The media loves a scandal — but who knew that any scandal could get tough-on-crime District Attorney Brooke Jenkins labeled as woke?
San Francisco’s top cop was in the news last week, thanks to digging from the SF Standard that revealed Jenkins had quietly promoted a longtime friend with no law degree or experience in prosecution from head of Victim Services to her chief of staff.
The former CEO of a short-lived marijuana dispensary, Monifa Willis now earns more than $300,000 from the DA’s office, in addition to $100,000 working as a lecturer and nurse practitioner at UCSF.
SF rules don’t bar an official from hiring a close friend, even if you ran track and field with them in high school, as Jenkins did with Willis. But co-workers who’d worked under Willis at Victim Services told the Standard it was a clear-cut case of nepotism.
“She was given this position because she knew the DA,” a former Victim Services employee who worked under Willis told the Standard.
Tabloid rag the Daily Mail was quick to leap on the scandal, running with this absurd headline: “Woke DA is dragged into toxic nepotism fight as she's accused of hiring her marijuana selling friend on $300,000 salary with no qualification.”
Whether or not it breaks the rules, there are plenty of legitimate questions to ask when a high-powered public official gives a friend who seemingly lacks experience a high-paying role. But calling Jenkins “woke” is an insane about-face on the part of the Daily Mail, which once championed her as the “no-nonsense,” “tough-on-crime” DA who was “starkly different” from her predecessor, Chesa Boudin.
Jenkins famously quit her job working for Boudin in 2021 because the progressive policies that Daily Mail called “ultra-woke,” like court diversions for low-level offenders and the ending of cash bail, made it too hard for her to keep people in prison.
Where did this surreal switch-up come from? Certainly, Jenkins played some role in it; despite conflicts with Boudin, Jenkins herself has long pushed the narrative that she’s a progressive leader. In a 2021 interview with contentious journalist Bari Weiss, Jenkins declared that she is a “progressive prosecutor” while emphasizing she’s working for “victims of color.” In 2022, then-SF Chronicle columnist Heather Knight labeled Jenkins as a “progressive prosecutor” in the headline of a story critical of Boudin. And in 2023, Jenkins’ office issued a press release touting all the “progressive” work she’d done in her first year.
I’m not sure we should take her at her word here, considering that agenda included bringing back cash bail, revoking plea deals for immigrants, charging juveniles as adults, and tapping into your doorbell cameras for police surveillance. But given the shifting standards of contemporary American politics — a world where MAGACommunism is a thing and white nationalists use Twitter to post pro-Palestine memes and go viral — labels like “progressive” have little consistent meaning.
And what does “woke” mean anymore, anyway? The word has its origins in the Black community, as a signifier of consciousness toward inequity and discrimination. But in recent years, it’s settled into position as a favored bigot dog-whistle, as regressive voices in outlets like Fox News and the Daily Mail have been happy to follow Donald Trump’s lead and apply it as a convenient slur toward anyone who’s a little too queer or a little too, err, of color.
Don’t take it from me — look at how the Daily Mail’s commentariat responded to the article about WIllis’s hiring.
It’s an ugly irony that Jenkins’ tough-on-crime policies are impacting people of color, especially those who are economically vulnerable, and yet her heritage is being weaponized to imply that she’s soft and into “DEI career advancement” because her chief of staff is a friend who is Black. The jury remains out on whether her “progressive” agenda is dramatically changing outcomes for victims. But any analysis of that work is taking a back seat to racist (and boring) rhetoric that hinges on the dumbest possible assumptions about a San Francisco elected official.
Can sending more people of color to prison ever be “woke”? Surely not — but San Francisco remains a punching bag for frenzied commentators in the culture war, even if their narratives keep flipping and flopping to target whoever’s currently in power. Welcome to the club, Brooke.
