A ROUTINE ADDRESS from Santa Clara County’s top prosecutor became a dark vision of potential injustice across Silicon Valley’s criminal landscape.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen — during his annual State of the Office speech on Tuesday — warned of threats to public safety as a $470 million county budget deficit will require his office to make “unprecedented” layoffs and department funding cuts. Rosen indicated services such as gun buybacks, collaborative mental health and drug courts and domestic violence services could be on the chopping block or severely affected.
Rosen has historically clashed with the Board of Supervisors for asking him to cut his office’s spending while expanding investments in assets like the county hospital system. At various points during his speech, Rosen posed philosophical questions about the price of a crime survivor’s life while supervisors looked on from the audience.
“If you had to put a dollar figure on it, how much is a domestic violence victim’s life worth in Santa Clara County?” Rosen said in his speech. “Public safety costs money. Justice is expensive. Money is finite. There is less money. And so, there will be less justice. Please listen carefully: there will be less safety.”
It remains to be seen how the cuts will shake out. Supervisors are expected to vote on next fiscal year’s budget in June. For the current fiscal year, they approved a $185 million net appropriation for Rosen’s office — up from $177 million the prior year. That’s despite Rosen’s staffing projections trending downward, from 672 in 2024 to 660 in 2025 to 645 this year, according to county documents.
The District Attorney’s Office has more than twice the funding as the Public Defender’s Office, which provides criminal defense attorneys for Silicon Valley’s poor and indigent residents. Supervisors approved a $90 million net appropriation for the public defender’s office this fiscal year, according to county budget documents. The public defender’s office took another hit of 10 slashed positions after this month’s mid-year budget update.
“I am confident that justice and public safety is a top priority for our board of supervisors, and even as they face difficult budget decisions they will continue to invest to ensure the criminal legal system delivers fair outcomes and works for all communities,” Public Defender Damon Silver told San José Spotlight. “It’s both moral and makes fiscal sense.”
What could be lost
Rosen touted a number of achievements by his prosecutors that he warned might not be possible under a drastically reduced budget. He pointed to one prosecutor on his team assigned to domestic violence cases, Rachel Westcoat, who achieved a guilty verdict despite the victim refusing to testify in court. He said his office’s team that handles sexual assault cases conducted a record 42 jury trials last year, with a more than 90% conviction rate. His office last year also secured what’s believed to be the first conviction of a transgender domestic violence homicide in the county’s history, when a man was sentenced 15 years to life for the murder of 24-year-old drag performer Natalia Smüt Lopez in 2021.
“How much was Natalia Lopez’s life worth?” Rosen said, with Lopez’s family watching from the audience.
He added the cuts he’s expected to make will have tangible, negative and even “dire” consequences for the public safety of every county resident.
“Will people get hurt? Will they be killed? Will criminals go free? I don’t know. Hyperbole is not what’s needed,” Rosen said. “What’s needed is a clear-headed analysis of what this community wants and what it needs. This is my analysis in one sentence: None of Santa Clara County’s amenities — parks, pools, schools, roads, sewers and hospitals — are worth a dollar if the people who live here are not safe from crime.”
“Will people get hurt? Will they be killed? Will criminals go free? … This is my analysis in one sentence: None of Santa Clara County’s amenities … are worth a dollar if the people who live here are not safe from crime.”
District Attorney Jeff Rosen
Recent years have especially strained Rosen’s relationship with the Board of Supervisors. Last year, county leaders successfully asked voters to approve a five-eighths-cent sales tax increase to protect their public hospital system — now Northern California’s second largest — from unprecedented federal spending cuts. Rosen endorsed the measure only after saying he gained assurances his department would see some of the $330 million revenue. County Executive James Williams later publicly stated his plan to recommend the full allocation of the money to the hospitals — prompting Rosen to publicly threaten an investigation.
“Are we better than other county employees? No. Of course not. All public servants have my respect and admiration,” Rosen said. “But these are objective financial decisions with real world effects. I think we should all be looking at the consequences as we make these decisions.”
District 4 Supervisor Susan Ellenberg said every county department will have to make tough choices this year.
“I hope that the district attorney, like all of our department heads, will find ways to create systems of prioritization that allows him to continue doing most of the vital work of his office,” Ellenberg told San José Spotlight. “None of us this year will be able to do all the things we want to do and truthfully we will all be a little worse off for it.”
Contact Brandon Pho at brandon@sanjosespotlight.com or @brandonphooo on X.
This story originally appeared in San Jose Spotlight.