Well, Chesa Boudin has finally done it: he's gotten himself into the San Francisco D.A.'s seat, after a lifetime of standing up for crooks and mastering criminal "justice" from Bill Ayers's stepdad berth and Hugo Chávez's knee.

Like the way criminal justice works in Caracas?  In San Francisco, Hugo Chávez's trusted adviser is now there to help.  He's there to "transform," as he says.  That's his brand, as the Bay Area tech marketing hipsters say.

This won't work out too well if you've got bums vomiting at your doorstep, gang members shooting with muzzle flashes 'round corners, and junkies setting up camp on your sidewalk.  We've already seen the boulder-warfare some of the homeowners are putting up in a desperate bid to stop it.  Such people can probably now look forward to getting arrested.

Boudin spoke at his election celebration in supposedly conciliatory terms, but if you look closely, he wasn't conciliatory, and his remarks were very anti-police.

Here's the San Francisco Chronicle report:

When Chesa Boudin is sworn in as San Francisco's new district attorney, he said, he will immediately get to work reforming the city's criminal justice system. Some goals, like ending mass incarceration, will take time. But others, like doing away with gang enhancements and ending money bail, will begin on day one, he said.

Ending mass incarceration on the logic that there are a lot of them in the can puts a lot of thugs out on the streets to prey on the locals.  In Chavista Venezuela, that was useful for keeping the street protests down, of course.  Boudin uses the more Sorosian argument that the only reason these criminals are in the can is racism, not anything they might have done.

He also says he's going to end "gang enhancements," which means extra charges for doing things gang leaders want their gangster peons to do, such as pick off an innocent bystander to prove bona fides.  No wonder the Police Officer's Union called a Chesa D.A.-ship a gangster's delight.  That certainly ends penalties for thugs for "only obeying orders," as the Nazis at Nuremberg put it.  Gang enhancements, said young Chesa, "are explicitly racist." 

His other "transform" initiative is to end money bail for assorted acts of thuggery.  Ending money bail will make it even more profitable to commit crimes — and already every thief in San Fran gets a "free" $950 to steal from merchants as it is, given that no one gets busted for anything less.  Now there's no need for cash bail for even those who take more.

Here's another sleazy set of false conciliations from the stepson of "Guilty as Hell, Free as a Bird."  Commenting on the opposition of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, Boudin made the appearance of sounding nice:

"I'm not a vindictive person, and I don't hold a grudge," Boudin said. 

Then the weasel words came out:

"There's a lot of work to be done to rebuild the relationship between POA leadership and the communities of San Francisco."

Translation: In other words, the POA has a problem with the "communities."  There's no POA problem with him, despite those POA ads that said just that.  The only problem the POA has is with the people, and Chesa, who, as I said, learned everything at Hugo Chávez's knee, embodies "the people," kind of the same way Chávez (and, for that matter, his skunky socialist sidekick, the now -booted Evo Morales) declared, "I am the people."  He doesn't see himself as the problem.  He doesn't see his supporters who chanted on election night at his headquarters, the leftist chant "F--- the POA" as the problem; the only problem out there is how the POA opposes "the people."

There's just "work to do," he says, leaving off the pronoun.  He's not going to take responsibility for any of this or even admit that the cops have a problem with him (and his stepdad, who was likely responsible for murdering one of theirs decades ago and who got away with it).  In the phony picture Boudin wants to sell, it's just the people versus the cops, and pay no attention to that homeowner trying to get the junkies off his painted lady Victorian or the young female who's just been assaulted and mugged by an illegal alien on Market Street.

Creepily enough, there probably will be some kind of comity and glad-handing between Chesa and the cop union, which, like everything in San Francisco, is leftist.

It will come at the expense of the people.  The Ferguson effect will kick in, and cops will stop answering calls.  They'll retire at their desks, because why risk becoming one of Chesa's political grandstanding examples in the act of trying to stop a crime?  The pension stays intact, and the cops retire at their desks. There won't be any sticking of one's neck out. Having lived in San Francisco in the 1990s, I learned of the dynamic going on, but now it should accelerate.

We saw this in Baltimore, we saw it in New York, cops not sticking their necks out and the criminals having a field day. Good luck to San Franciscans on this Caracas-ification of their fair city -- it will become like Caracas because Chavez knew the value of a cowed citizenry that came of cops who no longer enforced the law.

If there's any silver lining to this for the rest of us, the city will spin into a real hellhole of Caracas-style crime and violence and Chesa's name will be on it even as he blames racism and anyone but himself. He's in his job now because he probably wants higher office, on the Kamala Harris model. With a record like Chavez's on crime and a showcase city to show how it works in the U.S, he won't get elected to anything. 

Image credit: Jim Hoft via Twitter screen shot.