You know those anti-George Gascón mailers that show the Los Angeles district attorney sporting cool, movie-star sunglasses — perhaps overly cool for the person you want to be your DA?
Yeah, those shades aren’t any reason to vote against Gascón in his bid for reelection.
You know the fact that so many of his prosecutors are obviously willing to bad-mouth their boss, forever saying that they should be the DA instead, that they and only they know how to put the bad guys in the slammer?
Well, just imagine being the nominal chief executive of an office in which the nearly 1,000 deputy district attorneys who nominally work for you are so entirely unioned up, so fully protected as “civil servants,” that they can essentially say anything they want about you and run zero risk of being fired.
George Gascón, who I’m voting for March 5 for a second term as L.A. DA, is being painted by the wily opponents and the nutball extremists as somehow soft on crime. The nice thing about being able to spread the truth is that his brilliant career has been precisely the opposite: serving his country and then putting crooks behind bars.
That career began as a soldier in the United States Army, which he joined at 18 after growing up here in working-class Bell, and was promoted to sergeant. He came home from the service to graduate from Cal State Long Beach, and then immediately became a Los Angeles police officer, working his way up to become deputy chief of the LAPD. New Chief William Bratton appointed him as his assistant chief, overseeing all of the LAPD’s daily operations. That sound soft on crime to you? Think you get promoted up that tough police department’s ranks by being pro-lawbreaker? He became chief of police in Mesa, Arizona. He was a Republican before being appointed chief of police in San Francisco and then district attorney there, changing his registration after moving because — well, you would, too, to survive in San Francisco.
And, yes, after all these years in law enforcement, Gascón became a proponent of justice system reform. He’d seen plenty of heads get knocked by fellow cops and plenty of tough talk from fellow prosecutors, and it wasn’t doing any good. It was doing bad, in fact.
So he came back to L.A. and properly won the district attorney’s race here four years ago at a time when most of us were coming to realize that putting 16-year-olds in the Big House alongside monsters wasn’t doing us or the 16-year-olds any good.
Now, as the incumbent, he’s being challenged by a large field of prosecutors and judges who say, to paint with a rather broad brush, “Reform? Nah. Let’s go back to busting heads.”
One of them claims crime has gotten so bad that she said in a debate that on a scale of 1 to 10 she ranks her feeling of safety when she walks the L.A, streets as 0. She walks really different streets than I do. Crime is down. But perception rules. And, much as I like him personally and for the work he has done, Gascón hasn’t been a great communicator with his troops or with the public.
“The reality is that if you have a feeling of insecurity, it doesn’t matter if I show you that crime is way down in comparison to 10 or 20 years ago,” Gascón has said. “I learned that the hard way quite frankly in the last year or so. I have to learn how to deal on an emotional level with people more than I have in the past, and I have to meet people where they’re at. To that end, I know that I have to improve the way I communicate.”
We talked with the DA in January, and I asked him about his opponents within his office.
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“There are multiple components to this,” he said. “A substantial number of people are very invested in keeping the old administration and the old style of doing things. In their work against me, the union had to raise their dues twice and now a third time — they spend it on the campaign against me, on recalls, on lawsuits. But … we are seeing cracks” in the internal opposition. “We gave tests for DA 4,” a step up for junior prosecutors. “and the union told people not to take the exam, and over 300 people took the exam. The union refused my offer to give raises to many of our attorneys,” because they didn’t want him to have that victory.
The negative campaigns against the DA are about style, not substance. For those who believe Prop. 47 reclassifying the felony threshold for theft is such a disaster — more than 30 states, Texas included, have higher thresholds. Recidivism is down in recent years; so is violent crime. These flashy, terrifying smash-and-grabs robberies understandably get headlines, signs of a sick society — and have nothing to do with Prop. 47.
George Gascón could tell his story better. But we’ll have an ultimately safer, more equitable L.A. if he is reelected.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com