Brooke Jenkins Selected to Replace Former Boss, Chesa Boudin, as San Francisco DA

Brooke Jenkins, a one-time San Francisco prosecutor who resigned from the district attorney’s office last year to support the recall of her former boss, Chesa Boudin, was named Boudin’s replacement on Thursday.

San Francisco mayor London Breed officially announced during a 5 p.m. PDT press conference that she had selected Jenkins, 40, to be San Francisco’s next district attorney. Breed said she considered several candidates for the position, but that Jenkins “stood out the most.”

“She sacrificed her career to fight for the people in this city, to fight for victims who needed a voice in this city,” Breed said of Jenkins, a political novice, who became a leading voice of the Boudin recall.

Jenkins, a one-time Boudin supporter, quit her job in protest after she said Boudin pressured prosecutors in his office to give lenient plea deals and that he acted more like the public defender that he had been than a prosecutor. During an introductory speech Thursday, Jenkins said the “paramount mission of the district attorney’s office is to promote public safety.”

Jenkins vowed to “restore accountability and consequences to our criminal-justice system.” She said hate crimes will not be tolerated, and “violent and repeat offenders will no longer be allowed to victimize our city without consequences.” She said a top priority will be ending open-air drug markets in the city and enforcing drug laws, “so that we can take back our streets.”

Jenkins, who is black and Latina, said she knows firsthand about inequities in the criminal-justice system and has “had family members on both sides of the courtroom, as offenders, and as victims.” She said the district attorney’s office can both hold offenders accountable and move forward with important criminal-justice reforms.