San Francisco voters recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin in June, and will vote on whether to retain his appointed replacement, Brooke Jenkins, in November.
Alioto Veronese, the grandson of former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, trailed both Jenkins and Hamasaki in the only poll of the race so far. Nevertheless, he told SFGATE he expects the Alioto name, strong fundraising numbers and several union endorsements to buoy him this fall.
More importantly, he believes that many voters want a district attorney who is not connected to either Boudin or the Boudin recall. Jenkins was paid six figures by a committee connected to the recall, and the slow trickle of information regarding the payments has fueled criticism inside and outside of the District Attorney’s Office.
In a Q&A with SFGATE, Alioto Veronese offered strong criticisms of not only Boudin and Jenkins, but also of Mayor London Breed, the San Francisco Police Officers Association and city politics at large. With polls showing general dissatisfaction with the state of the city, Alioto Veronese believes he offers voters a credible alternative to all of the major players in San Francisco politics.
The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
SFGATE: People hate using the “tough on crime” vs. “reformer” spectrum to discuss prosecutors and crime policy, but let’s indulge it briefly. From an ideology standpoint, how do you compare to Chesa Boudin and Brooke Jenkins?
Alioto Veronese: I don’t think those things have to be mutually exclusive and that’s where I think Chesa Boudin went wrong: He was focused on reform at the expense of public safety. The No. 1 job of the DA is to ensure public safety, that a San Franciscan is safe when walking the streets, and that they’re safe in their ownership of property. Where Chesa went wrong is he did away with mechanisms that kept people safe, with incarceration being the big one.
The differences between me and Jenkins are great: She’s all about talk, while I’m all about practices. She said she’d maybe hold fentanyl dealers accountable by charging them with murder, but you can’t just talk about it, you have to do it. London Breed appointed a politician, and not someone with experience keeping people safe. Jenkins is beholden to the mayor, and that means investigation into city corruption won’t be taken seriously. One of the first things she did was gut the political corruption unit. They punted a police misconduct case until after the election. She doesn’t want to be held accountable for the choices she makes.
The Chinese community is seeing people coming from East Bay and preying on elders. In both the Ren case and the Chew case, Jenkins should be charging people with hate crimes, but is only sending messages. The criminal justice system is not taken seriously in San Francisco. In my first 60 days, I’ll send a message to people coming to San Francisco seeking to prey on our elders, break into our cars or commit other crimes that they will be punished. If incarceration is needed, I’m not afraid to lock them up.
We also need to hold city agencies accountable. We spend billions on homelessness but are failing. It’s a failing of the DA, the mayor’s office, the nonprofit complex, everyone. The mayor’s office has handed out millions to her friends not to do their jobs, but as political payback. Jenkins is afraid to hold the mayor accountable, and that’s what makes me different. I’m not beholden to anyone. What makes me different from Hamasaki is he comes from a public defender background, but we’ve tried that. We need a new approach.
One other major difference between me and Jenkins is she has a problem with the truth. I saw the interworkings of the recall campaign, which is why I didn’t publicly support it, but I voted to remove Boudin.
SFGATE: You say that prosecutors can pursue both reforms and public safety. What reforms do you support?
Alioto Veronese: I do believe cash bail is discriminatory on its face. We can’t decide when to selectively use it, but we can’t just do away with it without legislating a new tool to make sure people come back to court. We need to work with the California Legislature to come up with other options. The Legislature tried to abolish cash bail, but we need a real alternative. We can’t just give judges the authority, we need some sort of mechanism to get people back to the courts.
Civil assessment fees prey on people of color; we need to get rid of those. We also need to abolish no-knock warrants, and for 5150s, that authority needs to get away from police departments who use it to criminalize mental health and addiction problems. The bottom line is we can do all of this and still keep people safe. It’s not an issue of left versus right. Democratic socialists, moderates and Republicans all agree we need law and order back in San Francisco.
It can be done. We see on the other side of Golden Gate Bridge or places south of San Francisco jurisdictions that have reforms and don’t tolerate the nonsense we tolerate. We also need to send a signal to other jurisdictions they can either work with us or fight us. When San Rafael police dropped a homeless person off in San Francisco, that won’t be tolerated anymore.
We need someone who’s going to fight for San Francisco. When Dreamforce happens and visitors go home and tell people, “I saw something no one should ever see,” that’s going to change next year.
SFGATE: I’ll ask you a question I asked fellow candidate John Hamasaki. On all of Jenkins’ major policy changes — cash bail, juvenile charging and pre-trial detention — she has given prosecutors more discretion and lifted blanket bans on certain practices. Would you continue these changes, revert them back to the Boudin practices, or do something different? We’ve already talked about cash bail a bit, so let’s focus on the others.
Alioto Veronese: On juveniles, most of that authority was taken away from DAs by Prop. 57, but the difference between me and Jenkins is she can profess all of these policy changes, but it’s the practices that keep people safe.
You can talk about policy, but unless you’re actually holding people accountable, it’s all just double speak. The case of the police officer being prosecuted has been postponed to after the election. There’s a serial groper that keeps getting released from jail. She’s a politician not fighting for San Francisco, but fighting for the job she wants and a paycheck.
SFGATE: You have called for the mass arrest of fentanyl dealers, and said you want to introduce a ballot measure that’d place the San Francisco Police Department under the DA office’s control. You believe the DA’s office needs to be independent of other city agencies and departments, but why is the police department different?
Alioto Veronese: Calling them mass arrests is misleading; there aren’t that many people doing this. We’re talking about a couple dozen people and trust me, the message will be sent with the arrest of 10 people.
DA independence is absolutely important, and we’ve seen Jenkins can’t be independent. We see this in her ties to the mayor and not prosecuting Leanna Louie for elections crimes. As it relates to the police department, the mayor has been using officers as political props. She has them standing behind her and talks tough, but at the end of the day, she’s failing. We need to take that power away from her, it’s impacting morale.
While I believe authority over SFPD should reside with the DA’s office, I think the DA should not have that authority unless we allow the California Attorney General to investigate both SFPD and the DA’s office for misconduct. We need robust policy at the state level giving the attorney general that authority, and then it would be appropriate to have police report to the DA. Another option I’m considering is a ballot measure to let police report to the sheriff. We just have to get them away from the mayor.
The system that exists currently is inadequate. You have a very political police officer association supporting the DA, and they say publicly they’re not, but she’s gotten checks from the head of the association. There also aren’t enough resources at the DA’s office to investigate the police, so you’re relying on the police department to do its own investigations, and from the very beginning those investigations are tainted and biased.
SFGATE: Regardless of how this race goes, I take it you plan on running in 2023?
Alioto Veronese: I’m currently running in both this year and 2023. There’s some confusion around it because when I first started to run in February, the recall was not yet certified, so in order to run for DA, I had to run in 2023. I am actively running in both 2023 and this round.
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