Los Angeles Should Follow San Francisco’s Path to Recovery — Says Man Who Helped Set Back Both

A former aide who served and defended two disastrous DAs now offers advice on urban governance.

Alex Bastian has lived and worked in California’s two most important cities, and he has advice for Los Angeles: Be more like San Francisco.

San Francisco “is my hometown,” he wrote recently in The Hill, while Los Angeles “has been my home for many chapters of my life.” However, he observed, “they seem to be moving in different directions.”

Just a few years ago, “San Francisco had become the national symbol of urban decline.” Today, its “cleaner streets, new investment and improving economic indicators” reflect a rejection of “ideological purity.” Los Angeles, by contrast, “is exactly where San Francisco found itself only a few years ago.”

“San Francisco’s progress,” he writes, “offers a roadmap for Los Angeles.”

It’s not until the tagline that you discover Bastian is no neutral observer. He’s president and CEO of the Hotel Council of San Francisco. But he is more than a paid cheerleader for Bay Area hotels — and far too modest when he says that he merely lived and worked in California’s two greatest cities.

In San Francisco and Los Angeles, Bastian was a high-profile government official who promoted the disastrous public-safety policies that have driven the decline of both.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Bastian went south to UCLA, then north to the University of San Francisco for law school. He joined San Francisco DA Kamala Harris in 2010, rising under her successor, George Gascón, to communications director and deputy chief of staff. When Gascón left for Los Angeles in 2019, Bastian remained to serve San Francisco’s new DA, Chesa Boudin — briefly. In 2021, with Boudin facing recall, Bastian followed Gascón to the Los Angeles DA’s office. Then, as Gascón’s tenure unraveled, Bastian returned north to run San Francisco’s Hotel Council.

Through it all, Bastian defended Gascón and Boudin, leaders of the progressive-prosecutor movement who presided over rising crime and disorder — from organized retail theft and open-air drug markets to attacks on elderly Asian Americans.

Gascón took his philosophy statewide in 2014, coauthoring Proposition 47, which turned many felonies into misdemeanors. A year later, San Francisco thefts from cars were up 47 percent, auto thefts 17 percent, and robberies 23 percent. Bastian offered a masterpiece of legalistic hairsplitting: Prop 47 was “not decriminalizing. It’s taking felonies and making them misdemeanors.” Six years later, amid mounting concern over crime, he was still at it: “Before Prop 47 and after Prop 47, there isn’t any difference.”

San Franciscans, especially Asian Americans, were growing restive. In March 2020, after 68-year-old Ximing Zhou was attacked while bystanders cheered and recorded the violence, Boudin’s office withdrew charges against one of the attackers. Bastian explained that, after conversations with officials, the victim had agreed that Boudin’s department should pursue “a restorative justice outcome in this case.” According to KQED’s review of a dozen hate crime cases involving Asian-American San Franciscans, including the attack on Zhou, “the promises of that process were ultimately unfulfilled.”

Just 18 months into his tenure, the city’s outraged Asian-American voters helped drive Boudin’s recall. Bastian had already found new work in the Los Angeles County DA’s office, serving Gascón again, this time under the title of special adviser for strategic communications and external relations. Gascón immediately restricted cash bail, eliminated sentencing enhancements, sharply limited prosecution of juveniles as adults, and declined to prosecute numerous misdemeanors.