On Monday and Tuesday, Ana Gonzalez from the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office took the stand in Judge Harry Dorfman’s ongoing unavailability hearings and tried to reframe the entire crisis.
Her message was simple: there is no emergency. In her telling, the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office is not drowning in cases, but mismanaging “abundant” staffing and hiding behind rhetoric about impossible workloads.
At the same time, the DA’s own press shop is bragging about a surge of felony drug prosecutions and touting staggering numbers of pending narcotics cases, bench warrants and multiple pending cases per person.
You cannot have it both ways. Either the system is overloaded or it is not.
In court, Gonzalez’s through-line has been that the DA’s filing practices are not to blame for the growing number of pending cases. She repeatedly emphasized that filings are not significantly higher than in the past and argued that structural changes in the law and defense choices about diversion and trial strategy are driving up pendency, not prosecutorial decisions.
She also insisted that, when you look at the numbers, the Public Defender has plenty of lawyers. At one point she contrasted the two offices and told the court, “We handled 35% more cases than they do.” That line is meant to do a lot of work: if the DA’s office processes more cases with roughly comparable staffing, then, the argument goes, the Public Defender must be choosing to cry “emergency” rather than face uncomfortable internal decisions about how to allocate attorneys.
That is the courtroom narrative.
But then we turn to the DA’s own press release, issued Tuesday, and it paints a very different picture of what is happening on the ground.
“Today, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced 34 individuals were charged with multiple felonies in connection to narcotics trafficking in the Tenderloin between October 31, 2025, and November 17, 2025, 14 were kept in custody and twenty were released.”
The office is not shy about selling this as a major crackdown. The release walks through a case in which an undercover officer allegedly bought $15 worth of cocaine base and then watched as the seller went to a woman holding a purse. A subsequent search allegedly uncovered “70.9 grams of fentanyl, 79.9 grams of heroin, 50 grams of cocaine base, 24.5 grams of methamphetamine, 13.2 grams of cocaine salt, two scales and empty baggies.”
The DA emphasizes that the court “set no bail for Mr. Lopez and he is currently in custody” and that Ms. Maple “was released on her own recognizance with electronic monitoring and a stay-away order.” The case is framed as emblematic of the office’s determination to prosecute open-air dealing aggressively.
Then come the numbers that really matter for the unavailability fight.
“As of November 15, 2025, we have 1,172 defendants with pending felony narcotics case, of which almost 60% (697) have bench warrants issued for failure to appear in court. Of that group of 697 defendants with open bench warrants, 179 individuals have more than one case in bench warrant status, 11 individuals each have four open cases and two individuals each have five cases in bench warrant status.”
And:
“As of November 17, 2025, 121 individuals are in custody for pending felony narcotics sales related charges, 82 have more than one pending case. 46 individuals have more than two pending cases and one person has seven pending felony narcotics cases.”
Those are the DA’s own numbers.
Taken at face value, they describe a system that is anything but flush with excess capacity. Over a thousand pending felony narcotics cases. Nearly 700 people with bench warrants just on drug felonies, many with multiple open cases. More than 120 people sitting in custody on narcotics sales charges, most with more than one pending case.
That is not the profile of a system where the only problem is defense lawyers gaming diversion or dragging things out for strategic advantage. It is the profile of a system in which the pipeline of prosecutions is running far hotter than the courts, public defenders and probation can realistically handle.
In the courtroom, Gonzalez tries to spin this differently. She insists that once cases move into various forms of diversion, they become “back burner” matters that do not significantly burden the Public Defender. She tells Judge Dorfman that diversion, mental health diversion and other statutory reforms have built delay into the system in ways that inflate pending-case numbers without a corresponding increase in attorney workload.
She also argues that defense lawyers themselves create delay by waiting to accept diversion and by setting cases for trial and then resolving them at the last minute. In her view, it is public defense strategy, not DA filings, that is driving the pending-case graphs upward.
But when the same office turns around and touts 34 new felony narcotics trafficking defendants in just over two weeks, on top of 1,172 people with pending felony narcotics cases, that story starts to look like political doublespeak.
It is especially striking in the context of the unavailability hearings. The Public Defender has taken the extraordinary step of formally declaring itself unavailable for certain new cases, arguing that ethical caseload limits have been exceeded and that continuing to accept everything the court assigns would mean providing ineffective assistance.
Gonzalez’s job (as she views it) is to convince the judge that this is manufactured, that the office is choosing not to do work it could do if it made different staffing and policy choices.
Yet her own office is feeding the crisis by continuing to shovel felony narcotics cases into the system and then using those same numbers to claim credit for being “tough” on drug trafficking.
The DA wants to use these figures both as proof of success and as proof that the burden isn’t really on her office. When it suits her, the pending-case explosion is a story about defense delay, diversion and judicial choices. When it suits her politically, the same explosion is a badge of honor—evidence that she is confronting the Tenderloin drug market head-on.
Look closely at the bench warrant statistics the DA highlights. Almost 60 percent of people with pending felony narcotics cases have bench warrants for failure to appear. Many have two, three, four or five cases in warrant status. That is a picture of churn, instability and chaos, not orderly case processing.
Every one of those pending cases has a file, discovery, obligations for both sides, and an ethical duty on the part of the defense lawyer to stay on top of it. It may be true, as Gonzalez says, that diversion and mental health diversion move some matters to the “back burner” for stretches of time. But the idea that hundreds of people with multiple pending felony narcotics cases and bench warrants are somehow light, easy work is not credible.
And more fundamentally, if the DA’s office is going to trumpet its choice to bring more felony narcotics prosecutions under new laws like Proposition 36, it cannot credibly turn around and tell the court that felony filings are essentially flat and that it bears no responsibility for the logjam.
Indeed, it’s striking that 11 days into the unavailability hearings there has in fact been no discussion of Prop. 36.
If you take seriously the claim that the Public Defender has an ethical obligation not to accept more cases than its attorneys can competently handle, then the proper response to numbers like these is not to accuse them of fabrication. It is to ask whether it makes sense to continue stacking up felony drug cases on top of everything else while insisting that there is no systemic emergency.
The DA’s own press release shows the contradiction. On one page, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins celebrates a wave of narcotics trafficking cases and notes that two people charged in the new round of prosecutions are alleged to have prior convictions under the new Prop. 36 regime. On another, her trial deputy is telling a judge that the Public Defender is overreacting, that there is no real crisis and that if they simply moved lawyers around differently they could absorb more work.
If the DA believes the city needs thousands of pending felony narcotics cases, with hundreds of people cycling through warrants and multiple pending files, then she should own the consequences of that choice: an overburdened public defense system, crowded dockets and longer times to resolution.
If she wants to argue that the Public Defender is mismanaging “abundant” resources, she should stop using the same ballooning caseload statistics as talking points in press releases designed to reassure the public that she is cracking down on drugs.
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