In a staff meeting that was dubbed “icy” and “awful,” San Francisco’s new district attorney Brooke Jenkins, who left Chesa Boudin’s office to lead his recall campaign, urged them to review instances where plea deals are being offered and spoke of a potential “reshuffling” of the office.
Jenkins was sworn in as the new DA on Friday after being chosen by Mayor London Breed to take the place of the recalled Boudin.
Jenkins convened a 20-minute meeting with 25 senior staff members after that, and many of the employees present told SFGATE that it was “awful,” “icy,” “uncomfortable,” and occasionally “crazy.”
Attendees pressed the new DA to provide specifics on how she would run the office and inquired as to whether she had any precise instructions.
Jenkins stated to staff members that she intended to give drug cases priority and that she wanted a review of every case in which the suspect had received a plea deal but had not yet accepted it.
To decide which plea offers to withdraw, a review would be conducted.
Jenkins is both black and Latina and left Boudin’s office in 2021 to volunteer for the recall.
She is the first Latina district attorney in San Francisco. The first black district attorney in the city was Vice President Kamala Harris.
Jenkins did not distinguish between cases of possession and cases of possession with intent to sell when discussing the drug cases, according to meeting attendees who spoke to SFGATE, and he did not provide a deadline for when the reviews would need to be finished.
Jenkins told the staff that no one will be let go that day but that there would be a future “reshuffling” of the office and that she still cares about Boudin hiring despite pushing for his recall.
Jenkins’ meeting was exactly how the attendees described it, according to a source close to Jenkins, but Jenkins did not gather the employees to lay out policy plans; rather, he did it to allay their anxieties.
Jenkins will succeed Boudin as district attorney, Mayor London Breed announced on Thursday. Voters in the renownedly liberal city ousted Boudin in a special recall election last month.
She claimed that the person she chose was the best candidate for pursuing criminal justice reform while holding offenders accountable.
Breed claimed that the reasons she chose Jenkins were her background, sense of justice, and empathy for both victims and perpetrators. The mayor fought with Boudin over enforcement but remained mum about her vote in the recall.
Breed said, “She gave up her career to stand up for individuals in this city, to stand up for victims who needed a voice in the city.”
Jenkins, who started working for the San Francisco district attorney’s office in 2014, announced her intention to run in November to complete Boudin’s remaining term until 2023.
Jenkins, a prosecutor who prides herself on being progressive, claimed throughout the campaign that Boudin was too set in his ways.
No matter how terrible the crime, juveniles would not be tried as adults, and he abolished monetary bail for offenders.
Jenkins stated that she wanted those resources available for prosecutors to use as they saw fit.
“Our city is one of second chances.” Jenkins stated this at a news conference to announce her appointment. “But the truth is we have to draw a line with people who choose hate, violence, and a life of crime,” she added.
I want it to be understood that punishing offenders does not prevent us from implementing necessary and significant changes to our criminal justice system.
Due to Boudin’s lack of dedication to pursuing criminal cases and the danger they believe his actions were unleashing on the streets of the violent city, Brooke Jenkins and Dan DuBain resigned from their positions as district attorneys in San Francisco last year.
Both of them charged Boudin with increasing the danger in San Francisco by routinely imposing less terms than required by law, releasing offenders earlier, and occasionally not even filing charges.
Jenkins, a prosecutor for seven years, most recently in the homicide department, said last year that “Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend.”
I absolutely concur that the criminal justice system needs a lot of improvement as an African American and Latina woman, but as a district attorney, it is your responsibility to maintain balance.
DuBain continued, “I think Boudin disregards the laws he doesn’t like, and he disregards the court rulings he doesn’t like to impose his own interpretation of what he thinks is just – and that’s not the duty of the district attorney.”
According to DuBain, a former district attorney in Solano County, “the office was moving in such the wrong path that the best thing I could do was to join the drive to recall Chesa Boudin as district attorney.”
A recall election on June 7 resulted from anger over public safety in the strongly Democratic city, and Boudin, a former public defender elected in 2019, was defeated.
Residents were alarmed by viral videos showing people robbing stores and assaulting seniors, particularly Asian Americans.
Jenkins explained that being a progressive prosecutor means being “creative about finding alternatives to incarceration, but trying to guarantee our defendants don’t re-offend” in an interview with The Associated Press before the election.
Boudin, who has not ruled out running for district attorney again, claimed that the pandemic that closed courts and the extensive treatment and counselling programs rely on to rehabilitate felons hampered his tenure in office.
On June 7, San Francisco decided to recall Boudin due to growing unhappiness with the city’s lawlessness.
His dismissal had been widely anticipated, and the recall vote by 60.5% of voters made it obvious how they felt about his progressive ideas.
In January 2020, the former public defender won the election. Residents who claim that the city has become an increasingly unsafe place to live as a result of his soft-on-crime policies made him the target of a multimillion dollar recall effort earlier this year.
Jenkins was one of the more than 50 legal professionals that left Boudin’s office in October 2021 owing to his lack of dedication to pursuing criminal charges.
Jenkins charged Boudin of increasing crime in San Francisco at the time by routinely imposing less penalties than required by law, releasing offenders early, and occasionally not even filing charges.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Boudin has been largely held responsible for the rise in crime and homelessness in the Bay Area, where bold looters have become accustomed to ransacking stores and breaking into cars.
Rapes and larceny in the city have increased by close to 10% and nearly 17%, respectively, since last year, one of the worst crime years in decades.
In the Bay Area, where homelessness and drug use have grown significantly during the pandemic, vagrancy has been a standout problem during Boudin’s term in office.
25 killings have been reported by San Francisco police so far this year, compared to 26 at about the same time last year.
Meanwhile, larceny theft, which accounts for the majority of recent “smash and grabs,” increased dramatically under Boudin, with 16,219 incidents reported this year, up 16.5 percent from the 13,1926 cases reported in 2016.
Along with rapes, assaults have increased by 10% with 1,138 incidents registered so far this year. Assaults have increased by 11%.
Breed ordered a broad crackdown on open drug use and drug trafficking in the downtown district last December. The Tenderloin neighbourhood is one of the most impoverished and drug-infested regions of the city.
The city’s notorious taxpayer-funded Linkage Center, which quickly turned into a site for addicts to take illicit drugs on the street in broad daylight, is just a block away from the open-air drug den that the young children are made to walk through.
The Linkage Center was funded by the city’s taxpayers.
Images of the location captured by DailyMail.com earlier this year depicted a woman slouched over in a wheelchair, her pants hanging around her ankles, and she was about to inject a syringe into her thigh.
The woman who was seated next to her on the ground had a needle in her neck. Others are stumbling in with drug paraphernalia in the cold, sitting on the ground amid trash, empty food containers, and filthy blankets.
After stepping off the school bus at the end of the day, the horrifying footage showed students having to navigate the unkempt, open-air drug den of homeless addicts.
The video, shot by Ricci Wynne, shows elementary school children exiting the 14 metro line in Golden Gate City at 8th Street and Mission near the Pacific Gas and Electric Company building through a large number of unwell people dozing off on the sidewalk.
He writes in the tweet, “This is no back ally.” Wynne wrote in the tweet, “This is the main artery of the city that has been hijacked bye [SIC] drug traffickers and is now Pure filth.”
In sharp contrast to the drug addicts who are scowling as they sit on the garbage-strewn pavement shooting up, the students appear upbeat as they return home after their classes.
Wynne, who identifies as a “professional criminal” and a former drug user, frequently uploads films of drug users on the streets or the trash and used needles they leave behind.
Numerous store closings in the Bay Area are the result of drug store chains like Walgreens and CVS becoming popular and simple targets for shoplifters.
Under Boudin’s direction, low-level offences like retail thefts have been successfully decriminalized in the region’s largest city, San Francisco.
According to the Chronicle, Walgreens reported last year that retail theft in San Francisco was five times the chain average and security costs were 46 times the norm.
Grand larceny rates in California’s liberal stronghold were up 26% in mid-April compared to the same period last year, according to the most recent crime statistics available.
Despite a contentious 2014 measure called Proposition 47 that prohibited prosecutors from charging suspected shoplifters accused of stealing less than $950 worth of products with felonies, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has vowed to crack down on gangs of retail thieves.