San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
City’s ills too much for any D.A.
San Franciscans have long made it clear that they don’t want crimes born of poverty, addiction or mental illness punished with jail time. It’s also evident, however, that it’s those exact crimes — car break-ins, petty shoplifting, public drug use, along with visible homelessness — that are driving much of the city’s current unrest.
What the next district attorney is supposed to do about this quandary is anyone’s guess.
When California voters passed Proposition 47 in 2014, they essentially told cities like San Francisco that we can no longer use jails to warehouse our social ills. Under the measure, most nonviolent crimes can’t be charged as felonies, only misdemeanors — meaning that while some minor crimes can result in jail time, taking proactive steps to alleviate the root causes of social decay is the best and only meaningful way to remove it from public sight. That hasn’t happened. Eight years after Prop. 14, drug treatment on-demand, comprehensive alternative responses to police, and anything resembling adequate housing and supportive services for those in need remains elusive in San Francisco.
Decades of data from the state’s tough-on-crime era show that locking people up for poverty and addiction results in racial bias and poor outcomes. But letting chaos reign in the streets clearly isn’t working, either.
Over the past year, this Editorial Board has had a number of conversations with political leaders and community stakeholders worried about the impacts of San Francisco’s growing national reputation as a den of lawlessness. Downtown, which accounts for 72% of the city’s gross domestic product, is the focus of their concern. When businesses, tourists and conventions are scared away from downtown by the perception of disorder, it has real economic and social consequences, regardless of what the crime stats say.
This reality is propelling policy decisions in ways that aren’t being openly acknowledged.
That sounds hopelessly cynical, but all of the candidates for San Francisco district attorney (sans Maurice Chenier, who did not respond to our multiple interview requests) acknowledged to varying degrees that some perception management is needed now — even progressive criminal defense attorney John Hamasaki.
In an interview, he acknowledged the precarity of downtown’s economic ecosystem absent immediate intervention. He stressed accountability for repeat offenders while continuing recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s work of pursuing alternatives to incarceration for those who commit low-level nonviolent crimes. He maintained that his personal experience as a victim of bigotry uniquely positioned him to take on anti-Asian violence in the city while simultaneously reassuring reluctant members of the Asian American community that their safety and a more equitable criminal justice system don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
If Hamasaki had a track record of public service as nuanced as his interview, we would seriously consider an endorsement.
But he doesn’t.
His penchant for lobbing bombs on Twitter and from his former platform on the Police Commission has alienated much of the city’s political establishment. The challenge of running the District Attorney’s Office is monumental enough without a history of public spats with police Chief Bill Scott and Mayor London Breed. If there are advantages to adversarial relationships with either, Hamasaki wasn’t able to identify them.
Perception, meanwhile, is a linchpin of attorney Joe Alioto Veronese’s campaign. A former police officer and heir to a San Francisco political legacy (he’s the grandson of former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto) Alioto Veronese’s proposed policies, from jail diversion for low-level crimes, to the aggressive prosecution of bad cops, resemble those of Boudin’s — with the exception of more robust plans to clean up downtown with aggressive drug enforcement. His pitch to us was one of political gravitas; only he can get the police to start making arrests again after what appeared to be a de facto work stoppage under Boudin — a notion he would like to cement with a bizarre plan to put the police under the district attorney’s control instead of the mayor.
It’s safe to say rule by a dynastic cult of personality isn’t the fix for a criminal justice system desperately in need of strategic cross-agency planning and collaboration.
Which brings us to interim District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who was perhaps the least open about the performative aspects of the job she’s done thus far. From the start, Jenkins has couched her aggressive posture in the need for more prosecutorial discretion in response to the city’s woes — a reasonable-sounding position. But in a place where nonviolent property crimes are the dominant source of angst, why make a show of prosecuting minors as adults for violent crimes that aren’t happening or reiterate silly Fox News talking points about “rainbow fentanyl” if not to send messages?
Charging and crime rates have been similar under Jenkins to that under Boudin. The major difference between the two camps has been one of tone. Frankly, if that tone helps provide a sense of public calm until the city can ramp up its safety net, we’re OK with that.
That strategy, however, rests on trust — something Jenkins has done little to engender in her brief but tumultuous political career. Her failure to disclose payments by a nonprofit linked to the Boudin recall campaign, despite presenting herself as an unpaid volunteer, raises red flags.
Is her proposed “war on fentanyl” calculated bluster or the substance of her ideology? Because where there is human misery there is always another drug in waiting — and those willing to peddle it.
San Francisco needs wholesale systemic changes and a district attorney willing to say as much. Jenkins, thus far, hasn’t. And we’re not confident she will if the political winds don’t allow for it.
It would take a generational talent to succeed under the conditions San Francisco has placed its district attorney. None of these candidates is that; all are deeply flawed. Based on what we’ve seen and heard, we can’t pretend that any of them will make a meaningful dent in the city’s issues. And so we won’t — and are withholding our endorsement accordingly from this race.