Column: Gascón, ousted as L.A. County top prosecutor, was his own worst enemy

Nov. 17, 2024 3 AM PT

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón’s election defeat was one more reminder that despite what those of us in progressive states say we want (criminal justice reform), our feelings about crime and safety rule our decisions at the ballot box.

I was sorry that Gascón lost to Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who ran as a Republican for California attorney general in 2022, and has promised to undo most of Gascón’s reforms. But I wasn’t surprised.

“I had people calling me two months after Gascón won asking, ‘Why is crime going up?’ He hadn’t even gotten into office yet,” civil rights attorney Connie Rice told me Thursday. “That’s irrational, and they blamed him for COVID policies that the Superior Court set that emptied out low-level offenders [from jail].”

Had Gascón moved more slowly, explained himself more clearly and allayed the fears of his critics, I think he might have had a successful tenure.

But he moved too fast, announcing leniency measures and an end to cash bail his first day in office, broke too much furniture and alienated the very people he needed to woo — his own prosecutors.

“He was trying to get rid of the extremes of mass incarceration but didn’t tell the stories of those extremes,” said Rice. “He didn’t come in and say, ‘Anyone who needs to be charged for a violent third strike will be charged, but what I am going to do is end the railroading of young people into pleading guilty and sending them to prison.’”

In a sense, Gascón made the same mistake that President-elect Donald Trump is making right now: assuming that voters gave him an unassailable mandate to blow up the status quo, and that they would stay with him when the going got tough.

Los Angeles County voters chose Gascón months after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer and Black Lives Matter protests swept the country.

Emotions about systemic racism and disproportionate punishment were running high, building on the reformist tide that swept Chesa Boudin into office as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2019 and then swept Gascón into office in L.A. County.

Boudin barely lasted two years before he was recalled. Gascón survived two recall attempts, but in the end, both fell victim to voters’ perceptions about crime, not the reality.

“Gascón, like Chesa and others, were deeply motivated by justice and fixing wrongs,” said filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who produced and directed a 2023 documentary about Boudin, “Beyond Bars.” “They were not dedicated to, nor proficient in, the messaging about what they were doing and how they were doing it and why it would make people safer. Driven by a moral compass, rather than political calculation, they moved as quickly as possible, not as carefully as possible.”

The antagonism toward Gascón that I heard from many of my neighbors was the same sort of anger I heard them express toward former Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, whom they could not forgive for treating our “unhoused neighbors” as his constituents, too.

The homeless encampments that proliferated all over the city and especially in Venice during the pandemic, and Bonin’s principled stand that housing was the answer to homelessness, were too much for voters who just wanted an end to the chaos.

“His changes were not that radical,” Rice said of Gascón. “I thought he could have made some allies and taken a more deliberate pace, and explained to the public. Those smash-and-grab robberies, when the targets are rich people, the panic goes through the roof.”

The outcome of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s race is a good example of how California voters swing between extremes when it comes to issues of criminal justice.

In 1994, California voters enacted the misbegotten law colloquially known as “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” which mandated 25-years-to-life sentences for anyone convicted of a felony with two prior serious or violent convictions.

That resulted, Rice told me, in life sentences for a man with two prior convictions for check kiting fraud who stole a box of Morton’s steaks, for a man who stole six Disney tapes so he could visit his daughter at a Motel 6 and have something to watch with her, and for a man who stole a bicycle lock.

Perhaps the most famous example of the law backfiring was the preposterous 25-years-to-life sentence given to a man who stole a slice of pepperoni pizza from some kids near the Redondo Beach Pier.

Eighteen years later, in 2012, voters passed Proposition 36, which softened the law, requiring that all three strikes be serious or violent.

In 2014, voters passed Proposition 47, a sentencing reform measure aimed at reducing the number of people in California’s dangerously overcrowded prisons. It reduced six nonviolent crimes — including drug possession and theft of amounts under $950 — from felonies to misdemeanors. Although state data show no significant increase in reports of shoplifting or theft overall, police are less likely to make arrests. This is a policing problem, not a prosecution problem, though voters apparently did not see it that way.

The backlash against Proposition 47 triumphed this month when voters passed a new Proposition 36, which will increase penalties for several drug and theft crimes. Critics of the measure claim — and I believe them — that it will drive up state prison costs, cut funding for behavioral health treatment and could increase homelessness.

So here we are. Two steps forward, one step back, pushed and pulled by our conflicting emotions about crime and safety and fairness.

We want to redress the terrible policies that lead to mass incarceration, but we are appalled the local drugstore is locking up our safety razors and deodorants. And shamefully, we can’t make up our minds which is worse.

Bluesky: @rabcarian.blsky.social

Column: George Gascón, ousted as L.A. County’s top prosecutor, was his own worst enemy

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