By Rory Fleming
Right after firebrand progressive prosecutor Larry Krasner took office as Philadelphia’s District Attorney, he fired 31 veteran prosecutors, sending a warning to the rest of the office’s 500 prosecutors that they should shape up or ship out. That is relatively typical for DAs, but not in California, where many counties have robust civil service protections for deputy prosecutors.
San Francisco, where Chesa Boudin is the DA, is one of them.
Given the insular, conservative, and sometimes bigoted culture of US law enforcement, including in San Francisco, it is no surprise that old-guard prosecutors in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office would flake on their mission to keep the city safe rather than change their old ways.
Some seem to believe that San Francisco is incapable of having regressive prosecutors, as demonstrated by a recent piece at the San Francisco Chronicle starring allegedly “progressive” homicide prosecutor Brooke Jenkins, who was hired during George Gascón’s tenure as San Francisco DA. The reality is that every DA office in America, no matter how liberal the jurisdiction, has these types working there.
For example, before Boudin took control of the office, Deputy DA Linda Allen was still working at the San Francisco DA’s Office, despite obtaining the wrongful conviction of Jamal Trulove. According to Mercury News, Allen was fired by Boudin, though this necessarily means she was terminated for cause. Far from receiving true accountability, Allen was promptly hired by Santa Clara County DA Jeff Rosen, who himself calls himself a “reformer.”
Yet, because of the skewing of data based on just how neanderthalic most elected county prosecutors are in the US, many Californians have an inflated sense of 
what being a ‘reformer” means. California’s elected DAs, regardless of party or reformer rhetoric, are notorious for refusing to support criminal justice reformers that their county voters support.
In that climate, George Gascón himself was elected to the nationally-recognized status of “reformer” before he truly embodied the mantle as Los Angeles County DA after 2020. There is no reason to suspect that line prosecutors elevated during Gascón’s tenure are “progressive.” The reality is that each recent San Francisco DA, besides Terrance Hallinan, who Kamala Harris defeated in 2003 by fearmongering about alleged spikes in crime rates, was even worse than Gascón.
Truly, as the San Francisco DA, Gascón was undeniably inadequate for supposedly the most liberal city in the country. He was cowardly, living in the same weak-reformer mold as Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, who justified his continuing prosecutions of low-level marijuana offenses as stating “I certainly don’t take the position that I can willy-nilly ignore legislative mandates,” or King County (Seattle) Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, who took almost $200,000 in an anti-sex work nonprofit’s money in exchange for more prostitution prosecutions.
Gascón refused to charge police shootings and repeatedly let law enforcement officers sedate suspects to death with impunity. This caused many to protest his tenure, but instead of doing better, Gascón merely treated these concerned residents with disdain, stooping so low as to throw trash at them. Gascón even refused to even support the legalization of marijuana via Proposition 64, despite taking pot prosecutions off the table being Criminal Justice Reform 101.
It may seem like ancient history now, with anti-Boudin-mania filling the airwaves, but Gascón’s middle-of-the-road approach led to seemingly everyone hating him when he was San Francisco DA. In particular, no love was lost between Gascón and the local police. After Gascón retired early from the San Francisco DA seat, which was timed eerily as to sabotage Chesa Boudin’s chances of victory in 2019, Tony Montoya, the president of the San Francisco Peace Officers’ Association, said, “We are happy he will be leaving San Francisco but feel horrible that he is taking his record of failure to an even larger county where he can cause even more harm to public safety. Good riddance.”
Admittedly, as Los Angeles’s new DA, George Gascón is finally trying to do the right thing with his policies. But it only took over $2 million dollars from George Soros for him to do so. His current policies are smart politics from a campaign finance perspective, but they do not invalidate his prior sins.
Thus, before local San Francisco media laments turnover in the San Francisco DA office during the Boudin administration, they should get a list of the names of the dozens of prosecutors who have recently left his office. They should check each one of these prosecutors’ records for evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, a phenomenon that happens much more frequently than hits the news. They should also skim both news archives and the courthouse for evidence that these prosecutors overcharged low-level and nonviolent cases in ways that have unnecessarily ruined lives. Then they should report what they find there.
As for the early retirement of experienced prosecutors, that is more than welcome, depending on their track record. Hiring less ethically compromised prosecutors with adequate enough trial chops is going to almost always be easier than trying to reform carceral zealots like Linda Allen, who will attempt to “win” cases at any cost.
Rory Fleming is a writer and licensed attorney.
And the horse you rode in on!
It’s starting to look like the chickens have come home to roost: