The day after Election Day, predominantly Black recipients received racist, trollish text messages telling them they had been “selected” to “pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” The messages were sent from varying numbers and area codes, and sent to recipients in at least eight states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Alabama. Students at both Alabama State University and the University of Alabama reported getting the messages; some Twitter users reported that children or teens too young to vote also received them.

The foul texts generated anger, fear, and a somewhat muted response from law enforcement, with the FBI confirming in a statement that it was “aware” of the incident and is in communication with the Justice Department and “other federal authorities” on the matter. Now, political violence researchers at Princeton University have a theory about how the messages targeted Black recipients, and advice for those who received them. 

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

The Princeton researchers also wrote that they consider the security risk posed by the messages to be “low,” considering they didn’t contain other personally identifying information targeting the recipients, like their addresses. They advise recipients not to post screenshots of the messages that could inadvertently expose identifying information like phone numbers. They also recommend reporting the texts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has condemned the messages and said it’s investigating their origin, or to local law enforcement.

Along with the FBI, Virginia’s attorney general has condemned the messages; a spokesperson with the Federal Communications Commission told Virginia’s 13News Now that the agency is also looking into the messages “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson explicitly tied them to the election results, writing in a statement: “The unfortunate reality of electing a President who, historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes.  These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

Johnson added that the threat contained in the messages “is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.” The NAACP also said it’s encouraging the FBI and local law enforcement “to take these messages seriously and respond appropriately.”

The day after Election Day, predominantly Black recipients received racist, trollish text messages telling them they had been “selected” to “pick cotton at the nearest plantation.” The messages were sent from varying numbers and area codes, and sent to recipients in at least eight states, including Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Ohio, and Alabama. Students at both Alabama State University and the University of Alabama reported getting the messages; some Twitter users reported that children or teens too young to vote also received them.

The foul texts generated anger, fear, and a somewhat muted response from law enforcement, with the FBI confirming in a statement that it was “aware” of the incident and is in communication with the Justice Department and “other federal authorities” on the matter. Now, political violence researchers at Princeton University have a theory about how the messages targeted Black recipients, and advice for those who received them. 

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

The Princeton researchers also wrote that they consider the security risk posed by the messages to be “low,” considering they didn’t contain other personally identifying information targeting the recipients, like their addresses. They advise recipients not to post screenshots of the messages that could inadvertently expose identifying information like phone numbers. They also recommend reporting the texts to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has condemned the messages and said it’s investigating their origin, or to local law enforcement.

Along with the FBI, Virginia’s attorney general has condemned the messages; a spokesperson with the Federal Communications Commission told Virginia’s 13News Now that the agency is also looking into the messages “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson explicitly tied them to the election results, writing in a statement: “The unfortunate reality of electing a President who, historically has embraced, and at times encouraged hate, is unfolding before our eyes.  These messages represent an alarming increase in vile and abhorrent rhetoric from racist groups across the country, who now feel emboldened to spread hate and stoke the flames of fear that many of us are feeling after Tuesday’s election results.”

Johnson added that the threat contained in the messages “is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.” The NAACP also said it’s encouraging the FBI and local law enforcement “to take these messages seriously and respond appropriately.”

I was doom-scrolling on X a few months ago when a video about Oakland, California, caught my eye: “Do you know your recaller?” it asked, before an image of a talking white-haired man with a yellow tie flashed across the screen. “Let’s find out.” 

I’d been curious about the recalls in Oakland for a while: Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price, both progressive women of color, face elections that could drive them out of office. Though their critics have come at them for many reasons, from allegations of nepotism and mismanagement to an FBI raid on Thao’s home, these recall campaigns have largely been driven by community concerns about crime: In Oakland, as in much of the country, many people don’t feel safe right now, even if the data shows that violence dropped significantly this year. I’d already spoken with some of the city’s recall leaders, many of whom are also people of color, hoping to understand why. But I had never seen the man with the yellow tie before. He worked in PR.  

Republicans and moderate Democrats are using crime fears to whip up support for their causes, even as extreme pandemic-era spikes in violence fade.

“Sam Singer is the predator’s press man, the bad guy’s good guy,” the video’s anonymous narrator told me, listing a few of Singer’s achievements in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in crisis communications. After a Chevron refinery caught fire in Richmond and its noxious fumes sent thousands of people to the emergency room, the oil company hired him to manage its reputational damage. The San Francisco Zoo did the same after a tiger jumped out of its cage and killed a teenager. And in 2019, Singer did PR for the house-flipping company Wedgewood during its standoff with a group of formerly unhoused Black moms squatting with their children in one of the company’s vacant Oakland homes. 

Journalists have described Singer as “the master of disaster” and “one of the most influential behind-the-scenes shapers of public opinion in the Bay Area.” He’s repped Facebook, Jack in the Box, and the 49ers, among others. These days, Singer does PR for the Oakland police union; he has said repeatedly that he does not work for the recall campaigns, but he tweets daily about crime in the city and his belief that Thao and Price should be removed from office, and he has a lot of sway with reporters. The video on X struck a conspiratorial note, questioning whether moneyed interests had hired Singer this election season to create “a negative perception of Oakland in the press,” which could help the recalls. Is someone “paying this high-priced spin doctor,” it added, “to talk shit about Oakland?” 

Intrigued, I called up some progressives in the city to see what they had to say about Singer. “He came out of nowhere to start attacking me” on social media, DA Price told me, adding that she had heard he was a “hired gun.”

“He’s a central figure in a larger network who are working together to ensure that a certain group of people remains in power,” said Leigh Hanson, chief of staff for Mayor Thao.

“When it comes to the messaging behind the recalls, he is the person,” added Chaney Turner, a delegate for the California Democratic Party.

He’s “using doom-loop narratives to manipulate pain, fear, and trauma, to push a right-wing agenda,” said Cat Brooks, who leads the nonprofit Anti Police-Terror Project.

“He is a spin doctor in the realest sense of the word,” said Tur-Ha Ak, another co-founder of that group. 

 “The mouthpiece,” said civil rights lawyer Walter Riley.

 “The architect,” said City Councilmember Carroll Fife.

They could not offer any proof that Singer is connected with the recall campaigns; the leaders of the recall committees say flatly that he is not working for them. And in any case, even if Singer is the doom-loop mouthpiece that the city’s progressives suspect, he certainly is not acting alone. In Oakland and around the country, there is no shortage of people retailing in bad vibes: Republicans and moderate Democrats are using crime fears to whip up support for their causes, even as extreme pandemic-era spikes in violence—like the one experienced in Oakland—fade. “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped,” Donald Trump said at a campaign event, though FBI data showed that US murders fell at the fastest pace ever recorded last year and were still falling in 2024. 

None of this is new: Inflated crime rhetoric can benefit lots of people; politicians get votes, police get funding, journalists get clicks. It’s been so consistent over the decades that some academics don’t even define “crime waves” as an actual increase in crime—they define it as an increase in public fear of crime, or public attention to it. “There is essentially no relationship between the patterns of crime coverage you see in the press and the amount of crime in the streets. They’re not related,” said Vincent Sacco, a sociologist in Canada who wrote the book When Crime Waves. Nationally, “we’re at essentially a 50-year-low on crime,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, who leads the Prosecutors Alliance of California. “And everybody is like, ‘Crime has never been worse!’ The media is a huge part of why people feel that way.”  

A day after the X video came out, Singer retweeted it. “We’re going to use this as a promotional video,” he wrote. But when I reached out to him for an interview, he demurred: “I don’t work for either of the recall campaigns…so I am not the right person to speak with about them,” he replied. Journalists told me that Singer is an easy guy to talk with, that he’d been profiled numerous times in the past. But for once, the PR professional did not want to talk. Singer is just “like every other neighbor you see out there tweeting about the recall,” said Seneca Scott, who leads the campaign against Thao. He added that Singer was doing it in his capacity as a “private citizen,” though Singer, unlike other citizens, also works for the Oakland police union, a client that badly wants Thao to step down. He “has nothing to do with the recall,” said Brenda Grisham, who leads the campaign against Price. “I’m not cool with people giving other people credit for the blood and sweat I’ve put into this.”  

In the days surrounding my interview request, Singer tweeted constantly about these elections. “Crime is up in Oakland, no question,” he told me in an email, linking to a story about several shootings. He also sent me a press release about a recall campaign ad.

As I dug around, I heard from people who wanted me to write about Singer but worried about speaking on the record. Someone even sent me an anonymous email, linking to information about how Singer influences the media, but they didn’t want to be identified because they interact with him professionally. Progressives complain that the recallers have been less than forthright about the powerful white people funding and otherwise supporting them. “Folks need to understand who’s behind it because they have created this façade,” Ak said. “They put Black people in front of this, and they’re not identifying who’s behind it.” (Scott and Grisham are Black; Singer is white, as are some of the recalls’ biggest funders.) Ak went on: “Without the Sam Singers, these folks would be impotent, they wouldn’t really mean much…The only reason they get any traction is because the Sam Singers amplify their message. The Sam Singers are helping them to get media.” 

Both Thao and Price are unhappy with the news coverage. Reporters at local, national, and even international outlets have written critically about their leadership, and the San Francisco Chronicle recently endorsed their recalls. Progressives continue to suspect that Singer is working behind the scenes to help shape how people in the city think about crime. “We the people want to know,” said Pecolia Manigo, who leads the social justice collaborative Oakland Rising, “how do you get as much media coverage as you get? Let’s see your receipts.”

Margaret Singer was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied the psychology of cults. After the Korean War in the 1950s, she counseled brainwashed prisoners of war. Then she was called to testify in the 1976 trial of Patty Hearst, who after her abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Army joined the group in robbing a San Francisco bank. Singer interviewed thousands of former and current cult members during her career, from survivors of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple to members of the Branch Davidians after the deadly Waco siege. “Under the right circumstances we all can be manipulated,” she once said. 

Her son, Sam, born in 1957, became fascinated by the news industry, he explained in a Facebook post, partly because of all the reporters who used to call to talk with his mom. At Berkeley High, Sam edited the paper and enjoyed the job’s competitive nature: He’d often run to the city’s Daily Gazette to “show them that I had beaten them on stories at the school board from the night before,” he told the trade magazine PR Week. Straight out of high school, the Gazette hired him as a copy boy, then as a reporter six months later. His editor Harvey Myman was impressed by his ability to listen—a skill that Sam seemed to have picked up while watching Margaret’s therapy sessions at their kitchen table. “He gets it from his mother,” Myman told the Richmond Confidential, which profiled Singer in 2014. “Sam has always been a very keen observer and understands people very well.” After grad school at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Singer returned to Berkeley when he was 26 and took over the Gazette as editor before it folded about a month later. 

“Under the right circumstances we all can be manipulated,” Margaret Singer once said.  

Soon, Singer pivoted to politics and PR. As press secretary to Nevada Gov. Richard Bryan during Bryan’s run for Senate, he realized he had a knack for talking with reporters. “If you can understand the news business from one side, you can understand it from the other,” he told PR Week. He opened a PR company alongside Larry Kamer, whom he met during a political campaign in California, and eventually started his own shop, Singer Associates, representing not just politicians but also corporations, government agencies, and anyone in need of crisis management. Over the years, that’s included the likes of Nike, Walmart, Bank of America, Williams-Sonoma, Sony, Levi Strauss & Co., Marriott Hotels, San Francisco International Airport, 24 Hour Fitness, and the Salvation Army, among many others. He was a spokesperson for the Bohemian Club, an exclusive fraternity that’s been rumored over the years to include some of the world’s most powerful people, from William Randolph Hearst to the Koch brothers and both President Bushes. When something blows up, you better call Sam Singer: “It’s almost a cliché in our world,” a longtime city politico told SF Weekly. (Singer’s son James is a spokesperson for Kamala Harris.)

Singer’s success, journalists have written, stems from his close relationships with reporters and columnists at major news outlets, including the Chronicle (another former client). “Sam understands what news is and how his clients’ needs and objectives fit into the definition of news,” PR strategist Chuck Finnie told the Richmond Confidential. After the Chevron fire, Singer even started a newspaper with Chevron funding. The Richmond Standard, as it’s called, still covers the city’s news with a smattering of positive stories about Chevron. 

Singer’s success also stems from his keen ability to “turn his client into a sympathetic victim while vilifying his opponents,” then-editor Robert Gammon wrote for Alameda Magazine. After a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo jumped over a wall that was four feet lower than recommended, killing a 17-year-old-old named Carlos Sousa Jr. and injuring two of his friends, Singer urged the zoo to put up signs warning future visitors not to tease the animals. “We knew journalists would ask if they taunted the animals,” he said of the teens. “And we’d say, ‘We don’t know, but we have enough information that we believe it was a possibility.’” The New York Post soon wrote that the friends carried slingshots at the time of the mauling, citing an anonymous source, and that an empty vodka bottle was found in their car. The friends sued following other press coverage, accusing Singer of libel and slander, and the zoo settled, but the damage had already been done: “San Franciscans seemed to be more put out over the shooting of a rare and beautiful animal,” SF Weekly wrote, than they were about the teens it had mauled.

The habits of mainstream journalism are easily exploited by people who know the business. Even here, I am practically compelled by conventions of balance to note that Sousa’s father told police that one of the injured teens admitted to him that he had been drunk and that he had yelled and waved at the animal. This information does important work, once introduced. The straightforward story of an institutional and regulatory failure—a zoo failing to implement recommended safety measures—becomes a melodrama about individuals behaving badly.   

 Speaking to SF Weekly‘s Joe Eskenazi, Singer bragged that getting journalists to use his narrative framing, and sometimes even his exact words, “is a rush that’s similar to sex and drugs and music.” Eskenazi wrote that it was “jarring” to hear such a boast from the son of a brainwashing expert; Singer pointed out that he used his mom’s lessons with good intentions, to help readers hear a different side of the story that they might not have considered. “I love my job,” Singer told the Richmond Confidential. “It’s like being an elected official without campaigning.” Some people who know Singer say he doesn’t lie, that he presents the truth as his clients see it, and that he appears to genuinely believe them. “Sam is extremely energetic and optimistic and always willing to believe the best of everyone,” a fellow consultant told Eskenazi.

“I love my job,” Singer told the Richmond Confidential. “It’s like being an elected official without campaigning.”

But that consultant added that Singer would still “throw a punch,” and that he’s the guy to hire when you want a fight. Case in point: Former business partner Larry Kamer remembers when he got a late-night call during a disagreement with Singer: “Larry, every time you start a fire for me, I’m gonna piss on it and put it out,” Singer said angrily before hanging up. The next morning, Kamer found a big wet spot on the beige carpet in their office—he had it removed, and rumors spread about Singer’s cutthroat tactics. It wasn’t until years later, when talking with Eskenazi, that Singer let everyone in on a little secret: “Decorum” would not allow him to urinate on a rug that he co-owned, he said, but it didn’t stop him from spilling a bottle of Heineken on it and letting everyone think what they thought. “This goes to my belief,” he said, a wide smile across his face, “that a good mindfuck is as good as the real thing.”

In recent years, Singer has shifted his focus to Oakland. Lately, he tweets almost daily about his disgust for the city’s progressive leaders. Speculating about why he has taken such an interest in Oakland has become a sort of dark parlor game among his antagonists.

City Councilmember Carroll Fife, whom Singer critiques often, believes he “has a bone to pick” after the Moms 4 Housing standoff in 2019, which she helped orchestrate with the squatting moms. At the time, Singer referred to them as “bullies” and “thieves,” and the real estate company he repped had them arrested and removed from the property in a predawn raid. 

But the moms won in the realm of publicity: News outlets nationally wrote about their movement for affordable housing. Gov. Gavin Newsom helped negotiate a deal for a community land trust to buy the property, which became known as “Mom’s House,” and it was turned into a transitional home for homeless mothers. California lawmakers enacted reforms. “I think it was embarrassing for him,” said activist Nicole Deane, who worked with Fife. “He’s a professional who’s been doing this for decades,” added Fife, and he got beat by a group of Black women he’d described as criminals. “That can’t be a good feeling.” 

Another theory is that Singer’s ties to the police turned his attention to Oakland. In 2020, Singer repped Anne Kirkpatrick after she was fired as the city’s police chief; she wound up prevailing in her wrongful termination lawsuit. In 2023, he also repped Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong while a federal monitor investigated Armstrong’s handling of a misconduct case. “He has a great reputation—he works hard for his clients,” Armstrong told me recently. With Singer at his side, Armstrong held a rally after newly elected Mayor Thao put him on administrative leave, and he accused the federal monitor of corruption. (A federal monitor has overseen Oakland’s police department for more than two decades to implement reforms that were mandated after a police brutality scandal.)

“I was surprised at the immediately aggressive tone that was taken in the public space,” said Hanson, chief of staff for Thao. Thao fired Armstrong the next month. Nothing else came of Armstrong’s accusation against the monitor.

Not long after that, efforts began to recall Thao and newly elected DA Price, who was also implementing reforms to roll back mass incarceration and hold police accountable. They weren’t the first progressive leaders to face backlash in Oakland: Mayor Jean Quan overcame a recall effort in 2012. Critics blamed them for high crime rates and business closures; Oakland, like many cities, saw a massive spike in shootings in 2020, before Thao or Price were elected; criminologists nationally connected the violence with the pandemic, and killings continued to climb after Thao and Price got to office—from 78 homicides in Oakland in 2019 to 126 homicides in 2023. Thao also faced attacks for Oakland’s budget problems. 

But more than anything, these recalls were fueled by “the image of Oakland,” said political scientist Robert Stanley Oden, author of From Blacks to Brown and Beyond: The Struggle for Progressive Politics in Oakland. “The image of Oakland that lost three professional sports teams,” he continued, referring to the Warriors, the Raiders, and the A’s. And “the image of Oakland where you have crime occurring and an intractable homeless problem—people connect those two issues.” For decades before the pandemic, crime disproportionately affected low-income communities in Oakland’s flatlands, but now richer neighborhoods were seeing instability too. “The people who are being hurt the most by our failed policies are the poor,” said Scott, who leads the mayoral recall campaign. “And now most of the affluent want her gone, too.” A wealthy critic of Price, who asked not to be named, told me earlier this year that he’d dealt with two attempted break-ins at his house recently; his friend a block over was held at gunpoint. “For the first 30 years I lived here, it didn’t feel that way. I never had it in the neighborhood, in front of the house,” he said. “People are legitimately concerned.” 

Journalist Ali Winston has pointed out that many landlords also oppose Thao because she helped enact an eviction moratorium while she was on the city council. This “set the wheels in motion for Thao’s recall virtually from her first days in office,” Winston wrote in August. 

Thao and Price have framed the recalls as undemocratic movements led by real estate and hedge-fund investors. “This is nothing more than a power grab,” Price said in February. The recall campaigns have been mostly bankrolled by a single investor, Philip Dreyfuss, a hedge fund executive who lives in Piedmont, but the campaigns’ leaders dispute that their movement is undemocratic or right wing. Grisham, who heads the campaign against Price, says she’s organizing around grassroots frustrations with violence: She lost her 17-year-old son in a shooting outside their East Oakland home in 2010 as they were heading out to grab dinner at Burger King. I spoke with other mothers supporting the Price recall who are also grieving murdered children.

Singer has taken a hand in these elections, even if he’s not formally working for either campaign. His firm has donated $2,500 to the mayoral recall. And he is the spokesperson for the Oakland Police Officers’ Association, which held a press conference in August calling on Thao to resign because of rising crime. (Murders are down 33 percent in Oakland compared with last year, and violent crime is down 19 percent, according to the latest data.) “Every day you are in office, Oakland is less safe,” the association wrote to the mayor in a letter in August. “[I]t’s time to pack your bag and leave city hall.” (The association’s vice president told the Chronicle that this kind of protest was unusual—that he’d never seen the group ask a mayor to step down in his nearly quarter century as a cop.)

Singer has also done PR work for the Oakland NAACP, which similarly called on Thao to resign and accused Price of creating “a heyday” for criminals. (In 2023, a group of Oakland progressives complained to the national NAACP that Oakland’s branch had been “reverting to lies, fear-mongering and the ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric that has targeted African Americans throughout our entire history.” They urged the local branch to end ties with Singer.) 

Singer has supported recalls in the past: In 2022, he went on a San Francisco podcast to promote the ouster of then-DA Chesa Boudin. He’s done PR work for at least a couple of Boudin’s opponents, including tech investors like Ron Conway and the ferociously antiprogressive Garry Tan. Conway is now a major funder of Oakland’s mayoral recall. 

On X lately, Singer regularly tweets multiple times a day about Thao and Price, and his firm, Singer Associates, sometimes joins in. “America’s most crime-ridden city is run by America’s most incompetent mayor,” he wrote recently. In July, he emailed the Oaklandside requesting a correction to an article about an ethics investigation into the anti-Thao campaign. When the Oaklandside’s editor asked whether Singer was a campaign spokesperson, Singer did not answer directly. “I would like to connect you with OUST,” he wrote back, referring to the recall committee, “but your reporters have burned their bridges with the group and its leadership.” (“Part of what makes Singer compelling as a man-behind-the-scenes is that it’s never quite clear which strings he is pulling or how far his influence reaches,” the Richmond Confidential’s Bonnie Chan wrote. “Singer himself is rarely willing to disclose his part in his firm’s public relations victories.”) Complicating matters, Oakland progressives say the recall campaigns are organized in a way that makes it hard to track who’s involved. “It’s very challenging for the public and even people in this industry to understand all the connections,” said Hanson, Thao’s chief of staff. “It makes for murky public dialogue; you can sense there is coordination.”

Since Singer says he’s not working for the recall campaigns, the mayor’s office wonders whether he might be working for fossil fuel interests; Thao recently alleged that certain recallers may be motivated by a desire to ship coal through Oakland’s port, something she’s opposed in the past. (Singer did not respond to my request for comment.) In August, Singer’s firm donated to an independent expenditure committee that’s run by Greg McConnell, a lobbyist who works for Insight Terminal Solutions, one of the companies that wants to build an Oakland coal terminal. That committee spent money on online ads for Brenda Harbin-Forte, who is running for city attorney and is also a leader of the mayoral recall campaign. 

Other progressives have questioned whether Singer might be working with Scott, the inflammatory recall leader. Singer regularly retweets Scott’s posts and shares his op-eds, and he’s written on X that Scott is “helping bring peace through positive, pragmatic, political change.” Singer didn’t respond to my question about this. When I asked Scott, he told me that Singer was probably just a fan. “I’m flattered,” he added. 

Over the summer, more questions emerged about Singer’s involvement in Thao’s political predicament. In June, two days after the recall election was certified, the FBI raided her home early in the morning as part of an ongoing investigation. That same day, Singer was planning to host a press conference for an affordable housing measure; some reporters set to cover his event were among those who knew to be outside the mayor’s home around 6 a.m. for the raid. The coincidence made some Oakland politicos raise their eyebrows. Had Singer somehow known about the raid in advance? Did he tip off the reporters? “The timing of all this is troubling,” Thao said afterward. “I want to know how the TV cameras knew to show up on my sleepy residential street so early in the morning to capture footage of the raid. And I want to know why Fox News and Breitbart were so prepared to fan the flames, and to tell a story that they want to tell, to bend the facts to shape a narrative. I have a lot of questions and I will get answers. We all will get answers.” (Singer did not respond to my questions about this incident.)

“The mayor’s office is in crisis,” Singer told the local ABC affiliate after the raid. “I don’t see how she overcomes this, it’s likely that she will wind up having to resign.” 

In October, Singer held a press conference at his office where 14 of the county’s police unions endorsed the recall of DA Price. Earlier that month, he also turned down my third request for an interview about his influence. “Thank you for letting me know that many people reference me, our agency, and our work, but I don’t have the time to devote right now to a profile. I am hardly a key figure, there are many people in Oakland and S.F. who have devoted countless hours walking, calling, donating and encouraging the public to vote for change,” he replied in an email. 

About a week later, he sent me a press release from the Price recall campaign with no additional comment. 

For decades, Americans have been sure that violence is rising, even when it isn’t. The Pew Research Center recently studied this phenomenon: In 23 of 27 Gallup polls since 1993, at least 60 percent of Americans said crime was higher in the United States than it had been a year earlier. But over that same period, FBI data showed that violent crime had actually dropped almost in half, and property crime had dropped even more. Americans today are much less likely to be a victim of violence than they were in 1993, but they sure as hell don’t feel that way. 

Local news coverage, Pew found, is likely a big reason why. You’ve probably heard the journalism adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” “Violent crime is much less common than property crime in the U.S., but Americans see local news about both types of crime with nearly the same frequency,” the researchers wrote, adding that many people also get their crime news on social media. “There’s a clear relationship between how much local crime news Americans consume and how concerned they are about their safety.” That’s not to knock crime reporters—I’m one of them. But it is to say that, sometimes, journalists make people believe that violence is more of a threat than it actually is. 

Some academics have started thinking about crime waves as “moral panics,” or mass fear about something that’s been exaggerated. Moral panics can be about almost anything—historically, uproars over “witchcraft” would fall into this category, while a more recent example might be concerns about kids becoming violent because of video games. The key isn’t whether the threat exists, but whether it has been inflated and by whom and for what reason. 

Stanley Cohen, the criminologist who named the phenomenon, identified the stages to a moral panic: Something is defined as a threat to society; the media amplifies the threat, treating it in a “stylized” fashion and drawing on prevailing popular prejudices; public anxiety is aroused and sharpened; “moral entrepreneurs” like activists or politicians or even savvy crisis communications specialists legitimize the panic by offering their own diagnoses and solutions. The panic dies down or results in change.

The first recorded crime wave moral panic was in 1744, when journalists in London, looking for something exciting to write about as news about foreign wars dwindled, started reporting on what they described as “swarms” of criminals, according to historian Richard Ward. Later in Victorian Britain, after reformers tried to roll back the use of public executions and floggings, journalists again led many readers to believe that crime had gone up, even though it hadn’t; lawmakers responded by enacting broader corporal punishment. Closer to home, the 1980s saw a moral panic about “crack babies,” notes social justice advocate Alec Karakatsanis, and in the ’90s a fear of teen “superpredators” helped President Bill Clinton pass the crime bill. “Crime waves” are frequently used to defend harsher punishments. Karakatsanis adds that “the ‘wave’…is often specifically manufactured by self-interested groups and complicit journalists precisely to have some political impact, whether it be the recall election of a DA whose policies they don’t like or blocking a bail reform bill or fear-mongering about slight shifts in budgets of police and prisons.”

“The ‘wave’…is often specifically manufactured by self-interested groups and complicit journalists precisely to have some political impact.”

More recently, crime panics in the United States have centered on retail theft. In 2021, a single shoplifting offense at a San Francisco Walgreens garnered 309 separate articles by local and national media over the course of a month. “This was during a public relations push by Walgreens, police unions, far-right media, and billionaire-funded DA recall activists to drive fear around ‘retail theft,’” Karakatsanis writes, referring to the recall of Chesa Boudin. Nationwide, the media’s obsession with shoplifting was so acute that the New York Times did a debunking in 2023, trying to answer why the issue had received so much attention, even though police data showed retail theft in most places was lower than it had been in years prior. 

Violent crime has also been inflated. After the presidential debate in September, when Trump insisted that crime was “through the roof” despite FBI data to the contrary, the co-hosts of Fox & Friends defended him: “There is the numbers and there’s the reality,” Brian Kilmeadesaid, and Ainsley Earhardt added that “we’re all a little bit more scared than we used to be.” Media reports about violence tend to increase before elections: In 2022, the number of crime segments on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC grew enormously before the midterm vote; on Fox News, and likely on CNN and MSNBC, too, crime coverage plummeted afterward. 

“Our common-sense understanding of crime waves is that crime rates are rapidly escalating and then falling off,” said sociologist Sacco, “but often the term is not used that way: It’s used to refer to an increase in public concern and media attention, rather than an increase in actual crime.” Moral panics, according to scholars Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton, are good for newsmakers: They “guarantee the kind of emotional involvement” that keeps readers or viewers coming back for more, and crime provides good visuals for broadcasters. In the political arena, the fearmongers can beat back any skepticism with a reliable rhetorical move. As Karakatsanis writes, “Anyone not reaffirming the narrative that crime by poor people is ‘out of control’ at any given moment—and anyone not responding to that problem with proposals of more prisons and police—doesn’t care about poor communities or communities of color.”

Oakland is a microcosm of these dynamics, and an example of the political consequences that can manifest when a mismatch grows between actual crime and people’s perceptions of it. Singer, recall committee leaders, and some local reporters have cast doubt on Oakland’s police department data showing that homicides and other offenses are falling rapidly in 2024. “Elected officials are still lying that crime is down,” Scott wrote to me in August. They have also linked business closures with crime in the city. When a Hilton hotel near Oakland’s airport announced in June that it was shutting down, some news reports speculated that crime was a cause. (“Unfortunately we are unable to comment,” a Hilton spokesperson told me when I asked whether this was true.) 

Still, Singer and doom-loopers like him are effective at swaying public opinion because they are tapping into something real: Regardless of what the crime data says, people feel like their elected officials have let them down, because they are seeing things that make them uneasy—more clearly than ever before. “Even if you have the same number of unhoused people or mentally ill people or people visibly using drugs” as you did before the pandemic, “it feels like this overwhelming scary presence because there’s not hundreds of other people commuting to work, going to happy hour, getting a Starbucks,” said Boudin, San Francisco’s former DA, who was recalled in part because of similar doom-loop rhetoric. “That feeling has been very successfully manipulated by the likes of Sam Singer,” he said, to go after progressives. In San Francisco and Oakland, Republican pundits and even some mainstream Democrats have masterfully equated images of poverty and addiction with crime, arguing that public safety and liberal leadership are incompatible. Crime is “a canard,” but it’s also “the soft belly for progressives,” said Oden, the political scientist. “It’s creating a crisis around the individual who had nothing to do with the reason for the crisis to be what it is.” 

Here is where Singer is so effective, whether the underlying story is a tiger jumping a low wall or a city navigating decades of municipal disinvestment. In his hands, the crisis becomes one of individuals behaving badly, a stylized drama of bullies and thieves and enabling corrupt politicians, not of low walls and institutional neglect. 

In 2022, during the movement to oust Boudin, Singer spoke despairingly of “the tents, the defecation, the urination, just last week the vandalism of…a Michelin-starred restaurant.” He lamented that “San Francisco is a shadow of its former self, and that really has to do with the permissiveness of certain members of the board of supervisors as well as the district attorney’s office. They’ve created a situation where there are no consequences, and when there are no consequences of doing wrong, wrong just proliferates, and right now it’s out of hand.” Of course, people are living in tents because they can’t afford housing, and they’re defecating and urinating outside because they don’t have housing to defecate and urinate in, but in Singer’s narrative the problem of housing recedes—what low walls?—and the failures of the humans getting mauled are magnified. Singer then ties a bow around the package by invoking the vandalism at the restaurant, a nonsequitur that encourages his audience to see, in people living on the streets, not the effects of a housing crisis but the sources of crime. He offers an explanation (“permissiveness”) and a villain: progressive leaders, who now must be ousted.

In August he used a similar framework when he tweeted that Oakland had been on the “upswing” until Thao and Price were elected, but then its “future crumbled before its eyes…resulting in mayhem, violence, crime and chaos.”  

“Even though we know for a fact that the district attorney is not the only factor in public safety, what Singer Associates is so effective in doing is making you forget that logic and lean into the villain narrative,” said Oakland Rising’s Manigo. “It’s like, ‘Who can we hang up there as the piñata to pound on for problems that are complex, that we all know are complex?” said DeBerry of the Prosecutors Alliance. “If crime was simple we would have solved it a long time ago; it’s not like the arrival of one new actor,” whether the mayor or the DA, “somehow caused the sky to fall.” Singer effectively “sets up the problem of Oakland as a city out of control, in a way that sets up the solution of new leadership that can pump the brakes and stop this careen into a doom loop,” said Pamela Mejia at the nonprofit Berkeley Media Studies Group. 

The situation is exacerbated as more local papers fold due to financial problems. “No longer will a daily newspaper bear the name of Oakland,” SFGate wrote in 2016 after six Bay Area newspapers were consolidated into two publications. “In the absence of information, the lies or misinformation spreads,” Oden said. Meanwhile, social media has given politicos a bigger platform to create their own news: Scott, who leads the Thao recall campaign, hosts a video series called Gotham Oakland that regularly blasts progressives. “I do not call myself a journalist; I’m very open that I’m a propagandist—a truthful propagandist,” Scott told me.

All these factors add up. Mejia at the Berkeley Media Studies Group cites a phenomenon called the “mean world” syndrome: When people consume a lot of news about crime, they become convinced the world around them is a dangerous place. And when they see homelessness conflated with violence, they may buy into that idea, too. In September, Oakland business owners gathered with former police chief LeRonne Armstrong, who is now running for city council, to complain about progressive officials who planned to put a homeless shelter near the restaurants at Jack London Square. “As we watch the crime statistics go down, people’s perception of crime hasn’t changed,” Dorcia White, who owns Everett & Jones BBQ, told reporters at a press conference, explaining why she opposed placing a shelter so close to the business district. “We feed the homeless nightly, and as that population grows, so do a lot of problems.”

“We don’t have to fearmonger—we are scared!” Scott told me over the phone, yelling. “My lady doesn’t want to go down the street to her car without an escort—we’re scared! My neighbor was stabbed to death by a crazy homeless person—we’re scared!”  

All the data in the world won’t change a simple fact: “If you don’t feel safe in a city,” Singer said in 2022, “then you’re not safe.” And with that, the moral entrepreneur had made his case.

Singer had little more to say when, after declining multiple interview requests, I sent him a long list of questions for this story. “Samantha, I have no role in the recall campaigns,” he said in an email. “It is troubling to see you and Mother Jones openly ignore the Blacks and Asians who started and run these political movements.” 

It was a playbook described by Karakatsanis, nearly verbatim. In not reaffirming the narrative about crime, I was showing a lack of concern for communities of color. Singer went on: “Your questions to me demonstrate your discriminatory attitude toward people of color, the working class, the Nor Cal Carpenters Union and Oakland Police Officers Union.” For me to not focus on the nonwhite leadership of the recall movements “is disrespectful and discriminatory,” he concluded. “They are the leaders of The Revolution.” 

On a Friday night in August, Mayor Thao sat on a stage in Oakland’s Chinatown during a “public safety town hall,” trying to dispel some of these bad vibes. Outside, a recall campaigner held a sign with the image of a sinking ship labeled “the ThaoTanic.” Inside, people who didn’t have a seat stood around the perimeter as Thao and her team listed some of the steps they’d taken to make people safer, from bringing back the Ceasefire gun violence prevention strategy (which Singer’s former client Armstrong, the ex-police chief, had effectively shelved) to installing more cameras on streets to identify car thieves. (Although they’re often conflated, property crime like car theft is not the same as violence. Such is the power of a moral panic that even Thao, one of its targets, seems to have accepted some of the doom-loop premise.)  

Seated alongside her was the city’s new police chief, Floyd Mitchell. He took a question from the audience about people not trusting the city’s crime statistics, and tried to set the record straight. Though property crime data can take a while to update, sometimes leading to inaccuracies, he said data on violent crimes against people—think murders, rapes, aggravated assaults—“are 100 percent accurate.” “There’s absolutely no need for me or anyone in our organization to come up here and jeopardize their personal or professional integrity to try to give you inaccurate crime stats,” he said. “I understand people’s skepticism,” added Holly Joshi, who leads Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, but “as a city we weren’t questioning the stats when crime was up.”  

Dispelling the bad vibes is an uphill battle. The Sam Singers of the world have money and time to fuel their narratives; they are at least offering an explanation for the visible deterioration of civic life, one that comports with centuries of folk wisdom about crime and criminals. Progressive politicians have not devoted the same energy to counter the doom. “There’s a market for content that’s salacious related to Oakland,” said Hanson, Thao’s chief of staff. “That’s a space where the city is perhaps less nimble, and [it] does not dedicate any public resources to combat that.” A journalist at the Bay Area News Group told me he reached out to the Oakland Police Department more than 10 times while reporting a story about Oakland crime, but nobody responded, so he turned instead to the police union, repped by Singer: The resulting story, which published in September, said Oakland’s violent crime rates had surged but did not mention 2024 data, which shows they’ve been dropping. Singer himself has been quoted in other articles about specific Oakland crime incidents, when it would more commonly be the police department’s job to comment. “There are PR firms that are progressive, and they cost money,” said the attorney Walter Riley, who helps lead a group countering the recalls. “Our group does not have that, so we are at a disadvantage in that sense. We are not gonna get the coverage of Fox News or even the Chronicle newspaper.”  

It’s also more difficult to convey nuanced messages about crime. Scapegoating a villain is more emotionally satisfying than dissecting the societal structures that perpetuate lawlessness—things like racism, poverty, unaffordable housing, and unemployment that have no easy answers. Who wants to stare at a wall, to really examine all its holes and dimensions, when you could instead be morbidly entertained by a tiger hunting down miscreant teens? 

Thao recently brought on PR specialists from the Worker Agency to help her fight the recall, but it may be too little too late: According to Oakland’s Chamber of Commerce, a majority of respondents in a recent poll said “current progressive policies are not benefiting the city,” and more than half indicated they would vote the mayor out; nearly half in another poll by a pro-recall group said they didn’t think Price was doing a good job. “Progressives have the power to defeat anything because there’s more people—the population they represent is larger,” said political scientist Oden. “But they can never organize them enough.”

Who wants to stare at a wall, to really examine all its holes and dimensions, when you could instead be morbidly entertained by a tiger hunting down miscreant teens? 

On a Saturday in August, I watched some of them try to prove him wrong. Respect Our Vote, No Recalls, a coalition of residents, activists, nonprofits, and Democratic clubs, called a community meeting inside At Thy Word Ministries Church in East Oakland to talk through their communication strategies. “It’s really true that democracy is in the balance,” Pastor B.K. Woodson, one of the group’s leaders, said from a podium. “We want you to take the information you get here today and spread it around: In every conversation you have, ask: Are you registered? Will you be voting?”

A woman in the audience raised her hand and asked about the media: She felt “bombarded” by negative news about Oakland and wondered how to respond. “Call up those MFers,” a woman in a sunhat urged her, referring to journalists. “Tell the real story.” Another woman in a flannel shirt got emotional while talking about her effort to fact-check the bad information online. “I don’t wanna be the only one on Nextdoor fighting these assholes!” she said, starting to cry. 

Sam Singer’s name never came up, but the meeting was unmistakably a rally against not just his message but his method, the emphasis on wayward individuals and not the low walls leaving Oaklanders vulnerable. In the end, the progressive leaders urged each other to get offline, to stop all the doom-scrolling and go meet their neighbors. “To get the real information, you need to go to the communities that are in the trenches with their sleeves up,” said Stewart Chen, president of the Oakland Chinatown Improvement Council. “Have these discussions outside these rooms,” said Turner, the Democratic delegate. 

“You are our hope,” said Woodson, calling the meeting to an end. “Go talk to people.”

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.)—the author of the state’s infamous bathroom bill, a fan of calling abortions “infanticide,” and the man who recently said “lawfare” against former President Donald Trump is “as bad as it was [for Black people] in Alabama in 1950”—faces the camera, warning of wokeness. 

“If you don’t feel safe, there’s a reason,” Bishop says. “Violent crime is up. More rapes and murders. Record illegal immigration. The cause? Woke crime policies. Defund the police. Open borders.”

In an ad that reflects the tone of the race in North Carolina, Bishop’s argument is simple: He wants to be the state’s “law and order” attorney general. Such an approach would be a shift. North Carolina has not had a Republican attorney general in modern history. A win for the congressman would have major implications for the state’s politics, not only on criminal justice but also in checking the power of a state legislature that has lurched increasingly to the right over the last decade. 

But his argument that the state is suffering from out-of-control crime has a few flaws.

The North Carolina police have not been defunded; after 2020, many local police budgets increased. While initially immigration surged under President Joe Biden, it has fallen dramatically after a crackdown. And there is no evidence that crime increases are driven by undocumented immigrants.

The claim he makes that is most directly related to the job he hopes to win concerns the overall rate of violent crime. In the ad, behind Bishop, is a simple graph: two arrows point up, showing that rapes increased by 55 percent and murders by 32 percent. Under Democrats, the GOP says, the nation has become a place of violence. You are being attacked, and they don’t care.

The truth is more complicated. A Mother Jones analysis found no configuration of data that matched these numbers. Bishop’s analysis for both rapes and murders appears to use counts, instead of rates, discounting population change, which is not best practice. And, oddly, even if using counts, the math seems to be slightly askew.

North Carolina’s rates for murder and rape match overall trends for the country generally, making the argument that Democrats caused unique challenges in the state iffy. After continual rises from 2017 to 2020, with a major uptick during the pandemic, rape and murder rates have fallen in North Carolina—and across the country. Violent crime did rise over the past 10 years, notably, but Bishop’s statistics don’t represent the trend in context and seem to involve errors. (Bishop’s campaign did not respond to multiple calls requesting comment.)

In a normal election year in North Carolina, stretching of the truth, inaccurate data on a central campaign issue, and Bishop's pugnacious style would command some attention. But during this campaign season, voters and the media seem to find it challenging to have time, despite the importance of the race. The Democratic AG over the past decade has consistently put constraints on the power of the GOP-dominated state legislature's enthusiasm for enacting extremist laws.

“Early on, we expected this to be a really hotly contested, nasty, expensive race,” Christopher Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University and author of Anatomy of a Purple State, told me. “But there's just not been much oxygen left in the room for this incredibly important, incredibly competitive race.”

"There's just not been much oxygen left in the room for this incredibly important, incredibly competitive race.”

One major source of the oxygen drain has been the governor’s contest. In September, CNN revealed GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s provocative postings on the website "Nude Africa," plunging his campaign into a double-digit deficit. The story broke just weeks after Vice President Kamala Harris floated the possibility of Gov. Roy Cooper as a potential vice presidential pick. And, soon after, Hurricane Helene ravaged the western half of the state. (In the wake of the storm, the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court allowing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vanity project of a campaign to mess with ballots became more significant.) Add to this the fact that North Carolina is not just a close swing state but, under certain Electoral College calculations, could decide the presidential election.

The battle to become the state’s next AG pits two sitting congressmen against each other and has become the most expensive race for that office in history. Jackson is a moderate Democrat who has become a TikTok regular, known for explaining his policies in social media monologues to the camera. Gerrymandered out of his current district, he has run on the traditional platform of a centrist: anti-crime, pro-family, many references to his suburban-friendly biography as a veteran and former prosecutor.

With a vocal Freedom Caucus backbencher in Congress against a Democrat who loves to use social media, the hotly contested race was expected to attract attention. Bishop is one of the 20 Republicans who voted against former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and has challenged the results of the 2020 election.

Robinson’s harlequin forum posting also may have prematurely decided the governor’s race, thereby making the AG election a contest that could fundamentally change the state’s political identity. Current Attorney General Josh Stein, a Democrat who appears to be heading for the governor’s mansion, won the position with 50.1 percent of the vote in 2020. (It was only 3,000 voters away from a potential recount.) Before Stein, Cooper held the AG spot for over a decade. 

Since 2010, Republicans have had near-complete control of the General Assembly—the state’s legislative branch—and have tried to implement myriad right-wing goals. State lawmakers' efforts to achieve key policy objectives—such as voter ID and the infamous anti-trans bathroom bill authored by Bishop—have been slowed by Democratic attorneys general.

“This is a position that matters,” Cooper, the professor, said. “And it particularly matters in an inter-party dynamics.” The AG job “would allow [Bishop] to litigate things like voter ID” and “to defend the Republican General Assembly in court.” 

If Stein wins the governorship, veto power will be in place. But since Gov. Cooper’s first win in 2012, a Democratic governor and attorney general have created an underappreciated dual check on North Carolina’s rightward lurch.

North Carolina is seen as a somewhat gentlemanly Southern state with a progressive bend, as political scientist V.O. Key Jr. famously noted back in 1949. In 2020, former President Donald Trump won North Carolina by his smallest margin of victory in any state. But its current status as “purple,” as Cooper explained, is because “there's about half [of voters] that are pretty bright blue and about half that are pretty bright red.” 

Even though North Carolina has not elected a Republican attorney general since 1896, members of both parties consider it to be the launching pad for the governor’s office. Outgoing Gov. Roy Cooper and likely incoming Gov. Josh Stein—as well as former Gov. Mike Easley—were all attorneys general. “The joke is that the AG stands for aspiring governor,” Cooper, the professor, noted.

Both Bishop and Jackson are ambitious members of Congress hoping for a greater role on the national stage, which they would enjoy as a state AG. Such positions offer a history of headline-making lawsuits on election results, social media, and drugs. One can easily imagine Bishop issuing threats concerning election integrity, following the path forged by other Republican attorneys general across the nation over the past four years challenging the veracity of the 2020 election. 

“The General Assembly has ruled with an iron fist, and has absolutely changed the state in some fundamental ways,” Western Carolina University's Cooper explains. “It's changed the power dynamics of institution versus institution.” In the end, a victory by Bishop could upend North Carolina’s centrist political identity.

Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis and reporting.

In early September, Peterson Harter was working the lunchtime rush in his sandwich shop on San Francisco’s Haight Street when in walked prosecutor Ryan Khojasteh, sporting slicked-back hair and circular glasses.

The year before, Harter had been punched in the face by a man who’d been urinating outside his shop. He posted a video of his black eye on Instagram, and it went viral. Khojasteh, a prosecutor who’s challenging San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins for her job in November, wanted to hear about his public safety concerns heading into the election.

“I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand.”

Harter told Khojasteh that the man who assaulted him came back to apologize after getting out of jail; he was later arrested again for assaulting someone else. “This guy actually needs mental health help,” said Harter, leaning against the counter in his apron. They began talking about the benefits of early intervention. If only “we could have helped this person way back when,” Khojasteh said.

The question of how to treat young offenders was on everyone’s mind that week. Days earlier, 49ers receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot by a 17-year-old during an attempted robbery near luxury stores in Union Square, making national news. Jenkins may try to transfer Pearsall’s shooter to adult court but hasn’t decided yet. (She’s also recommended transferring two 16-year-olds to adult court in an unrelated case.) Khojasteh says there are very few circumstances in which he’d do the same. “I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand,” he tells me. “That is the whole passion of this job.”

Khojasteh’s emphasis on early interventions is one of the ways he’s setting himself apart from Jenkins, who has taken a more punitive approach to teens after being appointed following the recall of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.

San Francisco’s DA race has not gotten much attention in a presidential election year, but the results will be significant because of what Boudin’s recall represented: Observers nationally described it as evidence that famously liberal San Francisco had rejected criminal justice reforms, and that other progressive prosecutors outside California should beware a similar fate. Jenkins pledged to “restore accountability and consequences” to the city. If she loses, it could signal that voters believe the pendulum swung too far right under her leadership.

Khojasteh has welcomed endorsements from heavyweights in the progressive prosecutor world, including George Gascón in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and from a slate of local progressive politicians and community leaders. But he is young, turning 31 next month, with less money, name recognition, and establishment support than Jenkins, who is endorsed by Mayor London Breed and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

And he will be trying to sell voters on his message about helping youthful offenders at a time when fears about violence are intensifying. Though juvenile crime has been falling for decades in San Francisco (and nationwide) to near historic lows, there’s been an uptick recently in kids arrested for serious offenses in the city. Not far from Harter’s sandwich shop, there were at least three other shootings over the past couple of years near Haight Street, a popular tourist destination; some of the gunmen were younger than 25. When Khojasteh spoke with other shopkeepers there, several said they didn’t feel safe. “The cops sadly don’t do anything,” an employee at a cafe told him.

As I tagged along with him on Haight Street, Khojasteh tried to convince people that he would offer a middle path between Boudin, a bold progressive, and Jenkins, a tough-talking moderate. “Anytime anyone commits a crime and I can prove it, I’m going to file charges,” he told a shopkeeper. But “the question is: How do I make sure they don’t come back into the system?” That’s what justice is, he says: figuring out how to keep someone accountable and keep them from coming back.

Khojasteh’s long-game approach to justice was shaped during his childhood. Raised in the Bay Area to Iranian immigrants, he was a toddler in 1996 when his family suffered a death that would cause him to question the root causes of youth violence. His uncle Cyrus Salehi was working the late shift at a Denny’s restaurant in Los Angeles when a 20-year-old walked inside, demanded money, and then aimed a pistol at his chest; two 18-year-olds and a 16-year-old sat outside with the getaway car. As Khojasteh grew older, the loss motivated him. “Why does this happen in the first place?” he wondered. “Why are there kids at that age with guns?” After Salehi’s wife got remarried, to a bureau chief of the Los Angeles DA’s Office, Khojasteh decided he wanted to become a prosecutor too.

He interned at the Santa Clara DA’s office after undergrad, then graduated early from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, in 2018, where he wrote a thesis on ending the school-to-prison pipeline. He also worked up the nerve, at age 24, to run against Nancy Pelosi for her seat in the House. (He lost.)

Next up was a fellowship at the San Francisco public defender’s office, where he met Chesa Boudin, then a deputy public defender. “For someone at his point in his legal career, he had a unique confidence,” Boudin says, describing Khojasteh as “hardworking, compassionate,” and eager to grow. “When I learned he’d run for office against Pelosi, I thought, ‘What a tremendous amount of character that would build, and what a steep learning curve it would be at his age.’”

Working with Boudin would have a deep impact on the way Khojasteh thought about helping teens who committed crimes. After Boudin was elected DA in 2019, Khojasteh was one of his first hires in the juvenile justice unit, as an assistant DA. Change was in the air; the San Francisco Chronicle had just published an investigation showing that youth crime had dropped enormously since the ’90s, but that San Francisco continued spending large sums of money on a juvenile hall that now held fewer and fewer kids. In February 2020, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to close the facility by 2021. “This jail for kids is morally repugnant,” said then-Supervisor Matt Haney. “I thought Ryan’s compassion and energy would be particularly useful” carrying out that mission, says Boudin.

Together, Khojasteh and Boudin tried to do more to connect kids with services rather than locking them up. They expanded the Make It Right initiative, launched by former DA Gascón in 2013 for teens who committed certain felonies. If the young offenders worked with a caseworker, talked with the person they harmed, and took steps to repair the damage, including through community service, they could avoid prosecution. Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted, according to a study by University of California researchers and the California Policy Lab.

Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted.

Boudin leaned on these services, diverting more teens than Gascón and pledging to use juvenile hall as a last resort. For more serious cases that required prosecution, he and Khojasteh tailored the punishment. When a 12-year-old robbed an elderly Chinese man, they filed charges but asked the victim what kind of justice he envisioned: The man wanted the boy, who was Black, to research the exploitation of Chinese people in America and think about their shared oppression. The boy also did community service, and the DA’s office checked to make sure he was going to school. Six months later, his mom reported that she’d never seen him behaving so well. “That had much more impact on his life and development than a couple of days in jail,” Khojasteh says.

Another time, Khojasteh prosecuted a 16-year-old who committed a serious property offense and was waiting in juvenile hall for placement at a residential school; the boy’s single mom couldn’t visit him because she was in hospice care with about a month to live. “I remember thinking, ‘If we keep this kid in juvenile hall, that would profoundly traumatize this child, the fact that he would never see his mother again,’” Khojasteh says. He arranged for the boy to leave and be with his mom for her last few days before returning to finish his sentence. “We don’t want to further cause the psychological damage that could ultimately cause him to act out or commit more crimes in the future,” he adds.

Khojasteh thinks some cases involving young people do require a tougher approach, especially if a victim is injured. He has incarcerated kids for offenses like carjacking. Juvenile hall “is a tool to protect the public and to protect the kid,” he says. But the number of children locked up for crimes fell dramatically in San Francisco under Boudin’s leadership—from an average of 33 kids a day in January 2020, when Boudin took office, to 9 kids daily in June 2020 and 16 kids daily in June 2021, according to city data. (Part of the drop can be explained by the pandemic: Social distancing forced detention facilities to downsize, and courts temporarily stopped trials.)

While working in Boudin’s office, Khojasteh also helped create a program for unaccompanied immigrant kids who committed crimes, and another that offered financial assistance to teens so they could pay restitution to their victims. Without the aid, the owed money often turned into debt for the teens’ parents, affecting the family’s credit score and upward mobility by making it harder to apply for housing or student loans.

San Francisco’s juvenile hall never shut down; Mayor Breed did not support its closure, and momentum for the plan dwindled. Then on June 7, 2022, San Francisco voters recalled Boudin, many of them frustrated by his perceived leniency amid heightened drug use and homelessness, as well as community violence against Asian American elders and viral social media footage of car break-ins and store thefts. (Though overall crime fell during Boudin’s tenure, commercial burglaries and homicides increased in San Francisco, as they did nationally around that time.) After the recall, Khojasteh urged Breed to pick a new DA who would continue the work he and Boudin had started on juvenile justice. “San Francisco deserves to see these reforms through,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Chronicle that July.

That’s not exactly what happened. Three days after the op-ed ran, Breed announced that Jenkins, a former assistant DA who’d quit Boudin’s office and then campaigned to recall him, would be the city’s next lead prosecutor. Khojasteh, now working on adult felony cases, tried to extend an olive branch: After Jenkins told staff she wanted to improve morale at the office, he emailed her to share his thoughts on how staffing increases in the felony unit might accomplish that. Days later, while he was at a family wedding, she called and fired him. “It was such an inappropriate way to handle this,” he tells me, frustrated that she didn’t give him time to write transition memos. He contemplated running against Jenkins in the November 2023 election but was not old enough; the law requires candidates to have worked five years as attorneys, and he would be several months shy of that. Instead, he got a job in Oakland at the Alameda DA’s office.          

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders.

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders. In September 2022, juvenile justice reform groups protested outside her office after she announced that she would consider charging children as adults in certain “heinous” cases, a departure from Boudin’s policy. “We won’t stand by and let our youth be criminalized!” Ally Durante, a youth organizer at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, yelled into a microphone.

Jenkins’ office also referred fewer teens with felony cases to diversion programs like the ones Khojasteh and Boudin had championed, according to Khojasteh, Boudin, and other attorneys who specialize in juvenile justice. It’s “back to the traditional approach,” says Daniel Macallair of San Francisco’s nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “It’s been difficult to work with her,” says Julia Arroyo, executive director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which mentors girls in the justice system. Lucero Herrera, who also works at the center, says Jenkins’ office stopped referrals to their programs without explanation: “She believes in charging young people, overcharging them.” The DA’s office and Jenkins’ campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these claims. In 2023, when the Chronicle reported that Jenkins was referring fewer adults to diversion programs, she said her team was more “thoughtful” than Boudin’s about selecting participants.

Because San Francisco has long been a leader on juvenile justice, says Macallair, kids with good public defenders and community advocates have continued to get connected with services in the city, despite Jenkins’ new policies. But she has also gone tougher on them in other ways. Her office has charged more strikes against teens, something Boudin and many other DAs in California have tried to avoid. Strikes remain on a kid’s record into adulthood and three of them can lead to harsher sentences.

Jenkins also made the unusual move of refusing to try new cases in front of a judge who took a progressive approach to juvenile justice late in his career. “She’s attacked judges in a way that’s unprecedented,” the now-retired judge, Anthony Kline, tells me, adding that her reluctance to refer both kids and adults to treatment-focused programs is “out of sync with the modern standards of criminal justice.” Under Jenkins, the number of kids at juvenile hall increased nearly threefold—from an average of 12 kids per day in June 2022, the month Boudin was recalled, to 31 kids a day in October 2023, a peak, and then 27 kids in July 2024, the last month for which data is publicly available.

In November 2022, San Francisco voters passed a ballot measure that pushed back the next DA election from 2023 to 2024, a change that meant Khojasteh would be experienced enough to run. This summer, he left the Alameda DA’s office to campaign full time.

If he's elected, Khojasteh wants to beef up the general felonies unit as well as the special prosecutions division, which handles public corruption, major financial crimes, and police violence; Jenkins downsized it and dismissed all the charges that Boudin had filed against cops. He wants to hold workshops with residents to teach them what to do if they are victims of crime. And he wants to expand the use of collaborative treatment courts for people who break the law because of drug addiction.

When it comes to teen offenders, he says he would increase referrals to the juvenile diversion programs he helped expand under Boudin, and he’d restart the relationship with the Young Women’s Freedom Center and other community groups. “We want to bring our community-based organizations into the fold when it comes to developing treatment plans and resources for kids,” he says.

Khojasteh has avoided labeling himself a “progressive prosecutor,” wary of the recall movements that other progressives like Boudin and now Oakland’s Pamela Price have faced. In a public conversation with Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi in June, Khojasteh described his top goal as public safety and said he was not seeking Boudin’s endorsement, though he’s still in touch with his former boss: “I’ve certainly had conversations with him on how I can not make some of the mistakes that he made.”

As I shadowed Khojasteh on Haight Street in September, I saw him talk with shopkeepers about accountability and pledge to prosecute whenever a crime is committed. Later, I asked him to elaborate on how he could make these promises while still prioritizing rehabilitation for kids. It was then that I saw how he might be more moderate than Boudin, even while maintaining a similar ethos. Khojasteh explained that Boudin’s office sometimes gave kids charges that were less serious than what the police had alleged. Teen robberies, for instance, were sometimes charged as thefts so that kids didn’t end up with strikes on their records. He believes this left prosecutors at a disadvantage during negotiations with defense, because the DA's starting offer was already so sweet.

“I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke."

Khojasteh would take a different approach: He would charge whatever crime is supported by the evidence, including robberies, but would later negotiate the charges down—so that kids would still face consequences without getting a strike or record that might keep them from securing a job or financial aid after their punishment. “I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke,” he told me. “I will still file the charges for serious cases—I'm going to hold you accountable—but I can do so in a way that lets you go on into adulthood with every tool at your disposal.”

Khojasteh diverges from his former boss in other ways. He does not support a blanket ban on trying 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, but says he’d only consider doing so in extreme cases like a mass school shooting. Nor does he support a blanket ban on gang enhancements, stiffer punishments that disproportionately affect people of color, though he views these enhancements with “disdain” and would generally avoid them.

Khojasteh declined to say whether he would charge the 17-year-old who shot 49ers receiver Pearsall as an adult, explaining that he hadn’t seen all the details of the case. But in late September, after Jenkins asked a judge to transfer two 16-year-olds to adult court for an alleged murder, Khojasteh criticized her decision. “This is election-year politics at the expense of justice,” he told me, noting that Jenkins made the transfer request a mere days before the kids were scheduled to go to juvenile trial, which is unusually late in the process, and just over a month before Election Day.

Jenkins told me she made the request because she did not believe the teens could be rehabilitated in the juvenile system, which can hold them until age 25. “I will not allow us to return to the days where blind loyalty to a failed dogma reigned supreme and perpetrators were not held accountable or faced consequences for their crimes,” she said. Khojasteh points out that if the kids were held in juvie until age 25, that would be more than half their current lifetimes incarcerated; if convicted in adult court, they face up to life in prison.

Whether Khojasteh can win enough votes remains to be seen. He’s the only challenger in the election. Jenkins has faced some recent setbacks: A court ruled that she committed misconduct in 2021 by disparaging a defense lawyer. Dozens of attorneys have left her office, some of them citing mismanagement. And a record number of drug overdoses in San Francisco last year fueled allegations that her crackdown on dealers isn’t making the city any safer. “People are frustrated and becoming disillusioned because nothing is changing,” retired San Francisco Judge Ellen Chaitin, who opposed Boudin's recall, told the San Francisco Standard.

There are some signs that Khojasteh’s message, meanwhile, is finding traction. Peterson Harter, the man who went viral for his black eye, agreed to put a campaign sign in his sandwich shop after Khojasteh’s visit. “Accountability and support—can we have those two things?” Harter said, moving his hands up and down like a scale.

Later that day in the Haight, a woman on the street stopped Khojasteh; she wanted to learn more about his juvenile justice stances, because her sister had spent time in a mental health facility and said too many kids there were later locked up. “The way we treat our young people says a lot about our values and our society,” says Celi Tamayo-Lee of the SF Rising Action Fund, a grassroots fund for communities of color.

But Jenkins has backing from San Francisco’s moderate political machine—I’ve heard rumors that her sights are set, eventually, on California’s attorney general office, the same path Kamala Harris took from the San Francisco DA’s office. (She did not reply when I asked her about this.) And she has funding from some of the rich execs who paid for Boudin’s recall: As of this month, campaign filings showed she’d garnered $368,000 for the election, compared with Khojasteh’s $105,000. She has declined to publicly debate him, making it harder for him to get media attention. “The fact that Brooke is an incumbent works to her advantage, and there has been a trend for voters to favor more tough-on-crime policies right now in San Francisco,” says Tamayo-Lee. Voters there recently passed ballot measures that decreased police oversight, increased police surveillance, and required people to get drug-tested in order to receive certain social services.

And then there’s the question of Khojasteh’s youth. Jenkins, 43, is more than a decade senior. Over the summer, Mission Local’s Eskenazi teased him for trying to look older than his years by cutting his long hair short and donning “Clark Kent glasses.” (They’re Garrett Leight.)

Khojasteh doesn't seem fazed. He tells me he did away with his long hair because he wanted to mark the transition into his 30s. He bought glasses because he couldn’t see the board during law school, though he soon realized (and embraced) that fewer people confused him for an intern when he wore them to court.

In fact, Khojasteh sees his youth as a plus. Unlike older politicians with ambitions for higher office, he says he can afford to stick around San Francisco as long as it takes to make the city safer, to balance accountability with the services and compassion that might keep people out of the justice system for good. There’s “value in me being a young candidate,” he told me before looking out onto Haight Street and all the people walking by. “I’m committed to San Francisco—this is my home. And I can be here for a long time.”

In early September, Peterson Harter was working the lunchtime rush in his sandwich shop on San Francisco’s Haight Street when in walked prosecutor Ryan Khojasteh, sporting slicked-back hair and circular glasses.

The year before, Harter had been punched in the face by a man who’d been urinating outside his shop. He posted a video of his black eye on Instagram, and it went viral. Khojasteh, a prosecutor who’s challenging San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins for her job in November, wanted to hear about his public safety concerns heading into the election.

“I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand.”

Harter told Khojasteh that the man who assaulted him came back to apologize after getting out of jail; he was later arrested again for assaulting someone else. “This guy actually needs mental health help,” said Harter, leaning against the counter in his apron. They began talking about the benefits of early intervention. If only “we could have helped this person way back when,” Khojasteh said.

The question of how to treat young offenders was on everyone’s mind that week. Days earlier, 49ers receiver Ricky Pearsall was shot by a 17-year-old during an attempted robbery near luxury stores in Union Square, making national news. Jenkins may try to transfer Pearsall’s shooter to adult court but hasn’t decided yet. (She’s also recommended transferring two 16-year-olds to adult court in an unrelated case.) Khojasteh says there are very few circumstances in which he’d do the same. “I want to prevent that 18- or 19-year-old from getting to a point where they have a gun in their hand,” he tells me. “That is the whole passion of this job.”

Khojasteh’s emphasis on early interventions is one of the ways he’s setting himself apart from Jenkins, who has taken a more punitive approach to teens after being appointed following the recall of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin.

San Francisco’s DA race has not gotten much attention in a presidential election year, but the results will be significant because of what Boudin’s recall represented: Observers nationally described it as evidence that famously liberal San Francisco had rejected criminal justice reforms, and that other progressive prosecutors outside California should beware a similar fate. Jenkins pledged to “restore accountability and consequences” to the city. If she loses, it could signal that voters believe the pendulum swung too far right under her leadership.

Khojasteh has welcomed endorsements from heavyweights in the progressive prosecutor world, including George Gascón in Los Angeles and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and from a slate of local progressive politicians and community leaders. But he is young, turning 31 next month, with less money, name recognition, and establishment support than Jenkins, who is endorsed by Mayor London Breed and Gov. Gavin Newsom.

And he will be trying to sell voters on his message about helping youthful offenders at a time when fears about violence are intensifying. Though juvenile crime has been falling for decades in San Francisco (and nationwide) to near historic lows, there’s been an uptick recently in kids arrested for serious offenses in the city. Not far from Harter’s sandwich shop, there were at least three other shootings over the past couple of years near Haight Street, a popular tourist destination; some of the gunmen were younger than 25. When Khojasteh spoke with other shopkeepers there, several said they didn’t feel safe. “The cops sadly don’t do anything,” an employee at a cafe told him.

As I tagged along with him on Haight Street, Khojasteh tried to convince people that he would offer a middle path between Boudin, a bold progressive, and Jenkins, a tough-talking moderate. “Anytime anyone commits a crime and I can prove it, I’m going to file charges,” he told a shopkeeper. But “the question is: How do I make sure they don’t come back into the system?” That’s what justice is, he says: figuring out how to keep someone accountable and keep them from coming back.

Khojasteh’s long-game approach to justice was shaped during his childhood. Raised in the Bay Area to Iranian immigrants, he was a toddler in 1996 when his family suffered a death that would cause him to question the root causes of youth violence. His uncle Cyrus Salehi was working the late shift at a Denny’s restaurant in Los Angeles when a 20-year-old walked inside, demanded money, and then aimed a pistol at his chest; two 18-year-olds and a 16-year-old sat outside with the getaway car. As Khojasteh grew older, the loss motivated him. “Why does this happen in the first place?” he wondered. “Why are there kids at that age with guns?” After Salehi’s wife got remarried, to a bureau chief of the Los Angeles DA’s Office, Khojasteh decided he wanted to become a prosecutor too.

Next up was a fellowship at the San Francisco public defender’s office, where he met Chesa Boudin, then a deputy public defender. “For someone at his point in his legal career, he had a unique confidence,” Boudin says, describing Khojasteh as “hardworking, compassionate,” and eager to grow. “When I learned he’d run for office against Pelosi, I thought, ‘What a tremendous amount of character that would build, and what a steep learning curve it would be at his age.’”

Working with Boudin would have a deep impact on the way Khojasteh thought about helping teens who committed crimes. After Boudin was elected DA in 2019, Khojasteh was one of his first hires in the juvenile justice unit, as an assistant DA. Change was in the air; the San Francisco Chronicle had just published an investigation showing that youth crime had dropped enormously since the ’90s, but that San Francisco continued spending large sums of money on a juvenile hall that now held fewer and fewer kids. In February 2020, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to close the facility by 2021. “This jail for kids is morally repugnant,” said then-Supervisor Matt Haney. “I thought Ryan’s compassion and energy would be particularly useful” carrying out that mission, says Boudin.

Together, Khojasteh and Boudin tried to do more to connect kids with services rather than locking them up. They expanded the Make It Right initiative, launched by former DA Gascón in 2013 for teens who committed certain felonies. If the young offenders worked with a caseworker, talked with the person they harmed, and took steps to repair the damage, including through community service, they could avoid prosecution. Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted, according to a study by University of California researchers and the California Policy Lab.

Kids who went through the program were 44 percent less likely to get arrested again compared with those who were prosecuted.

Boudin leaned on these services, diverting more teens than Gascón and pledging to use juvenile hall as a last resort. For more serious cases that required prosecution, he and Khojasteh tailored the punishment. When a 12-year-old robbed an elderly Chinese man, they filed charges but asked the victim what kind of justice he envisioned: The man wanted the boy, who was Black, to research the exploitation of Chinese people in America and think about their shared oppression. The boy also did community service, and the DA’s office checked to make sure he was going to school. Six months later, his mom reported that she’d never seen him behaving so well. “That had much more impact on his life and development than a couple of days in jail,” Khojasteh says.

Another time, Khojasteh prosecuted a 16-year-old who committed a serious property offense and was waiting in juvenile hall for placement at a residential school; the boy’s single mom couldn’t visit him because she was in hospice care with about a month to live. “I remember thinking, ‘If we keep this kid in juvenile hall, that would profoundly traumatize this child, the fact that he would never see his mother again,’” Khojasteh says. He arranged for the boy to leave and be with his mom for her last few days before returning to finish his sentence. “We don’t want to further cause the psychological damage that could ultimately cause him to act out or commit more crimes in the future,” he adds.

Khojasteh thinks some cases involving young people do require a tougher approach, especially if a victim is injured. He has incarcerated kids for offenses like carjacking. Juvenile hall “is a tool to protect the public and to protect the kid,” he says. But the number of children locked up for crimes fell dramatically in San Francisco under Boudin’s leadership—from an average of 33 kids a day in January 2020, when Boudin took office, to 9 kids daily in June 2020 and 16 kids daily in June 2021, according to city data. (Part of the drop can be explained by the pandemic: Social distancing forced detention facilities to downsize, and courts temporarily stopped trials.)

While working in Boudin’s office, Khojasteh also helped create a program for unaccompanied immigrant kids who committed crimes, and another that offered financial assistance to teens so they could pay restitution to their victims. Without the aid, the owed money often turned into debt for the teens’ parents, affecting the family’s credit score and upward mobility by making it harder to apply for housing or student loans.

San Francisco’s juvenile hall never shut down; Mayor Breed did not support its closure, and momentum for the plan dwindled. Then on June 7, 2022, San Francisco voters recalled Boudin, many of them frustrated by his perceived leniency amid heightened drug use and homelessness, as well as community violence against Asian American elders and viral social media footage of car break-ins and store thefts. (Though overall crime fell during Boudin’s tenure, commercial burglaries and homicides increased in San Francisco, as they did nationally around that time.) After the recall, Khojasteh urged Breed to pick a new DA who would continue the work he and Boudin had started on juvenile justice. “San Francisco deserves to see these reforms through,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Chronicle that July.

That’s not exactly what happened. Three days after the op-ed ran, Breed announced that Jenkins, a former assistant DA who’d quit Boudin’s office and then campaigned to recall him, would be the city’s next lead prosecutor. Khojasteh, now working on adult felony cases, tried to extend an olive branch: After Jenkins told staff she wanted to improve morale at the office, he emailed her to share his thoughts on how staffing increases in the felony unit might accomplish that. Days later, while he was at a family wedding, she called and fired him. “It was such an inappropriate way to handle this,” he tells me, frustrated that she didn’t give him time to write transition memos. He contemplated running against Jenkins in the November 2023 election but was not old enough; the law requires candidates to have worked five years as attorneys, and he would be several months shy of that. Instead, he got a job in Oakland at the Alameda DA’s office.          

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders.

From afar, Khojasteh watched as Jenkins took a harder turn against San Francisco’s teen offenders. In September 2022, juvenile justice reform groups protested outside her office after she announced that she would consider charging children as adults in certain “heinous” cases, a departure from Boudin’s policy. “We won’t stand by and let our youth be criminalized!” Ally Durante, a youth organizer at the Young Women’s Freedom Center, yelled into a microphone.

Jenkins’ office also referred fewer teens with felony cases to diversion programs like the ones Khojasteh and Boudin had championed, according to Khojasteh, Boudin, and other attorneys who specialize in juvenile justice. It’s “back to the traditional approach,” says Daniel Macallair of San Francisco’s nonprofit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. “It’s been difficult to work with her,” says Julia Arroyo, executive director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which mentors girls in the justice system. Lucero Herrera, who also works at the center, says Jenkins’ office stopped referrals to their programs without explanation: “She believes in charging young people, overcharging them.” The DA’s office and Jenkins’ campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these claims. In 2023, when the Chronicle reported that Jenkins was referring fewer adults to diversion programs, she said her team was more “thoughtful” than Boudin’s about selecting participants.

Because San Francisco has long been a leader on juvenile justice, says Macallair, kids with good public defenders and community advocates have continued to get connected with services in the city, despite Jenkins’ new policies. But she has also gone tougher on them in other ways. Her office has charged more strikes against teens, something Boudin and many other DAs in California have tried to avoid. Strikes remain on a kid’s record into adulthood and three of them can lead to harsher sentences.

Jenkins also made the unusual move of refusing to try new cases in front of a judge who took a progressive approach to juvenile justice late in his career. “She’s attacked judges in a way that’s unprecedented,” the now-retired judge, Anthony Kline, tells me, adding that her reluctance to refer both kids and adults to treatment-focused programs is “out of sync with the modern standards of criminal justice.” Under Jenkins, the number of kids at juvenile hall increased nearly threefold—from an average of 12 kids per day in June 2022, the month Boudin was recalled, to 31 kids a day in October 2023, a peak, and then 27 kids in July 2024, the last month for which data is publicly available.

In November 2022, San Francisco voters passed a ballot measure that pushed back the next DA election from 2023 to 2024, a change that meant Khojasteh would be experienced enough to run. This summer, he left the Alameda DA’s office to campaign full time.

If he's elected, Khojasteh wants to beef up the general felonies unit as well as the special prosecutions division, which handles public corruption, major financial crimes, and police violence; Jenkins downsized it and dismissed all the charges that Boudin had filed against cops. He wants to hold workshops with residents to teach them what to do if they are victims of crime. And he wants to expand the use of collaborative treatment courts for people who break the law because of drug addiction.

When it comes to teen offenders, he says he would increase referrals to the juvenile diversion programs he helped expand under Boudin, and he’d restart the relationship with the Young Women’s Freedom Center and other community groups. “We want to bring our community-based organizations into the fold when it comes to developing treatment plans and resources for kids,” he says.

Khojasteh has avoided labeling himself a “progressive prosecutor,” wary of the recall movements that other progressives like Boudin and now Oakland’s Pamela Price have faced. In a public conversation with Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi in June, Khojasteh described his top goal as public safety and said he was not seeking Boudin’s endorsement, though he’s still in touch with his former boss: “I’ve certainly had conversations with him on how I can not make some of the mistakes that he made.”

As I shadowed Khojasteh on Haight Street in September, I saw him talk with shopkeepers about accountability and pledge to prosecute whenever a crime is committed. Later, I asked him to elaborate on how he could make these promises while still prioritizing rehabilitation for kids. It was then that I saw how he might be more moderate than Boudin, even while maintaining a similar ethos. Khojasteh explained that Boudin’s office sometimes gave kids charges that were less serious than what the police had alleged. Teen robberies, for instance, were sometimes charged as thefts so that kids didn’t end up with strikes on their records. He believes this left prosecutors at a disadvantage during negotiations with defense, because the DA's starting offer was already so sweet.

“I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke."

Khojasteh would take a different approach: He would charge whatever crime is supported by the evidence, including robberies, but would later negotiate the charges down—so that kids would still face consequences without getting a strike or record that might keep them from securing a job or financial aid after their punishment. “I have that middle path between Chesa and Brooke,” he told me. “I will still file the charges for serious cases—I'm going to hold you accountable—but I can do so in a way that lets you go on into adulthood with every tool at your disposal.”

Khojasteh diverges from his former boss in other ways. He does not support a blanket ban on trying 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, but says he’d only consider doing so in extreme cases like a mass school shooting. Nor does he support a blanket ban on gang enhancements, stiffer punishments that disproportionately affect people of color, though he views these enhancements with “disdain” and would generally avoid them.

Khojasteh declined to say whether he would charge the 17-year-old who shot 49ers receiver Pearsall as an adult, explaining that he hadn’t seen all the details of the case. But in late September, after Jenkins asked a judge to transfer two 16-year-olds to adult court for an alleged murder, Khojasteh criticized her decision. “This is election-year politics at the expense of justice,” he told me, noting that Jenkins made the transfer request a mere days before the kids were scheduled to go to juvenile trial, which is unusually late in the process, and just over a month before Election Day.

Jenkins told me she made the request because she did not believe the teens could be rehabilitated in the juvenile system, which can hold them until age 25. “I will not allow us to return to the days where blind loyalty to a failed dogma reigned supreme and perpetrators were not held accountable or faced consequences for their crimes,” she said. Khojasteh points out that if the kids were held in juvie until age 25, that would be more than half their current lifetimes incarcerated; if convicted in adult court, they face up to life in prison.

He interned at the Santa Clara DA’s office after undergrad, then graduated early from UC College of the Law, San Francisco, in 2018, where he wrote a thesis on ending the school-to-prison pipeline. He also worked up the nerve, at age 24, to run against Nancy Pelosi for her seat in the House. (He lost.)

Whether Khojasteh can win enough votes remains to be seen. He’s the only challenger in the election. Jenkins has faced some recent setbacks: A court ruled that she committed misconduct in 2021 by disparaging a defense lawyer. Dozens of attorneys have left her office, some of them citing mismanagement. And a record number of drug overdoses in San Francisco last year fueled allegations that her crackdown on dealers isn’t making the city any safer. “People are frustrated and becoming disillusioned because nothing is changing,” retired San Francisco Judge Ellen Chaitin, who opposed Boudin's recall, told the San Francisco Standard.

There are some signs that Khojasteh’s message, meanwhile, is finding traction. Peterson Harter, the man who went viral for his black eye, agreed to put a campaign sign in his sandwich shop after Khojasteh’s visit. “Accountability and support—can we have those two things?” Harter said, moving his hands up and down like a scale.

Later that day in the Haight, a woman on the street stopped Khojasteh; she wanted to learn more about his juvenile justice stances, because her sister had spent time in a mental health facility and said too many kids there were later locked up. “The way we treat our young people says a lot about our values and our society,” says Celi Tamayo-Lee of the SF Rising Action Fund, a grassroots fund for communities of color.

But Jenkins has backing from San Francisco’s moderate political machine—I’ve heard rumors that her sights are set, eventually, on California’s attorney general office, the same path Kamala Harris took from the San Francisco DA’s office. (She did not reply when I asked her about this.) And she has funding from some of the rich execs who paid for Boudin’s recall: As of this month, campaign filings showed she’d garnered $368,000 for the election, compared with Khojasteh’s $105,000. She has declined to publicly debate him, making it harder for him to get media attention. “The fact that Brooke is an incumbent works to her advantage, and there has been a trend for voters to favor more tough-on-crime policies right now in San Francisco,” says Tamayo-Lee. Voters there recently passed ballot measures that decreased police oversight, increased police surveillance, and required people to get drug-tested in order to receive certain social services.

And then there’s the question of Khojasteh’s youth. Jenkins, 43, is more than a decade senior. Over the summer, Mission Local’s Eskenazi teased him for trying to look older than his years by cutting his long hair short and donning “Clark Kent glasses.” (They’re Garrett Leight.)

Khojasteh doesn't seem fazed. He tells me he did away with his long hair because he wanted to mark the transition into his 30s. He bought glasses because he couldn’t see the board during law school, though he soon realized (and embraced) that fewer people confused him for an intern when he wore them to court.

In fact, Khojasteh sees his youth as a plus. Unlike older politicians with ambitions for higher office, he says he can afford to stick around San Francisco as long as it takes to make the city safer, to balance accountability with the services and compassion that might keep people out of the justice system for good. There’s “value in me being a young candidate,” he told me before looking out onto Haight Street and all the people walking by. “I’m committed to San Francisco—this is my home. And I can be here for a long time.”

Former President Donald Trump wants you to believe that violence is surging. “All over the world crime is down; all over the world—except here,” he said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Crime here is up and through the roof.”

But the latest data seems to suggest the opposite.

In 2023, murders in the United States fell at the fastest pace ever recorded, by about 11 percent, according to figures released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week. And on Monday, the agency shared more good news: The number of killings seemed to keep falling significantly, by an estimated 23 percent, during the first six months of 2024.

“Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline.”

“It is an astounding feat that deserves to be studied for decades to come,” crime analyst Jeff Asher, whose reports on homicide trends have been widely cited, wrote on his Substack last week. He noted that the US murder rate is now “at or very possibly below pre-Covid levels,” and that the country hasn’t seen such a big one-year decline in killings since 1996, when murder rates dropped by 9 percent.

Overall violent crime is falling too—by about 3 percent in 2023, and by an estimated 10 percent in the first half of 2024, according to the FBI. This drop is “certainly nowhere near as fast” as the drop in murder, writes Asher. But unlike murder, he adds, overall “violent crime didn’t rise a ton in 2020.” It has “largely returned to the 50-year lows seen a few times over the last decade, and is down more than 50 percent from where it was at peak in the 1990s.”

The 2023 FBI data gives us a pretty good sense of recent crime trends, but it’s important to note that the latest figures from the first six months of 2024 are more preliminary—law enforcement agencies have until the end of the year to correct any mistakes. So take these figures with “a grain of salt,” writes Asher: It’s likely that the numbers won’t be quite as great by the end of the year.

Still, there’s a lot to celebrate right now: “Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline,” he summarizes. “Violent crime is down a fair amount…and will likely be the lowest reported violent crime rate since 1969…And property crime is down a ton thanks to the massive decline in motor vehicle theft following several years of huge increases.”

Former President Donald Trump wants you to believe that violence is surging. “All over the world crime is down; all over the world—except here,” he said during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “Crime here is up and through the roof.”

But the latest data seems to suggest the opposite.

In 2023, murders in the United States fell at the fastest pace ever recorded, by about 11 percent, according to figures released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week. And on Monday, the agency shared more good news: The number of killings seemed to keep falling significantly, by an estimated 23 percent, during the first six months of 2024.

“Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline.”

“It is an astounding feat that deserves to be studied for decades to come,” crime analyst Jeff Asher, whose reports on homicide trends have been widely cited, wrote on his Substack last week. He noted that the US murder rate is now “at or very possibly below pre-Covid levels,” and that the country hasn’t seen such a big one-year decline in killings since 1996, when murder rates dropped by 9 percent.

Overall violent crime is falling too—by about 3 percent in 2023, and by an estimated 10 percent in the first half of 2024, according to the FBI. This drop is “certainly nowhere near as fast” as the drop in murder, writes Asher. But unlike murder, he adds, overall “violent crime didn’t rise a ton in 2020.” It has “largely returned to the 50-year lows seen a few times over the last decade, and is down more than 50 percent from where it was at peak in the 1990s.”

The 2023 FBI data gives us a pretty good sense of recent crime trends, but it’s important to note that the latest figures from the first six months of 2024 are more preliminary—law enforcement agencies have until the end of the year to correct any mistakes. So take these figures with “a grain of salt,” writes Asher: It’s likely that the numbers won’t be quite as great by the end of the year.

Still, there’s a lot to celebrate right now: “Murder is down at the fastest rate ever recorded, easily eclipsing 2023’s previous record decline,” he summarizes. “Violent crime is down a fair amount…and will likely be the lowest reported violent crime rate since 1969…And property crime is down a ton thanks to the massive decline in motor vehicle theft following several years of huge increases.”