By The Vanguard Staff
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – A year ago this month, newly-appointed San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins—after months of campaigning to recall her former boss, progressive DA Chesa Boudin—exclaimed, “We are at a tipping point. San Franciscans do not feel safe.”
“Jenkins’ rhetoric was aimed at what many saw as the worsening state of the city’s streets post-Covid, with increased open-air drug-dealing and overdoses—all imparting a sense of lawlessness that many, fairly or not, laid in the lap of Boudin,” according to the San Francisco Standard.
Jenkins’ “more punitive approach to crime than her progressive predecessor both in tone and substance, homing in on repeat narcotics offenders and drug dealers, whom she targeted with more stringent policies and harsher rhetoric,” threatening to “charge dealers with murder if their drugs lead to overdoses,” writes the SF Standard, doesn’t seem to be working.
“(T)here is little evidence on the streets that these tactics are working, and many say they are merely a return to a failed ‘war on drugs.’ Instead of focusing on diversion and treatment, which were part of Boudin’s approach, Jenkins has put more of her tools toward jailing drug dealers and punishing users,” the SF Standard adds,
Drug offenses have increased 41 percent since Jenkins took over the DA’s Office, and, “Overdose deaths driven by the fentanyl epidemic are on pace to hit a record high, having hit 268 as of the end of April. Things have become so dire that Gov. Gavin Newsom sent in state law enforcement to help patrol the epicenter of the drug crisis in the Tenderloin as numerous local operations have sprouted to tackle the issue,” the SF Standard reports.
Unlike Boudin, Jenkins is charging more drug cases and sending far fewer people to diversion programs, which offer alternatives to conviction—but “her increased caseload has yet to lead to a sizable change in drug convictions. In fact, in her first 11 months in office, she convicted fewer drug dealers than Boudin over the last 11 months of his time as district attorney,” the story continues.
“Jenkins said her approach to running the District Attorney’s Office will simply take more time to bear fruit. Cases can take years to yield convictions, and righting an office that was driven more by a progressive ideology than the law cannot happen overnight,” Jenkins said in emailed statements.
The SF Standard report that, while both Jenkins and her critics agree that the drug crisis will not be solved by the criminal justice system alone, “those who oppose her tough-on-crime tactics say that the crackdown is misguided and cannot solve what is, in reality, a public-health emergency, with suppliers who cannot be arrested out of existence.”
“I think what we’re seeing—a year into what was billed as a different approach to drug use and sales—is that it doesn’t work,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, who heads an association for progressive district attorneys called the Prosecutors Alliance of California. “We don’t have anything to show for it.”
The SF Standard added “DeBerry—shortly Boudin’s chief of staff—advocates for a holistic, citywide approach that does not solely rely on arrest and prosecution but also treatment and other efforts to help end the cause of the addiction crisis.”
Jenkins, in her first 11 months, charged more people for drug offenses (240 more than Boudin) and filed more drug cases against alleged repeat offenders (47 more than Boudin) than in the former DA’s last 11 months as top prosecutor, according to DA Office data.
The SF Standard suggests the increased numbers could be because of “police making more drug arrests during her tenure—there was talk when Boudin was in office that police were on an unofficial strike, illustrated in a number of instances when police seemingly let criminals go free.”
Jenkins won more felony drug convictions than Boudin in that 11-month period, 35 felony drug convictions compared with Boudin’s 26, noted the Standard, also noting Boudin convicted 63 people for drug offenses compared to Jenkins’ 48.
Interestingly, despite the police complaining about Boudin not bringing cases, his office in 2021 charged 73 percent of the cases brought by cops—Jenkins has only a 68 percent filing rate in 2023, the SF Standard wrote.
Statistics show Jenkins in 2023 so far sent only 36 people to diversion—where accused agree to undergo treatment program and other court mandates in lieu of prosecution and if they don’t, the case is prosecuted—compared with Boudin’s 167 people in all of 2021.
Jenkins is up for re-election in November 2024.
San Francisco needs to go back to the Boudin years, said no one ever.
No one? That’s clear hyperbole. The last two elections suggest around 45% of the voters wanted to keep Boudin/ his policies. In the last year, I think we’ve seen that the problem was not Boudin. And before you say, we just need to give her a chance, Boudin didn’t get that long before there was a recall and his administration was dealing with the heart of the pandemic. The problem with San Francisco had nothing to do with Boudin, he was just the scapegoat.
That would be a lie Keith and a bad one at that. David provided the definitive proof of that fact.