With new D.A., little change in outcomes
But data shows S.F. police making many more arrests
After Brooke Jenkins replaced Chesa Boudin as San Francisco’s district attorney, police ramped up the number of arrests they brought to the District Attorney’s Office for possible prosecution by nearly 20%, according to an analysis of data.
The Chronicle compared data from the last four months of Boudin’s term to Jenkins’ first four months, seeking to understand how arrest and prosecution rates have shifted following her appointment. While overall crime rates have not changed significantly, police presented an average of 100 more arrests per month to the D.A. since Jenkins took over in July.
Other than the number of arrests presented to them, few major differences in prosecutorial outcomes between Boudin and Jenkins are detectable yet. San Francisco’s jail population has not grown much; neither have the D.A. office’s conviction, dismissal or overall charging rates. The one case outcome that has shifted significantly is that Jenkins’ office is diverting a smaller share of criminal cases than under Boudin in his final months.
In an interview, Jenkins said she’s expecting the gap between her and Boudin’s case statistics to widen as her policies spread through the city’s
criminal justice system.
Below is a breakdown of what has and hasn’t changed under Jenkins.
Police are bringing more arrests for review to Jenkins so far than Boudin in his final months.
SFPD activity ramped up following Jenkins’ appointment, the data shows.
A previous Chronicle analysis showed officers immediately made more stops after Jenkins was appointed, and the District Attorney’s Office’s data shows that has translated into more arrests. The D.A. data shows that police have presented about 100 more arrests to the office each month on average (about 755 a month) since she assumed office than the last months of Boudin’s tenure (640 a month). This increase didn’t happen in any of the past three summers, suggesting it’s not a seasonal pattern.
The data on arrests comes from all law enforcement agencies operating within San Francisco, but SFPD arrests comprise the majority, presenting more than 8 in 10 arrests handled by the District Attorney, according to the data. The increase in arrests under Jenkins comes entirely from the SFPD.
In an email to The Chronicle, SFPD spokesperson Robert Rueca did not directly attribute the department’s arrest surge to Jenkins. He said the department has “been able to focus more resources in the downtown area to address drug dealing, theft, and other crime impacting neighborhoods and merchant retail corridors.”
Arrest volumes declined sharply in 2020 and have stayed low throughout the pandemic. In February 2022 — at the height of a public battle between Boudin and the SFPD regarding investigations of police shootings — police presented fewer arrests to the D.A.’s office than in any month since at least 2011.
Jenkins said she believes her appointment influenced arrest rates in two ways. First, Boudin campaigned partly on a promise that he would not prosecute “quality of life” crimes like graffiti, solicitation of sex work and possession of drug paraphernalia.
“Because I took a different position, I would imagine that has affected (officers’) willingness to make arrests and present those cases,” Jenkins said.
Second, she said she thinks police are feeling more “motivated.”
“I’ve gone to seven stations in the last few months, telling (officers) directly, ‘If you bring the case to the office, we’ll ensure there’s a responsible form of accountability,’ ” she said. “Is that always jail? No.”
But, she said, she wants officers to know “that it’s worthwhile to them to do their work, and the city, quite frankly, is imploring them to do more.”
The biggest surge in police activity under Jenkins came from arrests booked as felony narcotics cases. Those arrests shot up by 74% from the second to the third quarter of 2022, from 131 to 229 cases.
Jenkins has also fired two of the three attorneys Boudin appointed to investigate police misconduct, and took the third off a still-pending case that would have been San Francisco’s first homicide trial of an onduty officer.
Andreea Matei, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Urban Institute, says Jenkins’ appointment triggering a shift in arrest rates makes sense. District attorneys are the lead law enforcement officer in their jurisdiction, so “they have to have this relationship with the police. When you have a strained relationship, I’m sure that impacts the (arrest) referrals you’re getting.”
But Matei pointed out that police officers are usually reluctant to attribute changes in their arrest rates to a specific D.A., because the perception that politics dictate arrests can erode legitimacy.
Jenkins is charging serious arrests at similar rates to Boudin.
While police have been presenting more arrests to the D.A.’s office since Jenkins was appointed, she is mostly charging those arrests at similar rates to Boudin — particularly when it comes to felony bookings, according to the data. Her charging rate for misdemeanors is close to Boudin’s, too, though it dipped in October; D.A. spokesperson Randy Quezada said the office didn’t know why, but an analysis of earlier years shows misdemeanor charging rates tend to vary more than felony rates.
Because police are bringing more arrests to the office, though, Jenkins has still charged more cases in her first four months than Boudin did in his last four.
Jenkins is also charging two crime categories at significantly higher rates than Boudin: narcotics and petty theft. So far her office has charged 71% of narcotics bookings, a 10 percentage point increase from Boudin’s final months. She has also charged 78% of petty theft cases so far, compared with Boudin’s 67%.
Jenkins did not address these changes specifically, but said that she and Boudin differed on their approaches to theft, drug use and other lower-level crimes.
“There were certain crimes, mostly misdemeanors, that he was not willing to charge,” she said. “I took a different position.”
Jenkins is starting to divert fewer cases than Boudin. Her conviction and dismissal rates have both increased slightly.
It’s still early days for Jenkins, and many of the cases that have been resolved during Jenkins’ tenure involved arrests and charging decisions made during Boudin’s time as D.A.
Even so, the D.A.’s office is already diverting a smaller share of cases under Jenkins than Boudin in his final months, the data shows. Diversion programs serve as alternatives to traditional responses to crime like prison sentences or extended jail time, and Boudin used them more frequently than his predecessor George Gascón. Jenkins told The Chronicle she believes these programs are appropriate for certain lower-level misdemeanors, but generally not serious or violent crimes.
“If you commit armed robbery I just don’t think you should be a candidate for diversion,” she said. “Certain crimes ... I just don’t feel diversion will prove successful in keeping them out of the system in the future.”
Even so, Jenkins’ overall 33% diversion rate is close to what Boudin’s was in 2021, according to the data. She said this is partially because in many lowerlevel cases, judges are required to offer diversion, so her office doesn’t have the option to seek harsher sentences. She added that many diversion cases that have been resolved during her term were initiated by Boudin; it’s likely many of her office’s referrals aren’t even showing up yet because those cases will take more time to resolve.
“Once someone has been placed into a diversion program, whether or not I disagree that individual person should’ve been given diversion, I don’t have the power to just come in and yank them out,” she said.
Matei, the Urban Institute policy analyst, said that diversion programs can be successful for both low- and high-level offenses, so long as the elected prosecutor supports them.
“What’s clear, if you’re talking to offices across the country, you need someone to really champion these programs,” she said. “It has to be an active priority.”
A recent study in San Francisco by the nonpartisan California Policy Lab found that people charged with felony crimes who were sent through diversion programs were less likely to be rearrested and convicted than people sent through the traditional court process.
In a statement to The Chronicle, a group of attorneys at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office who reviewed the data said they’ve also noticed a decrease in diversion program referrals under Jenkins.
The group said that a more punitive approach to drug dealing “does nothing to reduce the demand for drugs,” and added that while Jenkins’ stances “give the appearance of reducing crime and making certain residents feel safer, (they) do not actually reduce crime or improve communities.”
Rueca, the SFPD spokesperson, said the department believes it’s important to “fully prosecut(e) cases in court, especially violent offenses, repeat offenders and open-air drug dealing. Appropriate consequences have a direct impact on public safety.”
While Jenkins’ lower diversion rate means her overall conviction and dismissal rates are slightly higher than Boudin’s, her conviction rate for narcotics cases is down significantly. She attributed this to two factors: First, she said defense attorneys have been accepting her plea deals less often because they are harsher than Boudin’s were.
“When I was coming in, there were people with six open fentanyl sales cases who had a misdemeanor offer on the table, people ... given these excessively lenient offers, where I said absolutely not,” she said. “What you see is us at an impasse, the public defender saying, ‘You know what, we’re gonna set these cases for trial.’
“That will take time to play out, where they’re like, ‘OK, it’s not gonna get any better than this,’ ” she added.
Jenkins’ office has also instituted a blanket policy of “bundling” misdemeanor drug charges, like possession. The first four times a person gets arrested for such a charge, their case gets discharged, but if they are arrested a fifth time, they are prosecuted. Jenkins said this may incentivize police to make more misdemeanor arrests, but “right now it’s looking like we just keep dismissing everything,” she said, adding that nobody has hit the five-arrest limit yet.
The jail population remains well below pre-pandemic levels.
The San Francisco County Jail’s population has increased a bit since July, but at about 845 people is close to where it was in February and roughly a third fewer than early 2020, before the county released hundreds of people to prevent a COVID-19 outbreak.
Jenkins said she is not expecting a large increase in the jail population, partly because she has continued Boudin’s policy of refusing to seek cash bail.
“Of course, maintaining a progressive policy like that will lend itself to not having some overarching explosion in the jail population because that’s not what we were seeking,” she said.
While Jenkins said her administration is “certainly” seeking pretrial detention in more cases than Boudin’s, she said she has been stymied by people who are unwilling to agree to her plea deals.
Finally, rulings handed down last year at both the state and local level have prevented San Francisco law enforcement from holding people in jail indefinitely unless they’re facing serious violent charges.