressed.
I agree that Boudin has come across as arrogant, dismissive, and condescending, such as when he suggested that the defendant who allegedly attacked Vicha Ratanapakdee, and who later died, was suffering from a “temper tantrum.”
The exodus of employees from his office, including prosecutors Brooke Jenkins and Don du Bain who joined the recall effort, didn’t instill a lot of confidence.
But is the DA’s office any more or less a problem than other numerous city and county offices that knot each other up? I’m not so sure.
In our ongoing debates about open spaces, housing, crime, and small businesses, there doesn’t seem to be an endgame in mind. It’s only about what people want right now.
It would have helped if Boudin had acknowledged his part in the problem, which may have kept San Franciscans focused on long-term solutions. After all, when it comes to improving a seriously flawed (some would say broken) criminal justice system, there isn’t an instant way to measure progress. There is no immediate gratification. It takes incremental change, with bursts of innovation, and most of all, patience and openness from constituents to allow time for change to be measured.
We shouldn’t simplify this recall election as some right-wing takeover of San Francisco politics. My worry is that even progressive San Franciscans who voted to recall Boudin aren’t immune to the concept of immediate gratification. Don’t like something? There must be a way to immediately fix it: Vote someone out, or if that takes too long, recall them, even if they’re doing exactly what they said they’d do when you voted for them. The same way our culture is riddled with promises to lose weight fast, buy our way to happiness. We want an easy way to fix complicated problems.
I’m disappointed that this patience doesn’t seem to be an SF characteristic. In many of our ongoing debates about open spaces, housing, crime, and small businesses, there doesn’t seem to be an endgame in mind. It’s only about what people want right now, and of course we’d all love the problems to disappear through something as simple as a recall. We cannot call ourselves progressive if we look for scapegoats for all our problems.
We have a lot of work to do to clear generations’ worth of inequitable policies and practices, political corruption, and real fears and divisions in San Francisco. I wish we could unite in our love of the city, our spirit of inclusiveness, grit, and desire to solve the same problems, and slowly chomp away at the flammable material, rather than lighting it all on fire just because that’s a quicker way to get rid of it.
Erin Bank is a SF-based writer who covers topics related to mental health, social issues, local news, creativity, and science. She writes for the Sunset Beacon/Richmond Review and has been published in the Bold Italic, SF Weekly, and The Frisc. You can find her on the web, Facebook, and Twitter. When not sitting at a desk, she’s running the trails of Golden Gate Park, beachcombing with her husband and dog, trying to learn how to kitesurf, and keeping up her New York Times crossword puzzle streak.