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After a recent California Supreme Court decision that largely restricted pretrial detention to those accused of violent crimes, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is calling for the state’s constitution to be changed.

Jenkins, who was elected during the beginning of the city’s backlash against soft-on-crime left-wing politics in 2022, claimed that the court’s decision had hampered local efforts to fight retail theft. According to her, under the current state constitutional framework, “We are limited in being able to do what we need to do in order to keep these people from committing more theft in our stores.” She also said that she was pushing to advance legislation giving judges more discretion over detention.

San Francisco has seen a marked improvement in street conditions in the last few years, but it is still common to see large swaths of items locked behind plastic in chain retail stores. While the city’s voters’ turn to tough-on-crime politics has produced tangible results, their overwhelming support for Democratic politicians both locally and statewide has created the long-term problem of an activist judiciary tying DA Jenkins’s hands. Past ostensibly mainstream Democratic politicians have appointed more than their share of far-left judges.

Jenkins, herself a Democrat, has openly criticized leftist judges for leniency in the past. In one instance, she blasted a San Francisco Superior Court judge for ignoring voter sentiment after he gave a misdemeanor sentence to a man for minor theft, despite the fact that he had previous felony convictions. In 2024, Californians passed Proposition 36, which allowed for felony sentences in similar cases.

The current situation could have been avoided if San Francisco voters, and California voters more broadly, had been previously resistant to trendy crime-excusing politics. The Democratic judicial class, meanwhile, remains largely corrupted by 1970s-style “root cause” thinking on crime, where the focus is on sympathizing with criminals’ motivation rather than keeping the public safe. As San Francisco has learned, electing competent local politicians is one positive step, but an entrenched leftist judicial bureaucracy will be a little tougher to dislodge.