What is most amazing about this story is how transparent U. Cal at Berkeley is, even proud, about it. Amazing and alarming. The American far left is so confident now that it doesn’t attempt to disguise its most radical and destructive impulses.

Here’s the short version: the most radically progressive city in the country essentially fired its even more progressive district attorney for allowing the city to begin a death spiral into lawlessness. So despite that failure—indeed perhaps because of it— he was just named the founding executive director of the new Criminal Law and Justice Center at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.

The city is San Francisco, and the former DA is Chesa Boudin. Boudin, who has been discussed here before, is really an antimatter prosecutor: he doesn’t believe in prosecution, law enforcement, or laws, really. The son of Sixties radicals, members of the violent Weathermen group, his mission in life is to “dismantle the system,” as they used to say (and are now saying again) on college campuses. Among all the so-called “Soros prosecutors” allowing cities to decline into urban hellscapes where shoplifting is considered a right and police are hesitant to police, Boudin was the worst by far. Imagine what it says about our elite educational institutions that one of them, after seeing him removed for placing his ideological delusions above his duty, said, “Hey! This is the perfect guy to head up our new criminal justice center in our law school!”

It boggles the mind, or would, if we had not already observed the rapid and so-far unimpeded ethics rot in academia. Here’s part of Berkeley’s announcement:

Chesa Boudin has spent his whole life grappling with incarceration and its far-reaching implications. As the founding executive director of Berkeley Law’s new Criminal Law & Justice Center, he sees an exciting opportunity to build on his work of transforming the criminal legal system in profound ways.

“A lifetime of visiting my biological parents in prison and my work as a public defender and district attorney have made clear that our system fails to keep communities safe and fails to treat them equitably,” Boudin says. “I’m thrilled to join the nation’s premier public law school and engage with brilliant scholars and students to drive meaningful change by elevating the lived experience of those directly impacted.”

He transformed the criminal legal system in profound ways in San Francisco, all right. He just about destroyed it. From an earlier post:

Boudin had, it is far to say, no qualifications for the job of the head prosecutor of a major U.S. city with a growing crime problem. He had never prosecuted a case. But then he didn’t think most cases should be prosecuted…The voters are 100% responsible for electing him, and it is tempting to say that they deserve to have their city falling apart around them, except that innocent people are being hurt…After two days in office, he fired seven top prosecutors, replacing them with public defenders. Within months he had released almost 40% of the city’s prisoners. Shockingly–well, to those who voted for him, I guess—homicides have increased sharply, along with burglaries and carjackings. Arson is up by almost 50%. From taking office in 2019 to March of this year, Boudin has tried just 23 cases. For comparison, his predecessor, also a progressive, brought more than ten times as many cases to trial over an equivalent period. Prosecutors in neighboring Alameda county dismissed 11% of felonies brought to them by police; Boudin has dismissed 40%. Of the 131 arrests made for domestic violence in the last three months of 2020, Boudin dismissed all but 20. Nor is he willing prosecute the dealers behind the explosion in fentanyl overdose deaths in the city.

Now Berkeley wants him to train lawyers to do the same from coast to coast. The scary part is, it isn’t just Berkeley. Boudin’s total failure in San Francisco is viewed by an amazing proportion of Democrats as just a hiccup on the way to Utopia. What will it take to convince dedicated, unmovable progressives that in this area, at least, they are not just dead wrong, but dangerously wrong? In a video message at his swearing in ceremony in January 2020, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—you know, one of the “non-fascist” justices— told Boudin that “the hope you reflect is a great beacon to many.” Brilliant as usual, Sonia. Here’s a letter in response to the Berkeley story in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Myopic people who tried to ruin a good man. You Failed. Chesa says it all this morning in The New York Times. “I absolutely do not agree with scapegoating or attacking immigrants for what are clearly deep-rooted structural inequities and a public health crisis,” Boudin said. “It has never worked, and it’s often been a red flag for fascism. Scapegoating immigrants is not who we are in San Francisco, and it will not make us safer.”

About that Times story, which goes out of its way to portray Boudin as unfairly maligned in his previous job (the news media is a partner in the academia-public sector corruption enterprise) : Boudin is also quoted as saying this in defending his decision to charge two police officers for on-duty shootings,  cases that his successor as DA  later dropped, and called politically motivated:

“I campaigned on that issue. It wasn’t political. It was what voters wanted.”

In other words, it was politically motivated.