With just over five weeks to go before Election Day, the two candidates for Los Angeles District Attorney took to the stage Sunday, Sept. 29, to make their case why voters should elect them to oversee the nation’s largest local prosecutorial office for the next four years.
Incumbent George Gascón, who’s seeking a second term, and former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman sparred during an hour-long debate over topics ranging from combating violent crimes and Proposition 36 to free speech and minors who commit crimes.
It was the candidates’ second debate this month, with at least two more planned in October.
Unlike their Sept. 11 debate on Zoom, Sunday’s showdown had candidates going head-to-head in person, but they repeated many of the same talking points.
A Democrat who swept into office in 2020 on a progressive agenda, Gascón tried to align Hochman – who until last year was a registered Republican but is now running with no party preference – with former President Donald Trump. As Gascón did in the earlier debate, he called his opponent a “fearmonger” who is “full of half truths (and) lies.”
Hochman, running on a tougher-on-crime platform, doubled down on painting Gascón as having policies that are too soft on criminals. Hochman said Gascón has been “one of the greatest gifts for gangs” and accused Gascón of allowing some people who committed wrongdoings of getting away scot-free.
“I’m running for my family and all the families who are fed up of living in a community with rampant crime. … I’m running for parents who are trying to teach their kids that actions, like stealing, have consequences,” Hochman said. “I am running for store owners who watch helplessly as thieves routinely steal from their stores. I’m running for victims and victim families who want to have the D.A. be a champion for them again.”
Gascón criticized Hochman’s vision for the D.A.’s Office as taking “us back to the failed tough-on-crime policies I witnessed firsthand when I was a police officer.” He compared that to his own vision, “based on both hope and a passion for fairness and equity and a firm commitment to protecting all of our communities.”
Latest poll numbers
On Monday, Sept. 30, USC, Cal Poly Pomona and Cal State Long Beach released new poll results showing that out of 311 likely voters in L.A. County, 44.4% said they would vote for Hochman while 20.3% said they would vote for Gascón. About a third of the respondents were undecided.
The poll was conducted between Sept. 12 and 25 and the results about the L.A. District Attorney race had a margin of error of 5.6 percentage points.
“Nathan Hochman has taken a decisive lead over George Gascón outside the margin of error of the poll,” Christian Grose, a professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said in a news release. “Gascón is stuck in the 20s in the poll, which is pretty similar to the primary vote he received in March. … Gascón’s remaining hope is the large percentage of undecided voters.”
Grose also said the poll showed that voters are concerned about crime and that voters with crime concerns are more likely to choose Hochman.
The latest poll results are similar to another poll that came out in August. The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies/Los Angeles Times poll, conducted between July 31 and Aug. 11, had 45% of likely voters saying they would vote for Hochman while 20% named Gascón. Thirty-five percent were undecided.
The two polls suggest that Hochman may be gaining ground after coming in second to Gascón in the primary election. Gascón was the top vote-getter in the March primary, capturing 25.2% in a crowded field of 12 candidates. Hochman received 15.9% of the vote back then.
Violent crimes
During Sunday’s debate, ABC7’s Marc Brown said data from the California Department of Justice showed violent crimes – including homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults – went up 8.5% in Los Angeles County from 2019 to 2023. During the same period, the same crime categories reported by the Los Angeles Police Department showed a 5.6% increase in the City of Los Angeles.
The candidates were asked what they plan to do to address the increasing violence.
Gascón challenged some of the statistics presented, saying violent crime, including homicide, is down, though fear in the community is up. He acknowledged that some property crimes like car thefts have increased.
He said the D.A.’s Office under him has prosecuted serious and violent crime cases at rates comparable to before he took office. He said his office has addressed organized retail theft and has been “very aggressive” on hate crimes, human trafficking and waste theft.
“My ironclad promise has always been and will continue to be that I will do everything that I can in order to keep our communities safe,” he said.
Hochman, as in the first debate, accused Gascón of ignoring statistics from the state Department of Justice that include crime numbers for all 88 cities in L.A. County. Instead, he said Gascón talked about certain crime trends only for the city of L.A.
Hochman said he’d consider each case individually, taking into account a person’s criminal history, the crime committed and the impact on the victim before deciding if someone should serve jail time or if they should be ordered to perform community service, pay restitution or enter into a diversion program to treat their drug addiction.
Hochman criticized Gascón’s current policies as “extreme decarceration,” saying criminals aren’t prosecuted to the full extent allowed by law and that the D.A.’s policies allow criminals to leave jail or prison early.
What the candidates said about other issues:
On Proposition 36, which is on the Nov. 5 ballot to reclassify some retail thefts committed by repeat offenders or drug dealings as felonies and not just misdemeanors: Hochman supports the proposition while Gascón opposes it. (Gascón co-authored Proposition 47 a decade ago, which reduced some felonies to misdemeanors. Prop. 36 would undo some of that.)
On the Israel-Palestine conflict and balancing free speech on college campuses with students’ safety and ability to get to classes, following the chaos at USC and UCLA this past spring: Hochman said he respects the First Amendment but if someone shuts down a freeway or LAX, or vandalizes a campus, there will be consequences, including jail time. The D.A. should make that clear yet Gascón was silent last spring, Hochman said.
Gascón said Hochman was “disconnected” from reality. He said his office has prosecuted misdemeanors resulting from campus protests in cities where the D.A.’s Office has jurisdiction. But in the city of L.A. where USC and UCLA are located, it’s the city of L.A.’s city attorney who handles misdemeanor cases, not the D.A.’s Office, he said.
On crimes involving juveniles: Hochman said there should be consequences for minors. That doesn’t mean mass incarceration, he said, but it could mean ordering a juvenile to perform community service, pay restitution or enter into a drug treatment program. The important thing, he said, is that children learn there are consequences to their actions.
Gascón said there are cases where juveniles are prosecuted. But even when they’re not prosecuted, he maintained that there are no free passes. Rather, education or diversion programs may be recommended for the minor.
Candidates’ Republican past
While the candidates were asked a number of policy questions, the answers sometimes meandered into politics.
Although the D.A. is a nonpartisan office, Gascón on Sunday went after Hochman for being previously registered as a Republican, as he did in the first candidates forum.
About 40 minutes into the debate, while accusing Hochman of misstating facts, Gascón invoked the image of Trump falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating cats and dogs.
“I think this is the ‘Haitians eating pets’ – same approach here,” Gascón said. (In an interview after the debate, Gascón accused Hochman of name-calling and fearmongering and said “his behavior certainly seems to be very similar to Mr. Trump and other Republicans at the moment.”)
During the debate, Hochman said he was a Democrat for 20 years before becoming a Republican for 20 years and that he’s now running as an independent because he intends to run the D.A.’s Office independent of politics.
“What (Gascón) isn’t telling people … is that he’s been Republican in his life almost twice as long as I have, and I’ve been a Democrat in my life almost twice as long as he has,” said Hochman, saying this shows the irrelevancy of party affiliation in this role.
In an interview after the debate, Gascón said he grew up in a Republican household and that it’s common for people to register for the same party as their parents. He said he “increasingly became very uncomfortable” with the direction the Republican party was taking the country and switched to Democrat about 14 years ago.
Gascón then took a shot at his opponent for being a Republican much more recently than him.
“He ran as a Republican for (state) attorney general (in 2022) – after Trump ran in 2016, after Jan. 6 when people tried to overthrow democracy, after the Supreme Court (overturned) Roe v. Wade. He continued to run as a Republican,” Gascón said.
Hochman, in a separate interview, said Gascón is desperately trying to distract voters from focusing on policies by making the D.A.’s race be about a “Democrat v. former Republican” and painting him as a conservative Republican when, Hochman said, he considers himself a centrist who is pro-choice and supports LGBTQ+ rights.
Hochman said he did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020 and plans to vote for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, in November.
Sunday’s event was hosted by KABC Channel 7 and was co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles and the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles County, in partnership with Univision Los Angeles.
Gascón and Hochman are set to debate again on Tuesday, Oct. 8. That debate, scheduled for 5 to 6 p.m., will be hosted by KNX News and the Los Angeles Times. It will air on KNX News (97.1 FM & 1070 AM) and on the Los Angeles Times’ YouTube channel.
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