On June 7, 2022, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin will face a recall vote. 

The campaign to remove him from office is backed by wealthy donors and has strong support from different communities, but it’s not deeply rooted in fact. 

The basic premise for the recall: critics claim that crime is on the rise, and the DA’s embrace of decarceration — a policy that seeks to reduce the number of people we send to jail — is directly to blame. However, in 2021, just 4.2% of the incidents that were reported to SFPD resulted in an arrest, and many residents grumble that the police are on a wildcat strike. 

To learn more about what’s really driving this recall, I interviewed Boudin and Mission Local Managing Editor Joe Eskenazi.