John, when right-wing conservatives and police unions succeed in their efforts to remove our progressive District Attorneys from office, it means that police officers are able to escape accountability.
We are seeing this right now in San Francisco where District Attorney Brooke Jenkins recently announced that she will dismiss the charges against the officers who killed an unarmed man, leaving his 84-year old mother wondering if she’ll ever see justice for her son during her lifetime.
As you recall, DA Jenkins came into office after conservative billionaires successfully replaced Chesa Boudin through a sham recall campaign that was heavily funded by GOP megadonors and the police union.
Jenkins left Chesa's office in 2021, shared confidential documents over her personal email of a case that was at the center of the recall campaign's argument against Chesa, was "coincidentally" paid six figures by a non-profit linked with the main funders of the recall, and then was named as the new DA after their smear campaign succeeded.
In her first few weeks, she fired some of the most passionate, highly experienced prosecutors in the office, including the prosecutors who were working to hold SFPD officers accountable for committing murder.
And now, DA Jenkins is choosing to NOT hold cops accountable for crimes they commit. She has stated that she will not prosecute the officers who killed Keita O’Neil and Sean Moore.
This is what happens when we are unable to defend our DAs against right-wing billionaires — our justice champions are replaced with DAs like Jenkins who will roll back all of our work and refuse to hold police accountable.
We saw it in San Francisco. And now our opponents are using SF as a playbook to roll back our work nationwide. We are seeing it in Texas, where conservatives have introduced bills to make it easier to remove DAs from office. And we are seeing it in St. Louis, where conservatives are working to strip Kim Gardner of her power as Circuit Attorney.
And we know that if they succeed, they will want to replace our justice champions with DAs like Brooke Jenkins.
The officers who killed Sean Moore and Keita O’Neil were the first SFPD officers ever charged for killing someone on-duty — a historic first that was made possible because we worked so hard to elect Chesa Boudin as San Francisco DA in 2019.
In 2017, Sean Moore was having a mental health crisis and in need of medical care. San Francisco police officer Kenneth Cha pepper sprayed him, beat him, and shot him twice.
Sean died of his gunshot wounds 3 years later. Officer Cha was charged with voluntary manslaughter and assault with an automatic firearm under DA Chesa Boudin.
When DA Jenkins took office, she fired the prosecutors in charge of that case and has been ignoring Sean’s mother and, until this day, has not yet convicted the officers.
Another man, named Keita O’Neil, was shot by a San Francisco officer, Christopher Samayoa, through his vehicle window, even though O’Neil was completely unarmed. Former DA Chesa Boudin charged that officer for the killing.
But Jenkins has announced that she intends to dismiss the charges against Christopher Samayoa for lack of evidence — even though that same evidence was used to fire him from the police department, leading the judge to issue an arrest warrant, and prompted a multi-million dollar lawsuit between the city and Keita O'Neil's family.
We will be introducing a campaign in the coming days to demand that AG Bonta take over the case so that Officer Samayoa is finally held accountable.
This is exactly why we have our DA Defense Fund – to elect and defend progressive civil rights minded DAs that will do the hard work to hold police accountable and protect the people they serve.
In solidarity,
Real Justice
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Pol. Adv. Paid for by Real Justice PAC, realjusticepac.org
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