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‘Hey, where are you?” Hannah Ege texted her husband, Sheria Musyoka. He’d left on a morning jog and had been gone for an hour and a half. Hannah was home, taking care of their three-year-old son. She began to freak out. She called and texted and called again. He never answered.

Speeding and drunk — at just shy of eight in the morning — Jerry Lyons barreled through a red light at an intersection in a stolen Ford Explorer. Lyons struck and killed Musyoka, a 26-year-old Dartmouth grad who had moved to San Francisco only ten days earlier with his wife and their son. After clipping Musyoka, Lyons collided with another car, causing an eight-car pileup that sent several other people to the hospital.

The San Francisco police arrested Lyons on multiple charges that morning in February, but this was not the first time he’d been arrested for drunk driving in a stolen car. On December 3, he had been arrested for driving under the influence, driving a stolen vehicle, and driving without a license. Before that, he’d been released from prison after serving time for a grand-theft conviction; in fact, Lyons had been arrested at least seven times in the Bay Area since his release from prison, and his rap sheet goes back a decade. Still, San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, delayed pressing charges against Lyons until a toxicology report confirmed that he had been inebriated, which, more than a month and a half later in January, it did. Lyons then had 14 days to turn himself in to the DA’s office. On the 13th day, he killed Musyoka. While COVID-era difficulties might have accounted for the medical examiner’s slow speed in returning test results, a different DA could have chosen to move forward sooner — taking necessary precautions — and charged Lyons with a DUI based on observable factors alone, such as the results of Lyons’s field sobriety test, his erratic driving in a stolen vehicle, and close scrutiny of his behavior.

Hannah Ege expressed her grief and pain to a local TV news station, railing at the district attorney’s reluctance to lock up repeat offenders. Whom does she blame for her husband’s death? “The DA,” she said. “This freak accident was no freak accident. It was someone who was out in the public who should not have been out in public.”

The Lyons mayhem is not an isolated case in the city by the bay. On New Year’s Eve, a parolee on the run from a robbery — also in a stolen car — sped through a red light, striking and killing two women, 60-year-old Elizabeth Platt and 27-year-old Hanako Abe, who were in the crosswalk. The driver, Troy McAlister, had been released twice by the district attorney in the previous year: the first time because Boudin refuses to pursue three-strike cases, of which McAlister’s was one; the second — as recently as December 20, when the SFPD arrested McAlister for driving a stolen car — because Boudin kicked the case to the state parole officers, who did nothing.

Welcome to San Francisco’s latest idiocy, a new experiment in governance where everything is allowed but nothing is permitted. A paradox, you might say, but take a walk down Market Street, down that great avenue in a great city in a great nation, and note the desolation of the empty streets, the used needles tossed on the sidewalks, and the boarded-up windows on storefronts. Consider that, at various unpredictable times in the last year, it has been illegal — for the sake of public safety during COVID — to run a mom-and-pop corner shop or to serve food at sidewalk cafés. Reflect for a moment that, since time immemorial, it has been illegal to build any new housing, because of the most onerous and confusing zoning laws in the known universe. Mark Zuckerberg can apparently influence national elections by tweaking algorithms, but he is powerless before the planning commission when it comes to building apartments for his employees. The city has banned plastic straws, plastic bags, and McDonald’s Happy Meals with toys. And yet, all the while, drug dealers sell their wares — COVID or no COVID — openly and freely at all hours of the day and night, users shoot up or pop fentanyl in public and defecate on the street, robbers pillage cars and homes with the ease of Visigoth raiders, and the district attorney frees repeat offenders who go on to sow disorder, pain, devastation, and grief. A profound melancholy hangs in the air of this city, punctuated only by the shrieks of a junkie dreaming of demons or by the rat-tat-tat-bam of the occasional firework. (Or was that a gun?) ...

How did it come to this? On January 8, 2020, Mayor London Breed swore in Chesa Boudin as the new district attorney of San Francisco in front of a packed house at the Herbst Theater. Boudin won the election by a nose in a runoff, with oily promises to feel the pain of all parties to a crime, both victims and perpetrators. He made pledges to enact “restorative justice” and prison reform through “decarceration.” U.S. Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor recorded a congratulatory video message, which was played at the swearing-in ceremony for Boudin and the crowd. “Chesa, you have undertaken a remarkable challenge today,” the justice said. “The hope you reflect is a great beacon to many.”

The task before Boudin was already monumental. Before he assumed his office, San Francisco ranked No. 1 in the nation in property crime. On average, thieves broke 60 car windows per day, with impunity. In 2014, California voters approved Proposition 47, a reform measure that reduced many felonies to ticketed misdemeanors, such as theft of less than $950 and hard-drug possession. There were more drug addicts on the streets than there were students in the schools. Tent encampments of homeless people had sprouted in every nook and alley and under every highway overpass. Commuters faced a daily gauntlet in the form of an appalling humanitarian crisis in the streets.

But Boudin immediately refused to take any responsibility for these issues. Among his first acts was to fire seven veteran prosecutors who were not on board with his radical views. (Over 30 prosecutors have left during his tenure because they don’t want to work for him.) Next, Boudin abolished the cash-bail system, so offenders are able to walk free after arrest. He rarely brings a case to trial: Out of the 6,333 cases to land on his desk since taking office, he has gone to trial only 23 times. This is one-tenth the rate of his predecessor, George Gascón, who was hardly tough on crime. Since the killing of George Floyd, there has been a shortage of cops, as officers retire in record numbers. San Francisco has also moved to defund the police, with plans to shift $120 million in law-enforcement funding to restorative-justice programs, housing support, and a guaranteed-income pilot, among other ideas.

To where does Boudin’s “great beacon” point? Over the last year, there have been more deaths from drug overdoses in San Francisco than from COVID-19. Walgreens has closed ten of its drugstores in the city because its shelves were being pillaged freely by shoplifters. According to SFPD’s CompStat, compared with last year, arson has increased 52 percent, motor-vehicle theft is up 21 percent, and burglaries have seen a 59 percent increase. One largely Asian neighborhood, the Richmond district, has reported a 342 percent spike in burglaries this year compared with last. Admittedly, some numbers are down, such as those for larceny and robbery. But police attribute these declines to the pandemic, since there are fewer opportunities for would-be criminals to commit such crimes as people shelter in place. One neighborhood association sent a letter in February to Boudin and Mayor Breed, begging them to restore public safety. The association also posted it on the Internet. “Our neighborhood can’t wait another day,” they wrote. “Our homes are repeatedly broken into and robbed. Our merchants suffer unsustainable losses from theft and smashed windows. Employees are threatened with guns. Residents are robbed at gunpoint on our own streets. The sound of gunshots is no longer unusual.” ...

Now, what rough beast slouches its way towards San Francisco? With a district attorney who won’t prosecute crimes, how long will it be until an anxious Google engineer defends himself from being harassed by a madman? Will envious arsonists light the Salesforce Tower on fire as a jacked-up mob courses through the streets burning and looting the Painted Ladies?

A desperate sun struggles through the fog. There may be one ray of hope. The city has recently approved the effort to recall Chesa Boudin from office. Locals could begin downloading signature-gathering petitions on March 12. If 10 percent of registered voters sign the petition, all voters may get the chance to vote the bum out. But even if they do, it will remain tragic for Musyoka, Platt, Abe, and others like them that the day did not come soon enough.