There’s a new sheriff in town, and dealers selling drugs aren’t going to rehab; they’re going to jail. So announced San Francisco’s newly appointed District Attorney Brooke Jenkins who replaced disgraced and recalled former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.
Appointed by Mayor London Breed, Jenkins had quit her job as a prosecutor under Boudin to organize the recall campaign that successfully ousted him in June.
Immediately after being appointed to her old boss’s position, Jenkins said:
I think we have to start addressing repeat and violent offenders.… That needs to be our main priority….
We [will be] addressing those who continually commit crimes in San Francisco, [who] continue to victimize people in a violent way….
[Under Boudin] we’ve created an environment where [offenders] think there are no consequences to their actions.
After reviewing the cases pending under Boudin, Jenkins said:
Since 2020, nearly 1,500 people have died of drug overdose in part because dealers have been allowed to operate with impunity…. We must immediately change course, so we can save lives and hold people accountable for the havoc they are wreaking in our communities like the Tenderloin and South of Market.
Going forward defendants holding lethal doses of fentanyl will face felony charges.
Under Boudin, drug dealers, if they were charged at all, were allowed to go to rehab — San Francisco’s Community Justice Court — instead of facing jail terms.
In one egregious case, a drug dealer had six open cases against him, but Boudin offered him a plea bargain of a single misdemeanor to settle all of them. And in all of 2021 there was not a single drug conviction under Boudin, thanks to his loose, nearly nonexistent, enforcement policies.
That has changed under Jenkins. Her office has raised the pain level for drug dealers considerably, adding “charging enhancements” along with pre-trial imprisonment in extreme cases.
Jenkins also announced that, following her review of the cases Boudin left behind, she will recharge more than 30 of them with felonies — i.e., jail time if convicted — instead of misdemeanors for their crimes.
Under Boudin’s far-left “safe harbor for criminals” administration, the results were predictably catastrophic: Property crimes soared, along with open drug use. Car and home break-ins jumped. Homicides rose. Pan handling increased. Homelessness and the related squalid conditions he inherited got worse.
As EMC Research noted, burglaries spiked by 49 percent during his 18-month administration, and an astonishing 84 percent of charged perpetrators were back on the streets within two days!
With a new DA in town, San Francisco residents are going to feel safer, drug and other crimes will decline, and something like normal will return to the City by the Bay.
Related article:
