Municipal crime datasets comparing pre- and post-recall statistics reveal measurable shifts in public safety outcomes — from San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin recall to Los Angeles’s rejection of George Gascon. The data tells a story that progressive criminal justice advocates would rather not hear.
San Francisco: The Boudin Effect
When San Francisco voters recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin in June 2022 — with the pro-recall campaign raising $5.7 million versus just $224,000 for the anti-recall effort — critics dismissed it as a reactionary spasm. The data suggests otherwise.
Under Boudin’s successor, Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s crime statistics showed significant improvement. Car break-ins — the quality-of-life crime most associated with the city’s decline — dropped 54% between 2023 and 2024. Overall larceny theft fell 37% over the same period. Violent crime reached a 20-year low in 2024.
The prosecution pipeline changed dramatically. Misdemeanor diversion rates — the percentage of cases where charges are dropped in exchange for participation in alternative programs — fell from 70% during the Boudin era to 60% in 2024, then to 40% in early 2025. More cases were being prosecuted. More offenders were facing consequences. And the crime rate was declining.
Los Angeles: The Gascon Rejection
In November 2024, Los Angeles voters rejected George Gascon in favor of challenger Nathan Hochman — a former federal prosecutor who campaigned on reversing Gascon’s policies of declining to seek sentencing enhancements, eliminating cash bail requests, and reducing prosecution of low-level offenses.
Gascon’s tenure had been defined by ideological commitments that overrode prosecutorial discretion. He filed 16 criminal cases involving 25 officers for use of excessive force between 2021 and 2023 — compared to just 1 case in the prior 8 years. He ended death penalty prosecutions and resentenced 29 people from death row to life without parole. Whether these policies represented justice reform or prosecutorial abdication depended on whether you were a criminal justice academic or a crime victim.
The Data Pattern
The recall and replacement of progressive prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles represents a natural experiment in criminal justice policy. The same cities, the same demographics, the same police departments — but different prosecution philosophies. And the results, while subject to legitimate debate about causation versus correlation, point in a consistent direction: more prosecution correlates with less crime.
This finding is uncomfortable for the progressive criminal justice movement, which has argued for years that incarceration doesn’t reduce crime and that prosecution is itself a form of harm. The post-recall data doesn’t prove that argument wrong in every context — but it demonstrates that in these specific cities, the shift from lenient to aggressive prosecution was followed by measurable improvements in public safety.
The Nationwide Implications
The San Francisco and Los Angeles results are being studied by criminal justice researchers and political strategists alike. For researchers, the before-and-after comparison provides rare data on the impact of prosecution philosophy on crime rates. For political operatives, it provides a playbook: progressive prosecutors can be recalled, their replacements can change policy overnight, and the results are visible quickly enough to matter in the next election cycle.
The progressive prosecutor movement isn’t dead — well-funded organizations continue to support candidates in district attorney races across the country. But the San Francisco and Los Angeles recalls have established a template for accountability that didn’t exist before. Voters who lived through the consequences of progressive prosecution now have proof that the alternative works better.
Eduardo Bacci is an investigative journalist at The Investigative Journal. Data sources include SF OpenData crime statistics, LAPD CompStat data, and Ballotpedia recall records.