Welcoming the new D.A.

Chesa Boudin was inaugurated as San Francisco's new District Attorney yesterday. This reformer, experienced public defender, child of lefty jailbirds, was decidedly not what the city's elite had in mind for the job. But the position is elected and the people did want him and the new regime he stands for.

So naturally the SF Chronicle tried to appropriate the new guy to the a lineage of previous prosecutors who weren't there when it came to police abuses.

... while progressive prosecutors were once unusual around the country, San Francisco has a legacy of electing reform-minded district attorneys, including the last three, [George] Gascón, Kamala Harris and Terence Hallinan, who was elected in 1995. Other cities, like Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis, have followed San Francisco’s lead and recently elected progressive district attorneys.

I know a lot of San Franciscans who would question the "progressive" credentials of Harris and Gascón -- in fact they elected Boudin to clean up the office. But the Chron wants in on the new regime ... in a phrase used by John F. Kennedy: "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan."

For a more realistic account of Boudin's joy-filled inauguration, check out Mission Local. This story includes a video of Justice Sonya Sotomayor congratulating Boudin on his new job as well as a summary of some of the challenges the D.A. will face immediately. He's walking into a legacy of grievance and, as Supervisor Hillary Ronen reminded him,

“They will try to undermine your ideas in any way that they can — and they will attack you in brutal ways,” she said. “But they will only have the power to succeed if we let them — and we will not let them.”

For me, the most important quote from the event was from Emily Lee, the director of San Francisco Rising, which helped organize for Boudin during his campaign.

“Winning is hard — governing is harder,” Lee said, adding that Boudin was “put in [the DA’s] office by a movement — and he is now accountable to that movement.”

Too often we the people stop paying attention to elected officials once they take office. We can't do that.