Stop us if you’ve heard this one: There’s a polarizing, big-city DA whose methods veer sharply from those of their predecessor, and grab national headlines.
And, guess what? By 2025, crime goes down. Way, way down: Crime drops across the board, homicides reach lows unseen since “Gunsmoke” was on the air, and the DA delivers a forceful warning to Trump’s ICE goons. San Franciscans know this story well, right?
But you shouldn’t have stopped us. Because that DA is … Larry Krasner. Yeah, that’s right — the progressive prosecutor from Philadelphia. More on that in a moment.
Back in San Francisco, Brooke Jenkins, our photogenic and upwardly mobile DA, is having a moment in the sun, and not just because national media is calling in the wake of a 20-year-old traveling across state lines, penning an anti-AI manifesto and (allegedly) tossing a Molotov cocktail at the portcullis of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s mansion.
Jenkins is becoming a ubiquitous presence on the cable-news circuit; she increasingly receives the kind of coverage that can only help solidify a national donor base and make her eventual ascent to Sacramento appear inevitable.
The San Francisco DA to California attorney general to Democratic political stratosphere pathway is not novel. Had AG Rob Bonta not surprised everyone by opting to stay in his job instead of running for governor, Jenkins’ campaign for AG would likely be less abstract and more concrete.
It never hurts to be the subject of glowing portraits in national publications, such as a piece this month in the New York Post with the actual headline “San Francisco reports lowest crime rates in 2 decades — thanks to DA Brooke Jenkins scrapping woke predecessor’s crazy policies.”
Under “crazy” Chesa Boudin, the city’s reported crime rate fell by double digits. But, lo, now it’s even lower. The Post attributed this drop, exclusively, to San Francisco’s “anti-woke DA.”
As the Post covers more West Coast stories, we’ll have more opportunities to unearth the line from the 1984 movie “Top Secret,” in which Klaus the East German torturer is described as “a moron who knows only what he reads in the New York Post.”
San Francisco’s crime rates are indeed at their lowest level in generations. The Post and others are happy to attribute that to Jenkins scrapping the progressive policies of her vanquished ex-boss, Boudin, and her return to a more traditional form of carceral prosecution.
But crime has also dropped, precipitously, nationwide. And most everything you say about massive crime reductions in San Francisco could also be said about Philadelphia, where the OG progressive prosecutor who first inspired Boudin to run for San Francisco DA has been running the show for nearly a decade.
Krasner ran on ending mass incarceration, treating “addiction as a medical problem, not a crime” and rejecting the “return to the failed drug wars of the past.”
Last year, homicides in the City of Brotherly Love were at their lowest level since the mid-1960s (“Gunsmoke,” incidentally, was on the air for 20 years). Shootings, assaults and retail thefts are all down, down, down in Philly. Crime was far more prevalent a few years ago but, luckily for Krasner, there are no recalls in the state of Pennsylvania.
“Krasner is, if anything, as zealous as Chesa Boudin was,” says Stanford University law professor and empirical researcher John Donohue, about Krasner’s commitments to ending cash bail, mass incarceration and drug-use arrests. “You see the same pattern of crime up and crime down we see in San Francisco.”
Adds Michael Smith, a former cop and a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio, “Irrespective of what your DA was doing or not doing, crime was likely going to drop in San Francisco anyway.”
Is all this to say Brooke Jenkins is doing a bad job? No. Not at all. Rather, it’s to say that San Francisco’s DA does not have access to a de facto on/off switch for crime. San Francisco’s crime rate is declining steeply, but so is the nation’s — and that’s been the case for some time.
Anyone who claims what’s going on in this city is due to any single elected official is either naive or is selling you something.
Jenkins’ office did not return a request for comment on the Post crediting the city’s lowered crime rate to its “anti-woke DA.”
Funny thing about that article: It tubthumped our city’s reduction in crime, but it didn’t include all the crimes. Your average news-reading San Franciscan perusing such a glowing writeup might wonder: What about all the murders?
As of mid-April 2026, San Francisco police have recorded 15 homicides, a four-fold increase from this point last year. San Francisco is, presently, the murder capital of the Bay Area.
Is Brooke Jenkins responsible for this rash of homicides? Of course she isn’t. That’d be a dopey and ridiculous claim — just as it’s dopey and ridiculous to claim that Jenkins is some Judge Dredd-like figure singlehandedly squelching citywide crime.
Of note, 15 homicides pro-rates to around 54 by the end of December. It’s cold comfort to those who lose someone they know and love to a violent death, but even this is an extremely low homicide total for San Francisco.
Last year’s tally of 28 homicides was the lowest here since 1954, when the Giants played in the Polo Grounds. One year later, “Gunsmoke” would debut.
So, what’s going on in San Francisco (and everywhere else)? That could serve as the subject for not one but several criminologist panel discussions.
But a critical local factor could be something that studies have long shown: Criminals are deterred far less by the threat of severe punishment than by the perceived certainty of being caught.
In San Francisco there was, for years, the opposite of that. In 2016, this county placed last in California, 58th of 58, in arrest rate.
In 2020, San Francisco police only cleared one of every 16 recorded property crimes — meaning that 15 of 16 property crime cases never even had a chance of reaching the desk of San Francisco’s “soft-on-crime” DA.
Instances abounded of San Francisco cops dissuading people from reporting crimes or looking on while crimes were committed.
The relationship between Boudin’s office and the police during his two years as DA was bad enough that it essentially constituted a wildcat strike by the SFPD.
Its nadir may have come in May 2022, when the DA’s office moved to arrest the kingpin of a car break-in ring at his boba tea shop and the police refused to provide a vehicle with which to transport the culprit to jail.
Boudin was forced to bring in federal law enforcement to handle transporting the alleged criminal, and then to rent a U-Haul truck to transport the seized contraband to be processed as evidence.
“Irrespective of what your DA was doing or not doing, crime was likely going to drop in San Francisco anyway.”
University of Texas at San Antonio professor of criminology and criminal justice Michael Smith
In the present day, the DA’s data dashboard records more than 11 percent of reported incidents resulting in arrest thus far in 2026.
Those aren’t exactly gangbusters numbers, but it’s better than double what it was in 2021 and 2022, when only 5.1 percent of incidents resulted in an arrest. You know who the DA was then.
Police, says University of Texas-San Antonio’s Smith, cannot arrest their way out of a crime problem writ large.
But “arresting the right people in the right places doing the wrong things is a strategy” — and this is currently happening with some of the city’s most persistent crimes.
Magnus Lofstrom, the policy director of criminal justice at the Public Policy Institute of California, notes that the city’s crime stats record a clear tapering off of car break-ins in fall 2023.
That, he says, is when police implemented a policy of using bait cars, saturating problem areas with officers, and better coordinating with the DA — nobody’s charging up U-Haul rentals on DA credit cards anymore.
Jonathan Simon, a criminal law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, concurs that the shift in tactics seems to have worked.
“I’m not usually a huge cheerleader for police,” he says, “but it’s clear that they’ve had new strategies the last few years, especially on retail theft. They’re concentrating on the retail corridors.”
Police are also now better equipped with license-plate readers, drones and cameras. Residents’ home security cameras are near ubiquitous in some neighborhoods — and if cops couldn’t be bothered to obtain footage in years past, they sure seem to be doing it now.
Another factor, said Stanford law professor George Fisher, a former prosecutor, is that San Franciscans feel better about crime now.
In the pandemic years and shortly thereafter, Fisher said, people felt like crime was surging because of drugstores and supermarkets cutting staff and putting desirable items behind locked plexiglass cabinets.
There was the disconcerting experience of ambling into a Safeway or Walgreens in which, Fisher said, “you felt as though you were walking into a prison and had to circle around guards and barriers.”
Now, that the vibe has shifted, Fisher worries that there are larger, systemic problems that are being ignored — problems that progressives like Krasner and Boudin at least tried to remedy.
There are, Fisher said, “terrible conditions in our institutions.” People who received heavy sentences in the era when California was one of the largest incarcerators worldwide, are “in their 50s and 60s, still hanging around on life-without-parole cases they committed 40 years ago.”
Crime, it turns out, is a bit mysterious. The crime rate in prior generations was off the hook in spite of a prosecutorial onslaught and draconian sentencing. Between 1976 and 2006, California’s prison population jumped from a shade over 21,000 to roughly 173,000.
That’s something to think about when tough-on-crime measures are touted as the cure for all that ails us. Similarly, San Francisco could certainly use more cops but, historically, this city’s crime rate and police staffing rate do not correlate neatly.
When you talk to two criminologists, you may get three opinions. But even experts who held contrasting views on the roles of policing and aggressive prosecution agreed on this much: Crime, and its ebbs and flows, are deeply complex. And politicizing crime is never a good thing.
Reductive attempts to tie the results you like to the politicians and policies you like — while ignoring the plethora of evidence you don’t like — are not beneficial to society. That reduces us all to morons who know only what we read in the New York Post.
Jenkins owes her job to the Police Officers Association, which employed terrorist propaganda to oppose Boudin. then doubled down with more lies and threats for the recall, thereby ending and reversing a six year effort to reform the bureaucratically lumbering SFPD. As long as the POA has the power to disrupt and destroy any effort at police accountability and transparency, data and logic have zero chance.
The San Francisco District Attorney is not in charge of SFPD. If Boudin was interested in reforming SFPD, he should have lobbied Breed to be the police chief or for a seat on the police commission.
Jenkins’ frequent inappropriate comments about judges and blacklisting of judges are an abuse of power. Her threats to try juveniles as adults also goes against all available evidence and, if she was ever successful in those attempts, would only increase future crime rates.
@Paul in the Mission – The blaming of judges follows a trajectory. First it was Prop 47 that caused all the problems, but then it was Chesa Boudin, and in 2024 it was Prop 47 again in support of Prop 36 undoing some of it. Now there’s nothing and nobody to blame but them there ding-danged lib’rul judges, since of course the SFPD could never be at fault for anything.
Oh, and in amongst all that shifting blame, jurisdiction didn’t matter, Boudin somehow caused a statewide trend, Prop 47 was somehow causing problems specific to San Francisco.
Very true that the DA cannot claim responsibility for overall favorable crime trends nor should be blamed for them when unfavorable. But the larceny and car break-in trends in the graphs above do tell a story. Boudin’s prosecution rates for arrests for these crimes plummeted, and we all saw how thieves became more brazen, just stealing in plain sight because they knew they were unlikely to be punished in any way even in the unlikely event they were arrested. Boudin philosophically did not believe that such thefts were the responsibility of the thief. That resulted in a pretty dystopian environment where we all saw audacious thefts and we had to ask to have basic goods unlocked to purchase them. Jenkins reversed that specific trend.
Correlation is not causation, of course. But the DA (and, more so, the police) certainly can have an impact on certain types of crime. The deterrent effect is real. I’m the opposite of a lock-em-up type. I was involved in two large lawsuits that led to prison population reductions in California. But I do believe that criminals should be arrested and prosecuted, and it is on the punishment end that we should be more reasonable and thoughtful.
The table is arrest rates: I don’t think the DA can arrest people? To me it points to exactly what the author said (that there was a de-facto police strike because they weren’t arresting people). I didn’t see another graph for how successful prosecutions were, or the number that were convicted, which may point to how effective the DA is. Where did your data on Boudin’s prosecution rate come from?
“I don’t think the DA can arrest people?”
The DA’s office can file arrest warrants and (via a Grand Jury) indictments. The actual arrest would be by SFPD or SFFD.
This is disingenuous. What you’re suggesting is that the DA could have its own force of foot patrols that is able to stake out high break-in areas, find out who is breaking into cars, then assemble a grand jury and indict these people. That’s completely illogical and not how our system works at all.
I signed in successfully but I still can’t vote. Still a good website.
Thanks for reporting
Can you explain where the drug crimes are reported?
That is SF no 1 problem.
SF has the second highest rate and problems with illegal drugs in the whole country yet that is never reported by police etc .
Lawlessness is lawlessness
The harm and dying on the streets here due to the drug situation is major problem still.
Although we dont have a death penalty for drug sales and usage , the current way this city continues to handle the drug scene is really like a death penalty
Allowing persons to use lethal poisons at anytime is the samething as a death penalty .
Really cruel to still see addicts allowed to be harming and destroying their life s all day long .
Joe, you are being a bit deceptive here. Larceny and car breaking went to 45000 and 30000 a few years back and have dropped significantly in recent years. This is the vast majority of crime and dwarfs the other 6 categories combined that you site. Percentages are bullshit. Look at the total numbers. Larceny went from 15k to 45k then back down. Car breaking ins went from 10k to 30k and then back down. That is 50.000 less crimes in a short period. This is what people are talking about when they hype the DA. The numbers don’t lie.
Sir or madam —
You seem to have missed the part about police making arrests at double the rate of a few years ago and also seem to have missed the entire section about car break-ins. It’s there.
JE
This reads like an ESH – Everyone Sucks Here
I’m no fan of SFPD or their behavior during Boudin’s tenure, but leaving out Boudin’s actions after the Jamaica Hampton arrest leaves a pretty large gap in the narrative of responsibility for teamwork.
I’m firmly convinced that whatever cooperation Boudin was going to get from the SFPD — however little that may have been initially — was completely vaporized after Boudin’s wishy-washy “both sides” prosecution of the Jamaica Hampton arrest. A needlessly squandered opportunity to build a bridge between departments, and I put the fault for that fully on Boudin. It’s why he was never the right person for the job.
Voting is working now! Thank you.
Our “upwardly mobile” DA might be having a moment in the sun (“No, DA Brooke Jenkins does not have an on/off switch for crime” by Joe Eskenazi, April 20, 2026) including support from the patently conservative New York Post that mentions “her woke predecessor’s crazy policies.” However, I prefer those policies to hers. As you said, under DA Chesa Boudin, “the city’s reported crime rate fell by double digits.” Jenkins is clearly coasting on his major progress. I just completed jury service for a five-day hung jury trial of patently ridiculous misdemeanor “criminal battery” charges: two young bucks each thought the other had caused a nighttime auto accident. Both cars were seriously damaged and both men sustained non-lethal minor, if concerning, injuries. In rage, the complaining witness came running at the defendant while yelling in Spanish. The defendant did not understand or speak Spanish. Under understandable circumstances, he became suitably anxious as the other advanced within a foot or two, and bopped him on the chin. Of course, both then fell down wrestling until the police came. Are there not more serious City crimes for Jenkins to charge? Even worse, Jenkins refiled the same charges for the same waste of time and money! No less expensive and less time-wasting City alternatives like diversion or arbitration? There are no murderers, no drug dealers, no rapists, no grand larcenists, no white collar criminals to prosecute? Maybe then there is no need for DA Jenkins at all and she should resign?
The recall of Chesa Boudin, and before him the three Marxist members of the SF School Board, was the first solid indication I’d seen in years that maybe SF had not gone completely insane after all. The election of Daniel Lurie is another hopeful sign. (I know ML will love that.)
San Franciscans FEEL better about crime now because there actually IS less crime now. That said, many of the products on the shelves at my local Walgreen’s are still locked up.
I know little about the recent spike in homicides, but how much of it is gang related? If it is only gang members killing each other, heck, it’s almost a public service, as long as no one gets caught in the crossfire. Go for it, guys!
Some of the judges are a disgrace. Their all too frequent boo-hoo-hoo rulings in favor of those charged and convicted of crimes, to the exasperation of the DA and the public in general, betray much more sympathy for criminals than for their victims. Criminals often get more opportunities to commit more crimes, often horrible ones, despite a long record of arrests and convictions. The left in general, ML, and Mr. Eskenazi share this sympathy for bad guys, while their victims are just supposed to suck it up, apparently.
One thing I am certain of is that a criminal behind bars won’t be harming decent, law abiding people. Some of them are so violent they should NEVER have the freedom to endanger the rest of us. Lock them up forever.
The New York Post, by the way, is America’s oldest newspaper. Who knows, maybe they know a few things.
Lockup never stopped or rehabilitated a criminal, but certainly caused a ton more of them. And criminals always return to the community sooner or later. Enjoy the year or three you get with them locked up where there is easy access to sex, drugs, and rock and roll guidelines how to avoid capture in the future. Or where an addict can get dry but not really get the treatment and social support/housing and job needed to avoid going right back out to addiction. Jail is now a holding place for the unhoused and unserved addict plus folks that should never have been carged in the first place in favor of diversion, community service, house arrest and other. Just plain wrong.
I believe the ‘cameras everywhere’ meme has begun to sink into the criminal’s skulls. People used to think God was watching them. Now the criminals have something REAL to worry about. Good.
The last time a reformist left-wing SF DA was ousted from the right by a demagogic “tough-on-crime” centrist, it was Terence Hallinan in 2003 getting shanked by his former deputy Kamala Harris.
Clearly this means that Brooke Jenkins will win the 2044 Democratic presidential nomination, then will end up flubbing an easily-winnable general election race to the insurgent fascist candidacy of Kid Rock.
Good news: Crime figures in decline.
Bad news: Still way above the rest of the developed world.
This will never change as long as we allow every last hick to legally assemble an arsenal of guns and ammo.
Turns out it was but a handful of crews who circled tourist spots to smash car windows. Once taken off the street, car breakins virtually zero. Good work, credit where credit’s due. What took them so long, but better late than never I suppose.
Have mercy, so Stanford profs are now on the wagon of gaslighting us about how we’re supposed to feel and how we’re all wrong. The reality is CSV, Walgreens and Safeway put isles an isles of merch in locked cabinets after they looked at the numbers. This is a lose-lose situation, and yes, our street scene remains a total sh.tshow that nobody sane should accept. Yet, the status quo remains in large part so everybody from non-profits to professor Fisher can use it to sustain their raison-d’etre and tell us about our feelings.
“San Francisco could certainly use more cops but, historically, this city’s crime rate and police staffing rate do not correlate neatly.”
Again with this copaganda about needing more police in an otherwise sound column! Why could we “certainly use more cops” when, in the second half of this very sentence, you admit that won’t make us safer?
What we could certainly use more of is educators, bus drivers, street cleaners, nurses, mental health counselors, and affordable housing. No, the bursting-at-the-seams SFPD budget does not need to grow even bigger.
Cops don’t make us safer or solve social problems. Crime is down so we don’t need “more” cops, but fewer. Take what’s saved in the budget from fewer and spend it on social workers as well as what you suggest, with social workers assigned to each police station, several or them, to divert delinquents and solve household problems, saving a very highly-paid police force (one of the tops in the nation) for the big guy stuff that with their militarist training, they are prepared to handle.
Thank you Joe. I am irked by the implication that people who commit crimes can even name the DA, nevermind act or fail to act based on knowledge of policy. Most crime is caused by addiction, poverty or mental illness.
As a Public Defender, I would guess that less than 10% of my clients over the years could even name the DA. I’ve never heard a client say, “I was gonna do a robbery last week but I remembered the DA is Jenkins now and she’s tough on crime” or “I totally broke into that house because Chesa is the DA and he won’t hold me accountable.”
We should really take the politics out of this discussion and do what scientists do – apply evidence based analysis. Tons of evidence establishes that prison does not reduce crime (the recidivism rates are quite high for parolees), that the death penalty does not deter homicides, and that restorative justice, drug treatment, supportive housing, community, family support and stable employment all prevent crime.
Unfortunately, we currently have a DA who is dying to be the next Kamala and cares not a whit about the evidence, only her career.
Unfortunately, this DA rejects treatment courts and wants everyone to go to prison and have felony convictions and loses 50% of trials because they don’t know how to evaluate a case.
My bigger gripe with the recent news coverage is the complete and total absence of any mention of her numerous public problems with prosecutorial misconduct and ethical challenges, from campaign finance lies to illegally emailing RAP sheets to committing misconduct in multiple jury trials.
She’s dirty. And as you so eloquently explain, she gets ZERO credit for the high homicide rate or the reduction in property crime.
Correlation is still not causation; Jenkins is still corrupt and dishonest regardless of the crime rate which spiked during the pandemic and SFPD’s self-imposed stand down on enforcement efforts during the period. Of course the crime rate came down since that peak. Of course it did. She has literally nothing to do with it, but will certainly claim all possible credit for it. She’s a Breed appointee, lying is job 1.
She has the lost puppy look down to a science.