San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins appeared at an event called Winning the Middle, hosted by a centrist think tank called Third Way in Charleston, South Carolina on Monday, where she offered her thoughts on what’s going wrong in Bay Area politics: namely, the demonization of billionaires.
Jenkins shared the stage with Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss, Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb and moderator, Slow Boring editor Matthew Yglesias, for a talk called “The Don’t F it Up: Restoring the Brand by Governing Well.”
About halfway through the 40-minute talk, Jenkins chimed in to address Yglesias’ question about wealth inequality.
“In San Francisco, we are at a reckoning point with the labor unions… collecting signatures for a wealth tax,” she said, referring to the push for a state billionaire tax.
She continued by framing billionaires as crucial to the Democratic Party: “You know, we have the highest number of billionaires in the country in San Francisco. Most of whom are Democrats. Most of whom not only donate the most money to Democratic candidates, but also have extensive philanthropic records of giving money, you know, to our city.”
Jenkins wondered whether San Francisco will continue to alienate the people who have been “very successful” in America, and emphasized “not making them the enemy.”
“I think we are, you know, again at a reckoning point in our party with whether or not we can continue to be anti-business,” she continued, adding that the ultra-wealthy “are giving more than most.”
The comments serve as a rare glimpse into Jenkins’ beliefs beyond the law-and-order agenda that won her the DA seat in 2024.
In October 2021, Jenkins resigned from her job as assistant district attorney under Chesa Boudin, a progressive DA labeled “soft on crime” by his critics, especially those in the out-of-state press.
Jenkins then led the public charge to recall Boudin, receiving more than $175,000 from three SF political action nonprofits for her campaign work. Boudin was ousted in June 2022, and then-Mayor London Breed appointed Jenkins DA a month later. After earning enough votes to finish Boudin’s term, Jenkins won re-election in 2024 on a platform of cracking down on all forms of crime, including non-violent offenses.
Jenkins did not respond to a request for further details about her comments at the Third Way conference by press time.
As she has in the past, Jenkins noted during the event that SF crime and disorder is falling because of her “common sense” efforts to prosecute and incarcerate more people. This view, however, is contested by a number of crime experts, who in the past told Gazetteer that elected officials overstate the impact of their policy changes while downplaying organic declines in crime after a sharp rise during the pandemic.
At the beginning of the panel, Ygleisias, a frequent and staunch critic of the left, addressed Jenkins with a story about how he was peed on during a visit to San Francisco. “How do you make San Francisco a nice place to live?” he asked Jenkins with a laugh.
“You have to govern pragmatically. It’s not about ideology,” Jenkins replied.
That’s certainly true for Jenkins, who used to claim to be a progressive then shifted to the label of “centrist.” Whatever the terminology, Jenkins made clear she’s firmly pro-billionaire, labor unions be damned.
