Brooke Jenkins makes her case for a full term as district attorney

As part four of my special Meet the 2024 Candidates series — currently airing on the WE ARE SAN FRANCISCO podcast and YouTube show — I chatted with San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who is currently running for reelection. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

You came into office in unusual circumstances after the recall of the prior district attorney . What is the first thing you did to restructure the office? I had to make sure that we had experienced prosecutors at the helm of the office. I also had to make sure that everybody who was on the team was committed to public safety and doing our job the right way. When you are a public defender, your sole responsibility and thought process is about what is best for your client. But when you are a prosecutor, you have a different outlook. What is it that we believe will ultimately provide justice to a victim? And so it’s very difficult when you’ve been a public defender for 15 or 20 years, and you’ve only thought about what is best for your client, to change some of those patterns.

The prior district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was a vocal proponent of criminal-justice reform. Is it possible to accomplish that at the same time that we have major public-safety and property-crime issues? I absolutely support criminal-justice reform. I try to remind people that most of the people disadvantaged by the system are of my background. I’m a Black and Latino woman. And so those are the people who have overwhelmingly been disadvantaged in the system. So I don’t come from having had to learn about the need for reform in a book. I’m talking to you about what my family, my friends, and people around me have experienced in the system that’s been unfair.

I do believe we can balance both of these interests at the same time. But you have to be responsible in the way that you implement reform. It can’t be at the expense of public safety. Everything that we do on the reform side has to always keep in mind that our first and primary responsibility is safety.

Chesa Boudin said that the San Francisco police didn’t send him enough cases . Do you think police stepped up their activity once you came into office? I think the police always wanted to do their jobs. I don’t think any police officer decided in 2019, when [Boudin] was elected, that they were just gonna throw their hands up and no longer enforce laws. That’s not how they’re built. But what we saw was morale go down into the toilet because they felt as though the work that they were doing wasn’t having any impact once it got to the DA’s office. And so I think they had a renewed energy when I took over feeling that their work wouldn’t go to waste.

I went around to each police station and talked with the officers. Has that translated into more cases? Absolutely. When you have a functioning partnership, people thrive in their work like in any environment. Drug dealing is one of the things that we track most closely. They’ve almost doubled the number of cases that they’ve submitted to our office since I took over. And when I see and talk to police officers, they tell me that they feel reinvigorated because they see the fruits of their labor paying off.

Some of your critics have said that by putting emphasis on low-level drug offenses, it slows down our system and takes focus away from more important cases such as violent attacks. Do you think this is a valid argument? No. People who handle lower-level crimes are in a separate unit from those who handle violent crimes. We’re not taking away from our violent-crime unit in order to bolster our misdemeanor unit. Those are two separate things in the criminal justice system.

What we cannot do is decide that we are going to not enforce laws for the sake of helping our courthouse manage its calendars. That can’t be the case. My job is to enforce all laws in the city and county of San Francisco. I’m not a legislator. I don’t get to decriminalize certain things because I feel like my office has too much work to do. I have to enforce all laws because that is my job. Then the courthouse has to make sure that whatever cases come through it they can manage it effectively.

Some say that when one drug dealer goes to jail, they are just replaced by someone else. Do you think that we’ve been making progress on stopping drug dealing? I think we are making a difference. When we enforce our laws, it functions as a deterrent. People have to believe that there is a consequence. When you teach them that there is no consequence, then they pass along that information to others. And the problem becomes more pervasive.

Everything going outbound was that San Francisco is a safe place to deal drugs because nothing will happen to you. And so we saw one dealer turn into five and five turn into 15 and 15 turn into 30. Now the message is spreading that San Francisco is not a safe location to deal drugs anymore. And so we have seen the number of dealers out during the day reduce considerably. Do we still have a problem with them coming out at night? Absolutely. But they are learning, slowly but surely, that this isn’t the place that is so comfortable for them anymore.

Do you think we can make significant progress on San Francisco’s issues in the next two years or do you think we’ll have to wait much longer than that? We have made tremendous progress in just 20 months. We have seen most of our categories of crime trend downward in reported crimes. We have seen retail theft reduced dramatically. Auto burglaries have been cut in half in the last six months. The work that we’re doing to step up our game is being effective.

The City has, for the first time in a long time, a mayor, a police chief and a DA who can sit down together and talk about solutions. How long has it been since that’s been the case? We’re headed in the right direction. And I assure San Francisco, I’m not going to stop until we get there.

Regarding your reelection campaign — there is a new candidate, Ryan Khojasteh, in the race. Why did you fire him when you took office? I can’t get into personnel decisions. But what I can say is that I come into this role having been a veteran prosecutor. I previously spent a year and a half working in our homicide unit. Prior to becoming a prosecutor, I was an attorney for 7½ years practicing corporate law. So I’ve been an attorney for a long time. And I’m running against someone who has been an attorney for about five years, and who quite frankly doesn’t understand what it means to do this job fully. He first worked under Chesa Boudin, and now he’s in Alameda County. I don’t know that he has the right mind-set that San Francisco needs right now to have an effective district attorney.

If you had the ability to enact one major change that would impact your job as district attorney, what would it be? More police. We need more police to be more effective at deterring crime. Sadly, right now we need their presence most of the time to be able to do that. If I step outside of public safety, it always comes back to our investment in our schools. We need to make up some ground when it comes to early education in The City. We’ve got to prepare people to succeed in our city. And it starts with their foundation. We have to get back to the basics of giving people the tools in our city to succeed.

For the full interview with District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, tune in to Ben Kaplan’s WE ARE SAN FRANCISCO podcast and YouTube show .