Comment by dionidium
4 hours ago
We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
To some degree there simply isn't any plan you can have beyond that in the short term things will suck and hopefully the long term benefits will be worth it. If the existing incumbents are sufficiently ideologically opposed to your goals that they'll refuse to work rather than let you even inch towards them, there's not much you can do beyond try to replace them with people who don't have the relevant experience but are willing to work with you.
"Defund the police" didn't poll well so the progressive prosecutors who actually got elected were the ones who didn't admit that they were going to have to tear things down and start over (and maybe they didn't even realize it), but it was a very unsurprising outcome.
Prosecutors have no agency over police funding.
I mean, you have basically no control over law enforcement if they decide to arbitrarily slow down arrests or protest your leadership. This has been one of the more consistent issues in American politics and you can see it when the police union doesn't get their way they have a huge tantrum and make things worse for everyone involved.
This isn't really a statement on Boudin did or did not do since I don't have that knowledge but rather from separate experience seeing law enforcement shit itself during other elections.