SAN FRANCISCO — Throughout an annual Chinatown neighborhood occasion hosted by the police division in September, interim San Francisco District Legal professional Brooke Jenkins moved by way of the group like a rock star, stopping to oblige selfie requests and chat with locals gathered at Portsmouth Sq. for a dialogue on public security and crime.
The political newcomer surged to movie star in July as Mayor London Breed’s choose to exchange progressive District Legal professional Chesa Boudin after voters ousted him from workplace a month earlier. However very like her predecessor, Jenkins has grow to be one of many metropolis’s most controversial political figures.
For some, Jenkins has ushered in a obligatory crackdown on crime in a metropolis combating drug overdoses and violent assaults in opposition to Asian People and weak populations. For others, she’s a political pawn with questionable ethics, intent on dragging town again to a failed tough-on-crime period of a long time previous.
Jenkins ascended to energy roughly 9 months after she stop Boudin’s workplace and joined the marketing campaign to recall him amid a surge in frustration over crime and homelessness. Since then, she’s been accused of getting a too-cozy relationship with the mayor, sharply rebuked by the felony justice reform motion and criticized for being paid greater than $100,000 as a marketing consultant to a nonprofit group carefully linked to the recall marketing campaign.
Jenkins is now working within the Nov. 8 election to serve the rest of Boudin’s time period by way of 2023. She’s favored to win, in response to two recentpolls, in opposition to a long-shot candidate to her proper and two different Democrats who’ve earned the social gathering’s endorsement within the metropolis’s ranked-choice election.
Whoever succeeds will take official cost of an embattled workplace that is typically blamed for town’s most pervasive issues, pretty or not.
Jenkins stated she’s as much as the duty.
“(San Franciscans) are glad about what I’ve accomplished up to now. They’re fed up with the drug dealing,” she stated. “They’re fed up with San Francisco being a spot that’s now made enjoyable of within the information throughout the nation, due to the crime state of affairs. They’re bored with their companies struggling.”
Jenkins took over the prosecutor’s workplace amid deep political polarization in San Francisco, a favourite punching bag of Republicans and ring-wing media shops. To its critics, town is a liberal haven the place homeless folks defecate within the streets and the place even Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband is not secure from a violent assault.
Native politics typically devolve into ideological discord, not between Republicans and Democrats, however between moderates and far-left progressives. Earlier this yr, voters recalled three college board members over considerations with classroom closures through the COVID-19 pandemic, amongst different points.
“She was immediately elevated to some of the high-profile places of work in San Francisco, in some of the hyper-political cities within the nation,” stated Max Szabo, a former assistant district legal professional and spokesman for then-San Francisco District Legal professional George Gascón. “It is type of like going from peewee soccer to quarterbacking the Tremendous Bowl.”
Jenkins promised to revive legislation and order in San Francisco as town’s prime cop, largely by strengthening penalties for repeat fentanyl sellers and mitigating the drug disaster in beleaguered neighborhoods. However throughout a current two-hour ride-along with a metropolis disaster response group, Jenkins realized “how a lot work we have to do.”
One name got here for a homeless man exterior a grocery retailer who seemed to be injured. One other for an inebriated girl who bartered with the disaster intervention group for extra booze earlier than accepting a blanket. The third name was for a person on his arms and knees on the sidewalk who acquired a medical examine and a ready-made meal of rice and beef.
And in between every cease, the van zipped previous numerous homeless people asleep on the sidewalks or utilizing medicine.
“We actually aren’t going to prosecute our manner out of this case,” she stated after the trip ended.
It was in San Francisco and beneath Gascón that Jenkins discovered be her model of a “progressive prosecutor.”
“George Gascón in San Francisco took violent crime extraordinarily severely, but additionally was very clear with us that he needed to advertise options to incarceration,” Jenkins stated. Gascón was elected Los Angeles County district legal professional in 2020.
That stability shifted beneath Boudin, she argued, in a manner that deserted accountability in favor of “blanket insurance policies.” Boudin didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Jenkins stated she agreed with the “spirit” of Boudin’s ambition to reform the felony justice system. She considers therapy packages and commerce work alternatives in sure instances, she stated, together with psychological well being providers.
Considered one of Jenkins’ new insurance policies modified Boudin’s ban in opposition to charging 16- and 17-year-olds as adults to permit it for a restricted variety of ” heinous crimes,” akin to homicide, forcible sexual assault or mass shootings. She additionally revoked greater than 30 open plea presents for repeat fentanyl sellers, and introduced that she would permit her prosecutors to pursue attainable homicide expenses in opposition to alleged fentanyl sellers whose merchandise brought about an overdose loss of life.
“It isn’t sufficient to say, ‘I simply do not consider in incarceration.’ Definitely folks can name that progressive,” Jenkins stated. “But when you are going to put ‘prosecutor’ behind it, you really must be prepared to prosecute crime.”
The adjustments have ignited swift opposition.
Emily Lee, co-director of San Francisco Rising, an advocacy group that promotes civic engagement in communities of coloration, stated Jenkins’ choice to permit for juveniles to be charged as adults contradicts science and knowledge on teenage mind improvement. She stated the brand new coverage has disillusioned youth organizations and households of incarcerated individuals who “really feel like that is throwing away the lives of people that deserve a second likelihood and want extra alternative.”
Lee additionally stated households of people killed by cops have raised considerations with how the district legal professional’s workplace is dealing with their instances, and she or he questioned whether or not Jenkins’ new insurance policies have accomplished a lot to scale back crime. Lee stated it should take a couple of elected official to deal with the foundation causes of town’s most vexing issues.
“If DA Jenkins is a progressive prosecutor, the time period has misplaced all which means,” stated former San Francisco Police Commissioner John Hamasaki, who’s working to Jenkins’ left within the race for district legal professional. “Restarting the drug conflict, restarting the prosecution of kids, prosecuting low-level drug customers as a substitute of providing them therapy, I feel all of these issues are objectively regressive.”
Hamasaki earned the first-choice endorsement of the San Francisco Democratic Social gathering, whereas civil rights legal professional Joe Alioto Veronese was really helpful because the social gathering’s second alternative. Hamasaki stated he is working to deliver administration expertise to the district legal professional’s workplace and to root out corruption in metropolis authorities, together with the prosecutor’s workplace, the place he stated Jenkins is beholden to the mayor.
Jenkins has strongly denied the allegation. However she’s additionally discovered herself on the defensive over the six figures in charges she earned as a marketing consultant for the nonprofit group Neighbors for a Higher San Francisco whereas publicly portraying herself as a volunteer for the equally named Neighbors for a Higher San Francisco Advocacy, a political group that labored to take away Boudin. The 2 teams reported the identical San Rafael deal with and billionaire William Oberndorf, who helped finance the recall, is listed as a director or president in official data.
Jenkins stated she handled the roles as “two separate issues,” however acknowledged she might have disclosed her position as a paid marketing consultant sooner.
Jenkins discovered in a short time that, in a metropolis identified for gleefully devouring its personal leaders, each deft political instincts and a thick pores and skin are necessary for fulfillment. That toughness, although, ran within the household and have become a driving pressure in her life.
Jenkins, who’s Black and Latina, was raised in Fremont and Union Metropolis by a single mother who labored two jobs and attended school night time courses to grow to be a highschool counselor. Jenkins didn’t meet her dad, an immigrant from El Salvador who now lives in Germany, till she was 21.
“I really feel like being raised by my mother solely made me rather a lot stronger in quite a lot of methods, and I would not change something about my circumstances,” she stated. “However my dad and I, fortunately, have been in a position to actually forge a powerful relationship and a powerful bond.”
Jenkins competed within the 400-meter hurdles on the observe and area group on the College of California, Berkeley, then graduated from the College of Chicago Regulation Faculty. She labored in personal observe, then served because the assistant director of enforcement for the Nationwide Collegiate Athletic Affiliation earlier than she was employed in 2014 by the San Francisco prosecutor’s workplace.
She labored because the division’s designated hate crimes prosecutor and was later promoted to the sexual assault unit. In 2020, Boudin elevated her to the murder unit.
Jenkins stated she was uniquely certified to deal with homicide instances. She might relate to victims’ grieving households, she stated, as a result of she and her husband’s first child, a son they named Justice, died of pure causes quickly after he was born.
“I feel that stems from being a guardian who has needed to bury my very own little one and actually recognizing that excessive degree of loss when anyone takes the lifetime of your little one and also you’re left with nothing,” stated Jenkins, who now has two younger kids, a son and daughter.
Forrest Myers, an actual property developer who met Jenkins in center college, stated Jenkins is a “lawyer by coronary heart,” however was additionally raised in a neighborhood that valued collaboration, range and onerous work.
“She is tremendous right down to earth,” Myers added, describing Jenkins as a “hamburger-chicken-wing-Sunday-on-the-couch-football-East-Bay lady.”
In California, Jenkins might be thought-about a reasonable, even liberal on some factors.
She stated she helps overdose prevention packages, often called secure injection websites, given the fentanyl disaster on San Francisco’s streets. Not like a few of her fellow district attorneys, Jenkins hasn’t known as for the repeal of Propositions 47 and 57, two controversial voter-approved initiatives that aimed to decrease California’s jail inhabitants. She stated the insurance policies have labored as anticipated.
“I feel she will get caricatured as someway being conservative, and she or he’s not,” stated state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who endorsed her marketing campaign. “It is clear to me that she’s much more progressive than folks assume on felony justice points. She additionally believes in accountability, which is essential. I feel she’ll strike that stability.”
However she may not have a lot time.
Jenkins has put herself in a “troublesome place,” Szabo stated, after she grew to become “the general public face of a recall that blamed DA Boudin for town’s ills.”
“Now she has the reins, and she will be able to plead persistence all she needs, however that is an voters that threw DA Boudin out simply two years into his first time period when total crime was down,” Szabo stated. “On this city, on this local weather and particularly in that job, she doesn’t have lengthy.”
Forty-five p.c stated they’d been a sufferer of theft within the final 5 years, whereas almost 1 / 4 stated they’d been threatened or bodily attacked.
“I feel folks have reached the tipping level,” Jenkins stated, “that this cannot be the id of our metropolis.”