London Breed is beating the progressives. But is she actually fixing anything?

SAN FRANCISCO — Two floors above San Francisco’s historic waterfront, in a glass-encased room affording panoramic views of the glittering bay, the mood among the city’s business elite was dark, apocalyptic even.

It was May and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce had just released a poll showing plunging confidence in the city’s trajectory. Concerns about crime were soaring and there was a strong chance voters were about to oust the city’s embattled district attorney. As the members noshed on smoked salmon and macarons, Chamber CEO Rodney Fong drew a dire historical parallel: the 1906 earthquake. “We have a lot of work to do as residents are more pessimistic than ever.”

Then Mayor London Breed, the keynote speaker for the meeting, dressed in a bright orange suit, stepped forward. Breed beamed as she talked up San Francisco’s revival. But the heartiest spontaneous applause came not for Breed’s cheerleading but after she urged more arrests and prosecution. She exhorted business executives in the room to help her persuade the progressive-majority board of supervisors to approve increased wages to lure more police applicants and reverse a stubborn staffing shortfall that even her rivals on the board of supervisors acknowledge. She talked up legislation to expand police access to public surveillance cameras. She called for a tougher response to drug and property crimes. “My responsibility,” she said, “is to keep the people of this city safe.”

Her comments to the Chamber of Commerce were a slightly more polite version of a speech that Breed gave seven months ago — the now-famous “bullshit” tirade. Breed got a rush of national press as one of a handful of big city Democratic mayors willing to break with their party’s orthodoxy on crime and homelessness to tackle deteriorating quality of life issues. She was hailed by conservatives who saw in her a gratifying repudiation of soft-on-crime liberalism, though they conveniently failed to mention that she had said much the same thing in her inaugural address several years before. Still, her coruscating rhetoric on homelessness earned her the scorn of progressives who already perceived her as just another handmaiden to the city’s wealthiest who would rather sweep away problems than solve their root causes.

In the months since, Breed has positioned herself as a centrist ally of frustrated voters at a time of supreme discontent over crime and homelessness, thunderously rejecting the status quo and offering a sensible middle course: a city that offers services to homeless people while compelling them into treatment, that holds police accountable while swelling their ranks and giving them a more central role. She established her pragmatist bona fides by campaigning to recall several members of the school board who had advocated for renaming schools that sat empty of students. And then in early June, Breed further secured her political power when voters recalled the progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, with whom she had clashed over sentencing policies and prosecution decisions. Breed selected a vocal proponent of the recall, former prosecutor Brooke Jenkins, as Boudin’s replacement.

On paper, Breed’s mounting political capital would seem to present a model for embattled leaders in other big cities who have become political punching bags for Republicans. But while she is steadily reinforcing her reputation as a canny political operator, her actual record is muddled at best. She can point to some signs of progress. A February homeless count found that street homelessness had decreased 3.5 percent in San Francisco since 2019, the first such drop in years. The city has a budget surplus. More units of supportive housing have gone up than Breed had sought.

Yet even as crime rates have declined overall, murders and shootings rose in recent years as burglaries spiked during the pandemic and car thefts increased steadily. Viral videos of shoplifting and smash-and-grabs fueled a sense of disorder. An influx of fentanyl has led to an epidemic of overdose deaths, exacerbating an already severe substance abuse problem among the unhoused. A homelessness services center that Breed opened after declaring a state of emergency is slated to close. Thousands of students have departed the deficit-hobbled school district. Stubbornly high commercial vacancy rates are visible in empty storefronts throughout the city. “Unaffordable” doesn’t do justice to the ever-rising cost of housing.

Where outsiders see in San Francisco’s woes evidence of a lefty dystopia, local progressives tend to fault an unbreakable mayoral-business axis. In their view, Breed is not a new variety of Democrat — just a brasher version of a kind that has dominated city politics for decades, with little to show for it.

“Actually, we generally had this type of administration now for 20 years in San Francisco,” said former supervisor Jane Kim, a Berniecrat who challenged Breed for the mayorship but has maintained an amicable relationship with her. “And it hasn’t fixed homelessness. And I’m not saying that the left has all the answers either. But I don’t think that this strategy is working either.”

Soon enough Breed will face a reckoning of her own, when she stands for re-election in 2023 (or in 2024, if voters approve a measure pushing the election back ) and she will be judged on how she performed.

And now after two recalls there are few other elected officials to absorb voter discontent. Breed no longer has Boudin as a foil. Instead, she might be running alongside the anti-Boudin prosecutor she selected to succeed him. More so than at any point in her tenure, she will be synonymous with the city’s status quo.

“The reward for weathering the current political climate is you get to weather the next political climate. Every day in San Francisco politics is basically survival,” said Jim Ross, a political consultant who worked for Boudin. “The world has reshaped around [Breed] and around her office in the last year. She’ll have appointed a DA, she’ll have appointed three members of the school board, she’s appointed a supervisor to what is kind of the most politically charged district in the city. So I think now she’s heading into an election year where the results and how people feel about the city will be front and center.”

Always blunt, Breed professes to be unconcerned about facing voters.

“I don’t do this job,” Breed said, “in fear of losing it.”

In some important ways, Breed’s entire political orientation has been defined by her relationship with law enforcement.

She grew up in the Plaza East housing project in the city’s Western Addition neighborhood, where gunfire was commonplace and the San Francisco of ornate Victorian homes and rapidly acquired fortunes felt distant. She did not know her father and her mother was barely in the picture, so Breed was raised by her grandmother. Her brother struggled with addiction and was later sentenced to 44 years after a woman was killed by oncoming traffic when her brother pushed her from a getaway car, according to prosecutors. Breed’s sister died of a drug overdose.

Breed’s childhood gave her a nuanced view of law enforcement. She speaks often of the tension between residents both distrusting and needing the police, and she regularly derides white liberals who proclaim to know what Black voters want from the police.

Growing up, people saw “corrupt officers who did things like plant dope on people or would beat people down,” Breed said in an interview earlier this year with POLITICO. But people also suffered from the predation by others in the community, and Breed believes that rejecting a role for law enforcement is tantamount to abandoning those communities. She recounted the death of a friend who was shot “like a dog” in the street. “The worst part about that is not even a peep” came from police critics on the left, she said, “as if he doesn’t even matter.”

“The implication that people don’t want police or law enforcement in their communities,” Breed said, “I think it’s a false narrative.”

Her perspective on what was possible stemmed from interactions with people who helped her glimpse a better life. As a teenager, Breed babysat for the children of Shauna Marshall, the former dean of the University of California’s Hastings School of Law. Breed was friends with another young woman who lived across the street from Marshall, who remembered Breed as shy.

“One of the things I admire about London Breed is how against all odds and her background she has become so successful, and one of the reasons she said she was so shy — she’d never met a Black lawyer before,” Marshall said. “I don’t know if she’d met any lawyers, let alone a Black woman.”

Later, Marshall helped secure Breed a high school job working for Marshall’s relative at a center helping women transition from welfare to work. A supportive middle school teacher gave a Breed an important incentive to succeed by telling her she needed to be on good behavior to remain in the school band. A high school teacher guided Breed through the college application process after a visit from a recruiter from the University of California, Davis. Breed ultimately did get into and attend Davis, where she ended up switching from chemistry to a political science major. A graduate degree in public administration followed.

“I know the possibilities of what can happen when things go great in the city and what it can mean for someone’s life,” Breed said. “It’s the difference between me going to college and becoming mayor and giving back to the community in the way that I have and, sadly, my brother, who is incarcerated.”

Her political career began with a series of positions linked to Mayor Willie Brown. Breed interned in the Brown administration and worked on his 1999 re-election campaign, and in 2002 — at Brown’s urging — Breed, then 28, became executive director of the African American Art & Culture Complex, giving her a prominent role in the city’s civic life.

When an opportunity to run for the board of supervisors arrived in 2012, Breed’s background had gone from a barrier to an asset. The people who rallied early behind Breed’s run — both Black and white — saw in her someone whose life experience instilled in her a genuine desire to make policy work for San Franciscans.

“Her whole backstory is not only compelling, but it really spoke to me that here’s a person who’s been on the wrong side of so much that’s gone wrong in San Francisco for the last 50 years,” said Ted Loewenberg, who had met Breed before she ran for supervisor in his capacity heading the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association.

There is a term San Francisco political insiders like to use: “city family.” It typically refers to the inner circle of power surrounding and flowing from Brown, whose political successors include Gov. Gavin Newsom and Vice President Kamala Harris — and, depending on whom you ask, Breed, as well. Those mayors, from Brown to Newsom to former Mayor Ed Lee, have generally aligned with business interests and gone to battle with left-leaning Boards of Supervisors.

Breed has always pushed back against attempts to locate her within that sphere of influence. “I wouldn't say I was all that powerful or anything,” Breed said in an interview. During that first board of supervisors run she bridled at the notion she was just another Brown protégé, fuming to a reporter after an event that Brown “didn’t wipe my ass when I was a baby,” adding, “I don’t do what no motherfucking body tells me to do.”

The reporter published the quote, which cost Breed the endorsement of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. But she won the race, prevailing in an upset over a candidate who had been endorsed by then-Mayor Ed Lee. It was not the last time she would win despite elected powers closing ranks against her.

Those experiences cemented a sense of purpose, said Sheryl Davis, director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. “People tried to count her out or erase her or tell her it wasn’t her time,” Davis said, which “just made her more determined. Because if the people in power get to decide who’s in power instead of the people who need to be supported, then the system is terribly flawed.”

Former Mayor Ed Lee’s death in 2017 thrust Breed into the role of acting mayor thanks to her position as president of the city council. Her champions — a group of long-term residents and public figures disproportionately made up of Black women — said the city charter was clear: The acting mayor becomes interim mayor until the next election. Anything else, they argued, would be a double standard intended to punish Breed and an insult to the city’s diminishing number of Black residents.

“London Breed is not asking for any favors and we’re not asking for any favors for London Breed,” said Amelia Ashley-Ward, publisher of the city’s oldest Black newspaper, the Sun-Reporter. “She is equipped to do the job.”

But board members to Breed’s left refused to let that happen. Supervisor Hillary Ronen delivered a speech in which she warned the mayorship would lend Breed an “insurmountable advantage” in the upcoming election, and she cast the mayor as a pawn of powerful interests.

“There are white rich men, billionaires, in this city that have steered the policies for the last two mayoral administrations if not more, that have gotten us into the absolute mess that we are in today,” Ronen said in remarks widely seen as referring to tech moguls such as Ron Conway, a billionaire Silicon Valley investor and a longtime Breed supporter. “Those same white men — and it’s documented — they are so enthusiastically supporting your candidacy, London Breed.”

“Thank you very much,” Breed calmly replied from her perch overseeing the meeting. Her supporters were less restrained, chanting “shame on you” after the board installed a centrist, white, male supervisor seen to have no shot at winning in an open election.

It wouldn’t matter come Election Day. A few months later, in June 2018, Breed beat two progressive candidates to win the job, buoyed by spending from tech donors and other business interests. To Breed’s allies, the entire arc was a defining moment that was critical to understanding her political persona: unflappable and ultimately successful despite the obstacles progressives throw in her path.

“That is the most common misperception about her political career. This idea that she was handed something or that she’s somebody else’s acolyte,” said Conor Johnston, who served as Breed’s chief of staff when she was a supervisor. “They didn’t just try to throw her out of office,” Johnston added. “They tried to humiliate her in a very public way, in front of a large portion of the Black community that had come to show their support.”

Yet despite Breed allies’ insistence that she owes little to the city’s power structure, she is clearly enmeshed in it — which has ensnared her in ethics scandals that speak to the insular and self-serving nature of the “city family” network.

An influence-peddling probe has rippled out from San Francisco Public Works leader Mohammed Nuru, who pleaded guilty to federal fraud in January. Breed incurred nearly $23,000 in ethics fines in 2021 for, among other things, accepting car repairs from Nuru, whom she had dated years earlier. (She has denied any involvement in the corruption scandal and has not been accused of wrongdoing.) She was also fined for exhorting then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018, in a letter that invoked her title, to commute her brother’s prison sentence.

Breed has always had a reputation for bluntness. Then came “The Speech.”

In December, as newly married couples posed before a gold-trimmed Christmas tree in City Hall, a weary-looking mayor stepped to a podium and opened a speech billed as a response to public outcry for her to do something about assaults and drug dealing. Breed started by saying “things have gotten worse” and laying out various proposals to address street crime in the long-troubled Tenderloin neighborhood: more felony warrant sweeps, better lighting, bolstered surveillance, tougher penalties for resale of stolen goods and an overarching declaration that the Tenderloin was in a state of emergency.

Then she veered off script. Eyes flashing, voice seething with barely suppressed fury that conveyed the litany of stories she had heard from residents who feared walking down the street, the mayor delivered the lines that would introduce her to a national audience: It was time, she said, to end “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city.”

Everyone had a theory on what it meant. Conservative media outlets saw vindication: a lefty mayor repudiating her formerly woke agenda. Progressive skeptics perceived a cynical act of positioning by a canny politician looking to advance her agenda. “I think it was helpful to her relative to joining the elite cadre of big-city mayors who are dealing with a freaked-out populace,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a longtime City Hall player on the board’s progressive wing who has both clashed and collaborated with the mayor. Police reform activists saw a cynical sop to San Franciscans “clamoring for a crackdown,” prominent San Francisco Police Department critic John Hamasaki said.

“I think the mayor was reflecting a lot of pressure from social media, from the business community and from regular people who saw things” that upset them, said Hamasaki, who recently resigned from a civilian police oversight commission. “There’s a lot of vitriol, and it’s all people tagging the mayor and blaming the mayor,” he added. “I understand her frustration. I just wish it would be directed in ways that address the situation.”

But the people who know Breed best will tell you something else: The outrage was genuine. It was also consistent. Breed used her first mayoral address in 2018 to warn of rising public safety concerns and call for more cops — as she did in in her most recent State of the City speech. She has long advocated a policy of addressing root causes of crime like poverty, and she has attacked police misconduct while guaranteeing public safety as a foundational basis for a functional society — a balance that other Democratic politicians are trying to achieve. During 2020’s summer of racial discontent, the Board of Supervisors rejected Breed’s police commission picks as insufficiently reformist.

Breed was making a bet that weary San Franciscans were ready to step back from a criminal justice reform movement that has often relied on “defund the police” rhetoric and encouraged prosecutors to adopt more lenient sentencing policies for lower-level crimes like drug and property offenses.

That triangulation speaks to a larger dilemma for San Francisco politicians: how to address the city’s myriad and pressing problems without playing into the gleeful conservative caricatures. Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, one of Breed’s allies on the Board of Supervisors, said, “There are plenty of liberals and progressives and Democrats who recognize that policing needs reform, and also recognize that we need police.”

“I think it is important for us not to cede to Republicans and conservatives the ground of saying what's happening in San Francisco isn’t acceptable — because a lot of what's happening in San Francisco isn’t acceptable.”

Breed is not the first San Francisco mayor to vow swift action on homelessness. Gavin Newsom did so as mayor of San Francisco. More than a decade later, he is doing so as governor of California. The numbers of San Franciscans living in destitution has haunted successive administrations, speaking to a lack of easy solutions to a complex issue that is intertwined with substance abuse, criminal justice policies, the cost of housing and gentrification.

The limits of Breed’s ability to translate rhetoric into concrete change were on vivid display on a sunny morning in March in the shadow of City Hall’s gold-trimmed dome.  

While a mix of older residents and young professionals perused early spring peas and asparagus at a farmer’s market, a man staggered past other people lingering on the parched grass behind farm stands, bellowing “help!” to himself. A young woman was carried away on a stretcher, past a person huddling and rocking under a yellow sheet of plastic. Emergency response officials in blue uniforms approached multiple people — a young woman who could barely stand, an older man sprawled by a bus stop — and coaxed them into waiting vehicles with water and blankets. “Larry, you’ve got to come,” an EMT implored the man. “We gotta make an appointment.” Eventually he followed.

The farmer’s market, a staple amenity of urban life, happened to be located on the other side of fence from a Linkage Center — launched by Breed as part of the emergency declaration but now slated to close at the end of the year — whose signs invite the destitute to access water, food, social support and hygiene. “Come as you are,” a sign proclaimed in four languages. “Help starts here.” Some San Franciscans were infuriated earlier this year to learn the city was quietly allowing supervised drug use at the site. An unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate, Michael Shellenberger, said it embodied Democrats’ wrongheaded approach to homelessness.

Across the street, inside a fence-encircled, publicly sanctioned encampment, sat dozens of tents on wooden platforms and port-o-potties. “Be Compassionate” urged a pop-up canopy belonging to the services provider Urban Alchemy, whose workers are on seemingly every corner, urging unhoused San Franciscans to avail themselves of various city services. In Breed’s telling, those workers are a necessary complement to an augmented police presence. But despite the interventions of city workers, homeless people are still widely present both within the Tenderloin and downtown areas surrounding City Hall and in other neighborhoods farther from the epicenter of suffering.

Breed has vowed to build more housing and get people off the streets. In her first official mayoral speech, she condemned “the dangerous conditions we see on our streets” as “failures of public policy.” But it can feel like the city is straining at a breaking point despite all the billions of dollars the state and cities have allocated to allay homelessness. While Breed was recently able to tout the declining numbers of unhoused people after a sharp increase in 2019, the roughly 7,800 total of homeless people was still higher than it was in 2017, the year before Breed took office.

While Breed has exceeded her goals in building more permanent supportive housing and the city has permitted for about 15,000 new units since 2018, her efforts to accelerate housing production have repeatedly run aground in a hostile board of supervisors, which drew denunciations from Breed after rejecting a pair of developments. With state law requiring 80,000 new units in the next decade, San Francisco’s process is among the lengthiest in the state and the pipeline of new units has diminished as construction costs climb. Her advocacy for safe injection sites where people can use drugs under official supervision is entangled in state and federal prohibitions, although the city quietly allowed a version of the idea to proceed. A San Francisco Chronicle investigation uncovered deplorable conditions — broken elevators, nonfunctional toilets and mold — and deaths in hotel rooms where the city houses vulnerable people.

But it is her efforts to force more people to get help — whether that means incarceration or funneling them into shelter or treatment programs — that have generated the most controversy. Breed has long advocated for tougher conservatorship laws allowing the state to assume control over people who need help. Newsom has similarly unveiled a program of “Care Courts” that would allow the state to push people into treatment.

“We are not giving people choice anymore,” Breed said in her December speech. “We are not going to just walk by and let someone use [drugs] in broad daylight on the streets and not give them a choice between going to the location we have identified for them and going to jail.”

During the interview in her office, Breed stressed that an enhanced police presence had to be coupled with more service workers who could point homeless people toward assistance. She talked about the human toll of inaction. She described a schizophrenic man who has for years been on “my personal caseload” — her unofficial roster of recurringly needy residents, built up over years of civic life — who has endlessly cycled from shelter to the streets, and a woman dying soon after workers finally persuaded her to enter a shelter.

Breed cited both cases as examples of how the status quo is “a failure.” A failure to get the man the sustained medication and behavioral health treatment he so manifestly needed. A failure to ensure a woman stayed in a place where the city could help her. “If I was not in my right mind,” Breed said, “I would want somebody to force me into whatever treatment necessary.”

But she said the issue is bigger than people struggling with homelessness, talking about what the city owes to, say, the woman who is afraid to leave the house after she was assaulted by “some guy who was high out of his mind.”

“Why is that okay, for that person to have rights to be out there doing whatever he wants to do?” Breed said. “I get it,” she added. “People have problems. But their problems should not infringe upon someone's ability to live life safely in their own community.”

Mandelman, the supervisor who has aligned with Breed in pushing for tougher conservatorship laws, compared the feeling to being at war, engulfed in a “crisis that is of a sustained duration, that we have not figured out how to fix.” That stagnation, Mandelman said, suggests that “in important ways, we are failing.”

Many homeless advocates say Breed’s compassion for homeless people is belied by her private actions. They cite publicly released text messages in which she told her police chief she wanted a specific block “cleared” of unhoused people.

Coalition on Homelessness Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach said Breed has made some strides in providing temporary housing while also pursuing a punitive approach. Friedenbach said that two-step reflects the “classic center-liberal-moderate” calibration of business-friendly Democratic mayors: “Investments in a homelessness services program while violating the human rights of people on the streets.”

“As you push forward a response to homelessness you have some choices: You can center unhoused people and if you’re centering unhoused people that means things like creating housing,” Friedenbach said, “or if you want to just kind of satisfy downtown interests or corporate interests, then you just displace people from those areas to make those particular people satisfied. We kind of have a mix of that from London Breed.”

The Tenderloin emergency ended months ago after the 90-day time limit approved by the board of supervisors expired. Now the services center Breed has touted as a centerpiece of the response is scheduled to close — leading some skeptics to claim vindication.

“I have long been concerned that the sudden declaration of emergency in the Tenderloin was more an effort to deflect criticism and appease the media than to make lasting progress to reduce harm and suffering in the Tenderloin,” Supervisor Dean Preston, who is among Breed’s most steadfast critics on the board, said on Twitter after the closure became public. “The Mayor’s latest announcement heightens these concerns — not because of the closure of the Center, but because it was not accompanied by a commitment to a new site at which safe consumption, basic services, and referrals would be offered in its place.”

The one area where Breed is having incontrovertible success is consolidating power at the expense of her progressive detractors.

When San Francisco voters turned on their school board, Breed was with them. Classrooms remained closed in San Francisco longer than in much of the country. As parental desperation mounted, school board members moved to strip the names of famous Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington from dozens of still-shuttered schools and to end selective admissions at an elite high school. Breed shared outraged parents’ view that the board had lost the plot by focusing on schools’ names while kids languished at home. She sued the board to force schools open and gave the recall critical legitimacy with an early endorsement. She then got to replace the officials who were ousted in a landslide.

After endorsing a rival district attorney candidate, Breed clashed repeatedly with Boudin, lumping him with misguided white progressives and telling a reporter they were not “on the same page” about “supporting the victims of this city than we are supporting in some cases, sadly, the criminals.” In the interview with POLITICO, she lamented “the lack of prosecutions, you know, for sometimes violent offenders.” After Breed announced her plan for a stronger police presence in the Tenderloin, Boudin argued that we cannot “arrest and prosecute our way out of problems.”

Breed ultimately prevailed. While she remained studiously neutral on the recall, her declining to oppose it telegraphed her stance. Her choice for Boudin’s replacement also spoke volumes. Rather than go with a more neutral choice like a judge, Breed picked a former prosecutor in Boudin’s office who quit and then became a face of the recall, arguing Boudin had undermined public safety with lighter sentences, plea deals and an over-reliance on pretrial diversions.

In the same location where Breed delivered her “bullshit” diatribe, she introduced Brooke Jenkins with a familiar vow to balance reform and retrenchment, “accountability and justice.” But while Breed said San Francisco was not interested in “locking people up and throwing away the key,” her voice evinced some characteristic outrage as she described where things had gone wrong.

“I could hardly believe what was happening in what is one of the most progressive cities in the country. I could hardly believe that we would neglect so many victims,” Breed said, lamenting “all the situations where we’ve seen someone who was arrested and let go, arrested and let go, arrested and let go, end up unfortunately killing people on the streets of San Francisco in cases that should have been addressed and could have been avoided.”

Breed also hit a familiar theme: she was simply doing what the voters asked for. They listened to Jenkins, so Breed listened to them. “Many of us were introduced to her during the recall,” Breed said, “and a lot of people paid attention to what she had to say.”

In other words: Breed saw who San Franciscans voted with, and she responded.

“San Franciscans are liberal, they’re progressive, they believe in generous, compassionate social services, and I think they feel especially angry or even betrayed when essential government functions are failing or they’re getting worse,” said Tony Winnicker, a veteran of multiple mayoral administrations. “They’re speaking out in ways we haven’t seen in a long time with these recalls.”

It’s part of Breed’s larger reconfiguration of city government. She named one of her allies as city attorney. On May 9, the mayor announced she had tapped police department spokesman Matt Dorsey to fill a newly vacant Board of Supervisors seat, allowing her more leverage to nudge a body that has so far resisted her agenda. Progressives saw Breed’s selection of a law enforcement official as a thumb in the eye; she said it reflected voters’ prioritization of public safety.

Critics who believe Boudin became a scapegoat for far larger problems are unconvinced the picture would substantially change.

“She can appoint Judge Dredd as DA, but nothing will change given SFPD’s arrest rates,” Max Szabo, who has advised various progressive prosecutor campaigns, said in an email. “At that point the public will be in search of a new villain, and she won’t have a scapegoat, she’ll own it all: D.A., police, public health and homelessness.”

In a combined city-county whose charter already gives the mayor sweeping authority, Breed is stepping into an augmented queenmaker role. She is poised to win a second term in 2023 (or 2024) given the paucity of credible challengers. Jenkins will need to win a partial term in November — possibly by defeating Boudin, who has not ruled out another run. If Jenkins wins, she would appear on the same ballot as Breed in 2023, a race that could double as a referendum on the mayor’s public safety agenda.

“They’re not just somebody she’s appointed,” Ross said of Jenkins, who is now “in a lot of ways a running mate for [Breed] because her policies and their policies are going to have to align. She’s going to be held accountable.”

Peskin made a similar argument, warning that power and political peril are often intertwined.

“There’s risk and reward in this business. You break it, you buy it, right?

CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story misstated the period during which the population of street homeless decreased in San Francisco.