The Chronicle and Boudin: Creating Urban Myths

When I was assigned to SFPD’s Narcotics unit, I was exposed to the intersection of homeless drug users and narcotics street dealers, primarily of Honduran descent.  Recently, the Chronicle and District Attorney Chesa Boudin have been propagating representations that conflict with government statistics, surveys, and empirical evidence.

The Chronicle’s normalizes anomalies to meet their desired narrative:

Last week, the Chronicle published a column Homegrown and Homeless in Oakland, with a theme that homelessness is caused by economics and the pricing of housing.  To support this narrative, the Chronicle selected four unhoused individuals that were Oakland natives. 

While at SFPD, I mixed with and interviewed hundreds of unhoused individuals, and empirically I found that fewer than 10% attended a San Francisco high school.

Tipping Point is “a nonprofit organization that advances promising poverty-fighting solutions in the Bay Area”  and have a vested stake in the homeless nonprofit economy.  In 2019, they published a survey (pg. 19) that found that only 21% of homeless were born in San Francisco.  Hence, per Tipping Point’s findings, the statistical odds that the first four homeless people the Chronicle interviewed happened to be Oakland natives is approximately 1 in 600 (600:1)— or this is evidencing the Chronicle stacks the deck to meet their desired narrative.

On July 29, 2020, the Chronicle published a heart wrenching article on a seven-year-old homeless child named Theo.  And while I am not denying the existence of preteens that may be members of homeless families; I have never witnessed a homeless child living on a Bay Area street.

Ironically, the same day the article was published, Theo’s mom challenged the Chronicle on Twitter:

 A few months later, Theo’s mom solicited several neighborhood newspapers inquiring if they would help her refute the Chronicle piece.  Like the recent Oakland native piece, there seems to be a recurring issue of the Chronicle finding anomalistic samples that are unrepresentative of the total population. 

Boudin’s fiction about traffickers of Honduran drug dealers

At a July 26, 2020, virtual town hall, Boudin stunned an audience with the following statement regarding drug dealers:

   We need to be mindful of the impact our interventions have. Some of them have family members in Honduras who have been or will be harmed if they don’t continue to pay off the traffickers who brought them here.

For this column, I spoke to multiple officers that were recently or are still employed with the SFPD Narcotics unit.  Some of these law enforcement officers have been up on wires (government sanctioned eavesdropping of criminal narcotics enterprises’ cellphones.)  Over the course of my employment with SFPD, I interviewed or was involved in the arrest of hundreds of Honduran drug dealers.  Through our combined contacts with Honduran drug dealers, numbering in the thousands, not one law enforcement officer had ever heard of a single Honduran drug dealer’s family being threatened by traffickers. 

In fact, currently, my sources tell me Sureño gang members are charging Honduran drug dealers $50 per week for the privilege to sell poisonous fentanyl in the Tenderloin.  That conflicts with the logic that powerful international traffickers would allow Tenderloin gangs to extort fees before they are made whole.

It is frequently the intention of career public defenders, like Chesa Boudin, to try to create a small sense of doubt to law enforcement officers’ or witness’ testimony:

Officer, how do you know that my client didn’t just find the gun and was returning it to the nearest police station?

Like the Chronicle’s homeless series, Boudin is trying to create a sense of doubt through his unsubstantiated urban myth about Honduran families being harmed.

How Boudin’s use of the Honduran myth has created lawlessness in the Tenderloin

Miguel is Honduran and a Tenderloin drug dealer. 

Judges have issued orders for Miguel to stay-away from McAllister and Hyde Streets, the 600 block of Eddy Street, and Turk and Larkin Streets.

In January 2020, he was arrested with a large quantity of fentanyl.  Boudin dropped the case “in the interest of justice.” 

In both June of 2020 and July of 2020, Miguel was arrested with fentanyl.  Boudin “filed” those cases but has left them “open and pending” for well over a year.

In September 2020, at Turk and Larkin Streets where he was issued an ineffective stay-away-order, Miguel sold cocaine to an undercover police officer.  He was arrested with a ghost gun with an attached laser light, and a supermarket of narcotics: 1.5 ounces of fentanyl, meth, rock cocaine, and marijuana.

After a weekend in custody, Miguel was released to the streets with a GPS ankle monitor.  A few days later Miguel cut off the ankle monitor and has been a no-show to his scheduled court appearances.  There is an outstanding warrant for his arrest, which Boudin will surely scapegoat SFPD for not dropping everything to immediately find Miguel.

Boudin has failed in his three opportunities to keep this fentanyl-poison dealer off the streets.  And Miguel’s possession of a ghost gun demonstrates a) his disregard for Boudin’s prosecutorial prowess, b) the escalating Tenderloin violence as multiple ethnic groups and Sureño extorters fight for territory, and c) the increasing risk undercover officers now face. 

But in the meantime, other than his imagination, Boudin has not documented any violence that families in Honduras have suffered.   And considering Boudin’s nonexistent fentanyl prosecution, his $2.8 million budget request of our tax dollars for a DA fentanyl task force seems to be nothing short of a fraudulent money grab. 

The Chronicle and Boudin join forces

Over the past 30-years, the Chronicle has increasingly become more agenda-driven:

·      In a 2019, the Chronicle published a “signature series” arguing that because juvenile arrests were down, therefore juvenile crime must have declined.  The Chronicle completely failed to factor in SB 395, which greatly restricts law enforcement interactions with juveniles, or the effects of decriminalization by measure Prop 47.  Meanwhile, the SF Department of Emergency Management experienced an increase (February 2020) in juvenile being identified as crime suspects in 9-1-1 calls.

·      With Walgreens vacating San Francisco and Target and Safeway cutting hours because of increased shoplifting, the Chronicle’s Megan Cassidy incredulously reported that only six shoplifting crimes per day occur throughout the entire 49-square miles of our city.

·      Chesa Boudin is now spoon-feeding the Chronicle’s Susie Neilson his most flattering prosecutorial, but incomplete “charging” data.  (To be clarified in my next article.)

It is obvious that the Chronicle is on the verge of endorsing Chesa Boudin against the recall proposition.  It is one thing to for this legacy newspaper to advocate policy supported by representative data, it is quite another for this once great institution to put its finger on the scale of objectivity to mislead the residents of SF.

And the number Boudin’s fentanyl dead bodies continue to pile up in Supervisor Matt Haney’s district.