Ryan Khojasteh, incumbent District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ only opponent in November, appears to be distancing himself from ousted DA Chesa Boudin, who hired Khojasteh to be a prosecutor in 2020.
“I have not sought the endorsem*nt of Chesa Boudin, although I did work with him,” Khojasteh said during a conversation Tuesday night at Manny’s with Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi.
Moreover, he sees Boudin as a warning to himself. “I’ve certainly had conversations with him on how I can not make some of the mistakes that he made, which is valuable,” Khojasteh continued.
At 30, Khojasteh has been a volunteer attorney at the public defender’s office, a prosecutor at the San Francisco District Attorney’s office hired by Boudin (and then fired by Jenkins), and is now a prosecutor for Pamela Price, the district attorney for Alameda County.
Though Khojasteh avoided labeling himself a progressive prosecutor, he said the DA’s race in November would “be an election between progress and regress.”
Jenkins, he said, is “trying to promote ideology and refueling this reactionary base at the expense of public safety to win votes, as opposed to actually pushing forth the evidence-based policies that will make us safer.”
“The mayor made a mistake” in picking Jenkins, “a political ally,” as the DA, he continued. It would have been better “to pick a non-political manager to stabilize the district attorney’s office … to unify our city [after] a tumultuous recall.”
Still, though he hews closer to Boudin’s outlook on crime and punishment than Jenkins’. He said he differs with his former boss on several policy issues, such as the application of gang enhancements. Khojasteh said he “has a general disdain” for gang enhancements, which add to the punishment for crimes committed by and for criminal gangs; Khojasteh said these disproportionately criminalize and incarcerate people from Black and brown communities.
But he also avoided a yes or no answer on whether he outright opposed them, because “blanket policies can be irresponsible, and we should always be open to seeing if that’s going to ensure accountability for a heinous crime.”
“It is a bit of a differentiation” from Boudin, he continued. “But I think the spirit of it is the same.”
Nevertheless, he appreciated “a lot of the things that [Boudin] did for kids,” or juvenile offenders. Both Khojasteh and Boudin support reforms to the juvenile justice system, including not prosecuting juveniles as adults, and providing more rehabilitation programs for them. Khojasteh worked at the juvenile unit for two years while at the San Francisco DA’s office.
In fact, “kids” or “kid” was one of the most used words on Tuesday night, coming up about 19 times within the one-hour event. “Ending the school-to-prison pipeline by getting a kid the care, the mentorship, the services, the therapy, the extracurricular opportunities they need will stop crime,” he said.
In contrast, in Khojasteh’s view, his rival Jenkins “is exploiting our concerns about public safety to drag us back into failed policies of the past, which aren’t working,” he said. Those policies, he said, include “charging kids as adults and putting them into prison” and “the war on drugs.”
Under Jenkins, convictions have risen for the first time in eight years, and diversions to alternative programs have fallen. Dozens have left the office, saying the focus on reform under her predecessor has vanished.
Khojasteh bemoaned how Jenkins has slashed restorative justice programs in San Francisco, programs he believes are “incredibly effective” to put kids on a better path; he wants to bring them back to juvenile hall.
Asked how he would deal with the fentanyl epidemic, Khojasteh said that drug dealers should be prosecuted, while drug use should be treated as a public-health problem —which is beyond the purview of the criminal justice system.
The current approach, he said, keeps drug users waiting in jail to no avail, according to Khojasteh, leading to overcrowding and chaos that is risky to both inmates and sheriffs. He believes a more effective approach is to provide treatment, and the DA’s office should also get involved in advocating for more beds.
Khojasteh said that the next DA needs to work on rehabilitating the office’s image, partially because “the attacks by Jenkins on the DA’s office during the recall” — when Jenkins said the city was “at risk 24/7” and directly linked crime rates to Boudin’s “failed policies,” despite expert agreement that DAs have little influence on crime — undermined its credibility. “It’s happening to my colleagues right now,” he said, explaining that some victims and witnesses feel it would be a waste of time cooperating with the DA.
Khojasteh also disapproved of how Jenkins manages the DA’s office. He said 100 people have left the office under Jenkins mainly because of the high caseload. “I need to make sure they’re not burnt out, so we can competently prosecute cases,” he said.
Another theme of the night was public safety. “Safe” and its variants — “safety,” “safer,” “safest” — appeared a total of 39 times (sometimes uttered by Eskenazi). Khojasteh presented himself as a “safer” candidate than Jenkins, and said three times when answering various questions that his “job No. 1 is public safety.”
As for organized retail theft, Khojasteh believes that the people who do it must be held accountable. But to prevent it from going on, more work should be done with the unsolved mental illness, substance abuse disorder, poverty or housing instability lurking behind.
He believes San Francisco needs more police officers on the streets, but also needs better-trained police officers. He wants to hold the officers who abuse their authority accountable, but also wants to build strong relationships with the police department to help increase clearance rates. “The biggest problem here is that the police are unable to identify people in a lot of property crimes,” he said. “When the public loses trust in the ability to apprehend someone, they’re not going to report crime.”
Eskenazi needled Khojasteh for attempting to look older than his 30 years by cutting his long hair and wearing “Clark Kent glasses.” The moderator joked that his own clothes were older than the DA candidate to his right.
But Khojasteh took it in stride. Being a young candidate, he said, means “I’m going to be here for a while, and I can be the DA of San Francisco for a very long time to help stabilize and right the ship.”
