It’s time again for D.A. Tuesday — the day we take a close look at one of the four candidates for San Francisco district attorney. This week, it’s Suzy Loftus.

Voters in November will choose the city’s next top prosecutor — and for the first time in more than a century, they won’t have the incumbent as an option. District Attorney George Gascón last year announced he wouldn’t seek re-election here, though he is eyeing jumping into the race in Los Angeles.

That means the field is wide open, but Loftus has the inside track because of name recognition, her San Francisco roots, and endorsements from a host of big names including U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, Mayor London Breed, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and State Sen. Scott Wiener.

Loftus is a 45-year-old lawyer in the sheriff’s office who previously worked as an attorney under Harris in the district attorney’s office and state attorney general’s office. She also served on the Police Commission. Loftus joked that it added up to a 15-year graduate level course in the “dysfunction of the criminal justice system.”

“We need someone who is grounded in San Francisco, cares about this community and is more committed to solving problems than making excuses,” she said.

Loftus said that of all the candidates, her proposals are most focused on the communities affected by crime and including them in prosecuting it. She said her wealth of experience and deep ties to the city also set her apart.

“It’s about who can execute on these ideas,” she said.

Gascón’s office said it won’t comment on the race.

Loftus lives in the Outer Sunset with her husband, Tom Loftus, who works for San Francisco Government TV, and their three daughters: Maureen, 14; Vivienne, 12; and Grace, 10. The family also lives with Loftus’ mother, Maureen Roche, who immigrated to the U.S. from England by herself when she was 19.

“She’s the best American that I know, and she wasn’t born here,” Loftus said. “She raised my sister and I in San Francisco to be very civic-minded, to care about the community and to stand up for folks.”

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Loftus. To listen to the entire interview, check out the latest episode of our San Francisco City Insider podcast at www.sfchronicle.com/insider.

On the city’s broken criminal justice system: Loftus has been campaigning for a year and said people across the city are disappointed by the finger pointing and shoulder shrugging of all branches of the criminal justice system. She said that from police officers who won’t take a car-break-in report to families feeling unsafe walking to BART, “People don’t feel like their experience matters. ... We have a system that across the board has stopped thinking it needs to work for the people who live here.”

Loftus said the recent assault of a woman near the Embarcadero by a man who said he was trying to save her from robots was a good example — and was “a system failure on multiple levels.”

“We got to watch this woman fight for her life in a way that was so shocking and terrifying,” Loftus said of the security camera footage that captured the crime. She said it’s hard to believe that nobody in the neighborhood knew about Austin Vincent, the homeless man charged with the assault, and that no city agency was aware of him.

“He shouldn’t have been able to be in that level of distress and then cause that violence,” Loftus said.

At Vincent’s arraignment, the judge initially released him, later saying she hadn’t been aware of the video of the assault. Loftus said she read the transcript and it was clear the prosecutor didn’t try very hard to persuade the judge to keep the defendant behind bars. He made no reference to the video and downplayed the woman’s injuries.

“As the prosecutor, it’s your job to stand up for the community and to articulate the danger of that person being released,” she said, noting that the new prosecutor should have had a supervisor with him. “I want to run a world-class law office with great prosecutors who are well trained and have the support they need to do what is a very difficult job.”

On untreated mental illness in San Francisco: Loftus said it’s “a real problem” that our jails are the largest providers of mental health services in San Francisco, despite the city’s whopping $12.3 billion annual budget.

“What we’re essentially saying is we’re going to wait until you pick up a felony, and then we’re going to get you your psych meds,” she said.

She said it was a mistake to slash the number of beds for severely mentally ill people during the recession, not restore them during the economic boom, and then “clutch our pearls and be shocked” by the results on our sidewalks.

Loftus believes the city needs to invest far more in community-based mental health treatment that’s available when people start getting sick instead of waiting until they deteriorate to the point where they might commit crimes. She also supports expanding the city’s conservatorship program to compel people into mental health treatment if they’re too sick to voluntarily accept it.

On open-air drug dealing in the Tenderloin: Loftus said she supports Supervisor Matt Haney’s call for a task force to study the problem. She also supports arresting drug dealers and then bringing them before a community panel of neighborhood residents to hear about the impact of the crime.

“I think that would be really important to people in the Tenderloin, being heard,” she said, adding dealers could then choose the traditional path of being charged with a felony and being put on probation or opt for a city-provided job or apprenticeship.

“What San Franciscans want is to try something different that might be more effective,” she said. “We can’t keep going with the same approach.”

For drug users, Loftus supports safe injection sites and treatment for anybody who requests it. She also supports police bringing those using drugs on our sidewalks to the Adult Probation Department’s Community Assessment Service Center, which offers a host of resources, including substance abuse treatment. The district attorney wouldn’t have a big role in making those changes but Loftus pointed to her experience as chief operating officer for the Center for Youth Wellness in the Bayview as proof she can collaborate with health officials on these issues.

“I’m the only person in the race who has worked in public health,” she said. “Where there’s crossover, we’ve got to be able to work more effectively.”

On this year’s rash of pedestrian deaths: As a member of the Police Commission, Loftus was a backer of the city’s Vision Zero plan to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024. But this year has seen a big uptick in deaths on our streets — and one of them was Madlen Koteva, a 14-year-old soccer teammate of her daughter’s.

Loftus said the city needs to treat any traffic fatality “with the same level of scrutiny” as any other homicide.

“This hit home personally to me this year, in losing a bright light of a child on my daughter’s soccer team,” Loftus said. “One of the jobs of the district attorney is to name and make sure we’re addressing the biggest public safety threats — and what is happening on our streets is just that.”

D.A. Tuesday concludes next week with Chesa Boudin, a public defender who’s the most progressive candidate in the race.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf