A week after she was sworn in as San Francisco’s interim district attorney, Brooke Jenkins fired 15 people, many of them hired by her predecessor, Chesa Boudin. Jenkins quit her job in the DA’s office in 2021 to become the liberal face of the recall movement that ousted Boudin.
When critics pointed out that the campaign was spearheaded by Republican millionaires and billionaires, Jenkins stood out as a self-professed progressive, and a woman of color, who claimed that Boudin had gone too far: coddling criminals, failing victims, and mismanaging the DA’s office.
Boudin’s critics were elated when Jenkins was nominated. “SF’s radical DA replaced with a great moderate,” former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles wrote. The San Francisco Police Officers Association described Jenkins as “a qualified, competent, and compassionate prosecutor who will allow San Francisco to turn the page from the previous criminal defense attorney masquerading as the DA.”
But staffers in the DA’s office who spoke to The Intercept last week were not quite as pleased by Jenkins’s appointment. They suspected that Jenkins was picked because of her loyalty to Mayor London Breed. A representative from the mayor’s office sat in on Jenkins’s first meeting with the team, raising concerns that the representative was looking to gauge who among them would hew to Jenkins’s — and by extension Breed’s — agenda.
And that agenda, they emphasized, is a return to the 1990s-era war on drugs. Jenkins herself said she would take a harder approach to prosecuting drug crimes in a New York Times interview soon after her nomination. “No longer can we accept open-air drug markets as simply being a part of big-city life and life in San Francisco,” she said. “We need to have accountability for those who choose to continuously sell extremely dangerous and deadly drugs like fentanyl.
