It’s an anti-fentanyl frenzy. Police officers are busting their overtime budgets deploying to the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, South of Market, and the Mission to arrest drug dealers and users en masse. San Francisco’s jails are more crowded than they’ve been in decades.
But what happens if there are fewer attorneys to prosecute those arrests?
The San Francisco district attorney’s office may soon lay off at least 25 junior prosecutors to implement a $5.4 million budget cut mandated by Mayor Daniel Lurie.
That’s according to a scathing letter penned by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to Lurie’s budget director, Sophia Kittler, which was obtained by The Standard in a public records request.
“If implemented, the [district attorney’s office] would effectively have to suspend prosecuting entire categories of crimes due to lack of resources [and] reassign and redistribute thousands of cases or risk mass dismissals,” Jenkins wrote. “The impact of this request, if implemented, will still have a crippling effect on ensuring public safety throughout San Francisco.”
Lurie’s budget office instructed all city departments to cut at least 15% from their annual budgets. The ask comes as San Francisco stares down an $820 million budget deficit driven by downtown’s cratered economy. The mayor’s office is reviewing budget proposals from more than 50 departments, at least 20 of which bucked the order for reductions.
A City Hall hearing on the district attorney’s office budget and staffing is scheduled for Wednesday.
In her April 22 letter to Kittler, Jenkins said her office has little fat to trim. The cuts would need to start with junior prosecutors, who generally have fewer than five years of experience. They chiefly handle narcotics cases, misdemeanors, and preliminary hearings.
Lurie is balancing opposing needs.
Fiscal austerity in San Francisco’s current budget process is almost guaranteed. The mayor is legally mandated to deliver a balanced budget to the Board of Supervisors by June, a difficult task as President Donald Trump’s chaotic decisions threaten more than $1 billion in federal funding San Francisco relies on.
At the same time, Lurie rode into office promising a safer San Francisco. The fentanyl crisis yielded 635 overdose deaths in 2024 and more than 100 so far this year. Lurie has directed the San Francisco Police Department to take up special operations on Sixth Street and at 16th and Mission, among other drug hot spots.
Charles Lutvak, the mayor’s spokesperson, said keeping San Franciscans safe is Lurie’s “number one goal.” His budget will close a historic deficit while also building on the city’s recent drop in crime, Lutvak said.
“We appreciate District Attorney Jenkins’ partnership with our office and our law enforcement partners to get fentanyl off the street and keep our city safe every day,” Lutvak said.
In her letter, which reads very much like the work of a trial lawyer, Jenkins argued that the mayor’s one-size-fits-all budgeting approach wouldn’t work for the district attorney’s office.
The mayor asked departments to scale back their grants to nonprofit organizations, cut down on their contracts to outside firms, and reduce the number of professional services contracts the various departments offer.
That may apply to, say, the Mayor’s Office of Housing, which recently cut $4.2 million for free legal services provided by nonprofits to San Franciscans, or the Public Works Department, which contracts with construction firms. But Jenkins said those buckets of spending are not a significant part of the DA’s budget.
Jenkins also pushed back against the mayor’s request to conduct a review of positions for potential cuts. Her staff are already working beyond their capacity, Jenkins said.
“Any staffing reductions are not possible if the city wishes to continue prosecuting crimes meaningfully,” she wrote. “Stated another way, good police work turns into prosecutions — a push for public safety impacts both organizations.”
The city’s crime crackdown has piled cases onto prosecutors’ desks.
The district attorney’s office has 7,031 pending cases, the most in five years, Jenkins said.
“Any reductions in staff will invariably lead to even higher, more unsustainable workloads,” she wrote. That would lead to staff burnout and “retention issues.” The city has already seen what arrests without prosecutions look like: The DA’s office publicly said it wasn’t consulted about a March SFPD drug raid, leading to a grand total of zero arrests.
There was some reprieve for the DA, at least. The mayor’s office allowed Jenkins to bring in roughly 20 staffers during Lurie’s much-publicized hiring slowdown, according to sources with knowledge of the administration.
The district attorney’s office isn’t the only city department facing a fiscal scythe. Budget proposals show services slashed across the board: Public Works might clean streets less often, and even public toilets are on the chopping block. On the flip side of the justice system, the public defender’s office has said it is “grossly underfunded” compared to prosecutors and is asking Lurie for an additional $13.6 million to represent its clients.
Additional public records obtained by The Standard shine a light on the district attorney’s financial strain.
In an email to the mayor’s office in late April, Eugene Clendinen, the DA’s chief financial officer, asked the mayor’s office for $894,000 for general operation increases. The annual maintenance of the office case management system, physical record storage, an online legal research contract, and court litigation expenses — even a court shuttle — are “all woefully underfunded,” Clendinen warned the mayor’s budget office.
“These costs are not superfluous,” he wrote, “they are part of our core need for operation.”