Free Republic

Democrats aren't just out of touch with America, they're out of touch with their own voters Black voters are concerned about violent crime. Most Americans agree, with one notable exception: White liberals. According to a recent Pew survey of registered voters, 82 percent of black Democrats said violent crime was a "very important" issue in the 2022 election, compared with just 33 percent of white Democrats. Overall, 61 percent of registered voters described violent crime as a very important factor when deciding who to vote for in the upcoming midterm election. The groups least likely to agree with that assessment...

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins on Monday announced a host of charges, including attempted murder, against alleged Paul Pelosi attacker, David DePape. "The charges that we are filing today include attempted murder, residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder as well as threats to a public official and their family," Jenkins said, per Fox News. DePape allegedly broke into the Pelosi household in San Francisco seeking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A 911 dispatcher later contacted the authorities and sent them to the home after interpreting Paul Pelosi's "coded" words through an open...

Faisal Gill has worked for a host of anti-Israel groups ...far-left views on community policing and crime are so extreme that Democratic representative Karen Bass, who is running to be the city’s mayor, withdrew her endorsement. Faisal Gill, a libertarian Republican-turned-progressive Democrat, is running to become L.A.’s city attorney, a powerful post that will give him the ability to decide what types of minor crimes are prosecuted. "The city attorney is not elected to defend the police," Gill states on his campaign website. He also says he wants to end cash bail, support safe injection sites, and reduce criminal prosecutions....

“Our team is terrified. They feel unsafe. Security guards don’t help because these theft rings know that security guards won’t/can’t stop them. It’s impossible for a retail store to operate in these circumstances, especially when cities refuse to take any action (despite us paying taxes well above any other state we operate in),” he said. Smith slammed the city for reducing police presence in the neighborhood, likely owing to demands from defund-the-police advocates, “despite mass-scale crime.” He recounted terrifying incidents he and his wife have experienced while visiting San Francisco, a city he “used to love” that has now deteriorated...

New San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins fired 15 people in her office on Friday, with one in particular prompting an outcry. It comes in the first week after Jenkins was appointed by Mayor London Breed following the recall of Chesa Boudin. "Today, I made difficult, but important changes to my management team and staff that will help advance my vision to restore a sense of safety in San Francisco by holding serious and repeat offenders accountable and implementing smart criminal justice reforms," Jenkins said in a statement. Managing Attorney Arcelia Hurtado was the first member of the office to...

New San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is speaking out after someone recorded her first meeting with senior staffers last Friday without her permission. SFGATE first reported on what was said in that meeting, which was described as "icy" by attendees. On Wednesday, the San Francisco Examiner published a story with direct quotes Jenkins used in the meeting thanks to "a recording of the meeting obtained by The Examiner." Under California law, it is generally illegal to record a private conversation unless all parties present give consent. Jenkins, who was appointed by Mayor London Breed to replace the recalled Chesa...

San Francisco’s no-nonsense new district attorney is cleaning house — as she reportedly laid off 15 staffers inherited from her booted, woke predecessor. The firings Friday by Brooke Jenkins come nearly two weeks after she was appointed district attorney by Mayor London Breed following the recall of her much-maligned predecessor Chesa Boudin, according to SFGATE.com. “Today, I made difficult, but important changes to my management team and staff that will help advance my vision to restore a sense of safety in San Francisco by holding serious and repeat offenders accountable and implementing smart criminal justice reforms,” Jenkins said in a...

San Francisco Mayor London Breed says a potential ballot measure to move citywide elections to presidential years is a democratic socialist power grab, and the proposal's author is pushing back. Breed, a Democrat, characterized Supervisor Dean Preston's proposal to hold the next mayor, sheriff, district attorney, city attorney elections and treasurer in 2024 – and every four years after that – rather than in 2023 as Preston and a "group of democratic socialists" deciding "they want to have more control and power of being able to get their people elected." Preston, the board's first democratic socialist supervisor in decades, introduced...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hate crimes driven by homophobia and racism resulted in a 33% surge in reported incidents in California last year, following a similar spike in hate-driven attacks the year prior and confirming what officials have been hearing anecdotally since the pandemic began, the state’s attorney general said Tuesday. Attorney General Rob Bonta said that crimes against Black people were again the most prevalent in 2021, climbing 13% from 2020 to 513 reported incidents. Hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias increased nearly 50% to 303 incidents while crimes against Asian Americans were up 178% to 247 incidents....

Maybe San Franciscans aren't as blindly left as they appear to the rest of the country. First, Democrat mayor London Breed had to backtrack on defunding the police when faced with the reality of what happened after the police were defunded. Crime increased...a lot. Then the public recalled members of the school board who were more interested in pushing ideology than keeping schools open. Democrat district attorney Chesa Boudin didn't see or refused to see what was happening in his city. Residents grew tired of his failure to go after criminals and enforce laws. Boudin, a political newcomer, took office...

Colombia, which is America's strongest ally, has always had the most level-headed voters in the region. They've had two conservative parties, sometimes at once, and voters there have always rejected the crazy left, which in their case, is a Castro-grade revolutionary crazy grade of left, with Bill Ayers-types on steroids. They did, after all, fight a 60-year war against Marxist narcoterrorists, with only a few university wokesters defending them. So it was shocking news that on Sunday, Colombians went and elected just about the worst leftist of this stripe, a former M-19 narcoguerrilla named Gustavo Petro, president, turning one of...

The DA’s office apparently did not record the specific county jail sentences for many cases in its data dashboard. For the convictions where the DA provided specific county jail sentencing information, roughly half of the sentences agreed to were eight days or less, and some were as low as one or two days. The DA’s data, along with court records and information from DataSF, tell a chilling tale of gang members, drug dealers, and multiple violent repeat offenders sometimes serving just a short time in county jail, released on probation, or sent to diversion programs.

an francisco was conquered by the United States in 1846, and two years later, the Americans discovered gold. That’s about when my ancestors came—my German great-great-great-grandfather worked at a butcher shop on Jackson Street. The gold dried up but too many young men with outlandish dreams remained. The little city, prone to earthquakes and fires, kept growing. The Beats came, then the hippies; the moxie and hubris of the place remained. My grandmother’s favorite insult was to call someone dull. I learned young that it was impolite to point when a naked man passed by, groceries in hand. If someone...

Representatives for George Soros no longer want to be associated with disgraced prosecutor Chesa Boudin now that he's been rebuked by the liberal voters of San Francisco, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. Hours after Boudin was recalled by double-digits on Tuesday, representatives for the liberal billionaire contacted the Free Beacon to reject its characterization of Boudin as a "George Soros darling." The Soros representatives from public relations firm BerlinRosen say he never contributed to Boudin, and that it is wrong to label Boudin a "Soros prosecutor." "We disagree with any analysis that labels any prosecutor as a ‘Soros prosecutor'—each...

On Tuesday, San Francisco’s largely liberal residents successfully recalled their woke district attorney, Chesa Boudin. The majority of San Franciscans held Boudin accountable for the city’s skyrocketing crimes and the deterioration of the quality of life. The recall’s success has significant implications for San Francisco and the rest of the country. 1. Wokeness Gone Too Far, Even For Democrat VotersSince elected San Francisco’s DA in November 2019, Boudin has become the standard-bearer of the so-called progressive prosecution movement, which includes Los Angeles County DA George Gascón (he previously served as San Francisco’s DA), Chicago Cook County DA Kim Foxx, Philadelphia...

A new report concludes that there are 75 radical left-wing prosecutors linked to billionaire Democrat mega-donor George Soros, who has been spending lavishly in recent years to elect proponents of “criminal justice reform” across the country. The report, by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), is the first of its kind to put such a large figure on Soros’s role. When Soros’s role in such elections was first reported during the 2018 election cycle, the Los Angeles Times identified 21 races in which he was involved, and suggested that he might have been involved in far more that were...

San Franciscans’ landslide repudiation of Chesa Boudin’s de-prosecution strategy is good for San Francisco, of course — but it’s also good for all big, dense cities such as New York. It’s even good for the climate. Cities only work when people behave according to common standards — and the de-prosecution movement has proven that absent an external deterrent, enough people will behave hellishly to make life hell for everyone else. San Franciscans voted to remove Boudin from office for a simple reason: He couldn’t deliver on his promise. The supposedly idealist young prosecutor promised to cut crime while declining to...

San Francisco on Tuesday voted to recall its progressive district attorney amid rising anger at the city's crime-ridden state. Chesa Boudin, 41, had been widely expected to lose his job and on Tuesday, 60.5 percent of the electorate, or 70,730 people, voted to recall him. Thirty nine point five percent thought he should carry on. Only 24 percent of the city's 495,000 voters turned out to vote. Recall proponents cheered the news at a victory party, with California state leaders of the hotel and retailers associations lauding Boudin's removal as a sign that visitors, shoppers and employees will be prioritized...

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled by San Francisco voters Tuesday night, and when speaking to supporters afterward, said that he was recalled because of general frustrations about San Francisco crime and economic hardship brought on by the pandemic. "People are angry, they're frustrated, and I want to be very clear about what happened tonight: The right-wing billionaires outspent us three to one, they exploited an environment in which people are appropriately upset, and they created an electoral dynamic where we were literally shadowboxing," Boudin said. "Voters were not given an opportunity to choose between criminal justice reform...

Voters in San Francisco have chosen to recall embattled District Attorney Chesa Boudin following a recall effort centered on his handling of rising crime across the city. San Francisco voted to recall Boudin with 61%, compared to 39% who wanted him to stay as the district attorney, according to results at the time the Associated Press called the race. Boudin was elected in 2019 with 50.8% of the vote and was sworn in as San Francisco's 29th district attorney on Jan. 8 2020.