As of last week, San Francisco has a new District Attorney. After the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, Mayor London Breed appointed Brooke Jenkins as his successor. Jenkins worked for Boudin as an ADA but resigned over disagreements with how he was doing his job and became one of the leading voices supporting the recall. It has only been a few days but so far Jenkins is saying the right things. Yesterday she visited the Tenderloin neighborhood and vowed to crack down on the open-air drug markets that have become the norm in this part of San Francisco.

Standing Tuesday outside the Phoenix Hotel on Eddy Street — across the road from people using drugs on the sidewalk — Jenkins vowed more accountability for drug dealers, although she was light on new policy specifics.

Jenkins already directed her office to review plea offers not yet accepted in drug sale cases, saying that some “might be” revoked. She said Tuesday she saw “problems” with the status quo under former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, whom she replaced, appointed by Mayor London Breed in the wake of a nationally watched recall election. Under Boudin, only three offenders were convicted of felony drug sale charges in 2021, with others in drug cases pleading guilty to lesser charges…

“I have committed to them, just like I did the entire city, to make sure we end the open-air drug market and clear these streets so that kids and the people who live here can go about their daily lives without being scared,” Jenkins said. “We cannot continue to allow people to die on the street of overdoses … without holding those who sell fentanyl accountable.”

The commitment to make the streets livable for families is long overdue and already a big improvement on her predecessor. And yet, I have to say that reading about this from the local papers, I’m already feeling worried about her chances of making any real change.

Explaining why isn’t that complicated. It’s true that DA Boudin only convicted three offenders of felony drug sales in all of 2021. The reason is that in most cases he was pleading the cases down to lesser charges.

Under Boudin, San Francisco convicted many alleged drug dealers of the felony crime of accessory after the fact, rather than possession with the intent to sell, in order to avoid potential immigration consequences. Under federal law, felony drug-dealing convictions can be deportable offenses.

But Boudin wasn’t doing that simply because he’s a soft on crime former defense lawyer who was the son of domestic terrorists who spent most of their lives in prison (though he is all of that). Boudin was doing it because pleading the charges down allowed people to be convicted of charges that would not impact their immigration status. He’s doing that because the not-so-secret subtext here is that many of the low level dealers who create these open air drug markets in the city are illegal immigrants. As Real Clear Investigations reported last month, so many of them are recent arrivals for Honduras that they are often known as “Hondos” on the street. The cartels get them across the border and then require them to work as dealers to pay off the debt they acquired getting there. Most of them make enough to pay this off fairly quickly but at that point they have steady work and no way to make a comparable income legally, so they just keep selling fentanyl.

The key point here is that Boudin wasn’t just keeping the immigration status of these drug dealers in mind out of the goodness of his heart. Both state law and San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city means that the DA is required to consider the immigration status of drug dealers.

Complicating matters is the legal mandate that prosecutors throughout California consider a defendant’s immigration status before negotiating pleas.

The idea is that defendants shouldn’t be doubly punished for one crime — a jail sentence plus a deportation to a country where, in some cases, they could be harmed or killed. Many defendants arrested for drug crimes in San Francisco are not American citizens — young Honduran men make up a large percentage of street dealers in the city, authorities say — and could face deportation if convicted of drug dealing.

Bill Hing, a professor of law at the University of San Francisco and director of the Immigration and Deportation Defense Clinic, said that while there is some subjectivity in the immigration status statute, the purpose of the law was to err against deportation.

“As a district attorney,” Hing said, “you can achieve the interests of justice without having to incorporate a deportation penalty.”

Brooke Jenkins has already told her office that she wants to review any plea deals, especially the ones offered to drug dealers. So she might be able to come up with some workaround that could restore some sanity in the streets but the fact remains that both the city and the state are effectively working against any real reform. California just does not want to see anyone deported, not even convicted drug dealers who are directly responsible for the deaths of about 1,500 people since 2020.

And that’s not the only problem. The other problem is that there are a non-trivial number of people in San Francisco who are far-left extremists, i.e. people who still pine for abolishing the police and the prisons. Some of these people, not surprisingly, are “community leaders” and others are drug users who don’t want to see their supply disappear.

Del Seymour, a Tenderloin community leader for 35 years, said that he would support “moderate” enforcement of drug laws, such as arresting a few dealers to encourage others to get new jobs, but that officials need to help dealers replace their incomes so they can “figure out how they’re going to feed their kids.”

He added that the neighborhood also needs more medical practitioners and caseworkers to address drug abuse.

Jenkins’ tough talk didn’t bother drug users. One man, who was using drugs across the street from where Jenkins was speaking, said he doesn’t think prosecuting drug dealers would make them go away.

“It’s never going to happen. It’s an illusion,” said the man, who declined to give his name, but shared that he’d used fentanyl and meth for 15 years. “The person will come out and do exactly what they’re doing. They’re doing it to support themselves.”

And there’s one more point of opposition. Chesa Boudin may be gone but he hired some of the true believers who are currently working in the office that Jenkins now leads. You can bet they’ll be doing everything they can to ensure her reforms don’t work. Her first meeting with the staff was last Friday and immediately there were leaks about how “icy” it was.

Multiple people in attendance, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, described the approximately 20-minute meeting as “horrible,” “icy,” “uncomfortable,” and, at times, “insane.”…

All of the attendees who spoke with SFGATE said that they were struck by two things: 1. What they described as a lack of understanding about what managing the office requires and 2. The fact that Jenkins was accompanied by Andrea Bruss, who serves as Breed’s deputy chief of staff.

Basically these are the wokest of the woke, probably former defense attorneys hired into these positions and after just one meeting they are already trying to slag their new boss in the press. It’s rumored that Boudin may return to run for DA again in the fall so you can bet the folks he hired are planning to keep this up at least until then.

I don’t revel in being a glass-half-empty guy, but looking at this objectively Brooke Jenkins is up against the city, the state, the dealers, the former DA’s cronies, the users and the general array of idiots who basically approve of what San Francisco has become. That’s a lot of opposition for one person to deal with before she’s even sat down in her office. That said, it’s nice to have someone in place who at least seems capable of acknowledging there’s a problem and that the DA’s office is partly responsible.

Here’s a bit of Brooke Jenkins’ appearance yesterday.

Watch: Newly-appointed DA @BrookeJenkinsSF speaks in the Tenderloin at her first press conference since her swearing-in last week.

"I have committed…to making sure that we end these open-air drug markets, that we clear these streets."

Story coming soon. pic.twitter.com/7Ty1jdT34a

— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard) July 12, 2022