Berkeley hires Chesa Boudin, former San Francisco prosecutor, to train CA law students.

Chesa Boudin, the former district attorney of San Francisco, has been appointed to lead a new research and advocacy center at UC Berkeley’s prestigious law school. The center aims to train the next generation of lawyers on criminal justice reform, as announced by the university here.

In his new role, Boudin plans to draw on networks of advocates, activists, judges, and legal practitioners to support reform and advance safety in ways that are rigorous, principled, and responsive to the lived experiences of directly impacted communities, as he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The university-sponsored project in the heart of the Bay Area comes as the region reels from the soft-on-crime policies supported by Boudin. Violence and property crime in Berkeley is at a 10-year high, and the college town’s next-door neighbor, Oakland, is seeing a groundswell of anger from residents who blame city leaders’ leniency for a sharp uptick in violent assaults.

Steve Smith, a senior fellow at the conservative Pacific Research Institute and author of a new study on crime in California, said, “UC Berkeley law school continues the progressive strategy of gaslighting Californians—as Boudin puts it—dismissing the public’s concerns as ‘fear mongering’ and ‘scare tactics.’”

Smith noted that the project doesn’t bode well for the future of prosecution in the Golden State. “The fears of California’s more than one million crime victims are real and justified, and they don’t want new prosecutors being trained to follow Boudin’s reckless path in communities across the state,” Smith said.

The university does not list the center’s funders. Neither Boudin nor Berkeley responded to a request for a list of donors for the new center.

Boudin’s political rise was bankrolled by groups funded by liberal megadonor George Soros, although the Democrat-aligned billionaire distanced himself from the prosecutor after the recall.