A solid beginning
It’s 2016, and look who’s back in the news: O. J. Simpson and his murder trial are the subjects of a popular TV series. And now there is the knife, supposedly dug up nearly 20 years ago on Simpson’s former property and f inally turned in this year by an ex- cop who had been keeping it in his private collection. The headlines summon memories of the so- called trial of the century and the 1990s, when the rap against the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office was that it couldn’t win the big cases and couldn’t match the sheer lawyering power wielded by wealthy celebrity defendants like Simpson.
It’s not just a different era but virtually a different world for current Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, who is soon to complete her first term and will run for reelection June 7 with no opponent — and as a consequence will win, without even the need for a campaign or a November runoff.
Voters will have other decisions to make on their ballots, but when they get to the D. A. box their only question will be whether to bother. The Times editorial board will make its endorsement later this spring, and naturally, with no options, there will be no suspense.
Lacey’s easy path to reelection is at least as much a function of political good fortune — for example, no high- profile celebrity acquittals, like Simpson’s — as it is a reflection on her performance during her first four years in office. The Times prepared midterm report cards for city and state officials and it is appropriate to now do the same for Lacey. The same is true for Supervisor Mark Ridley- Thomas, the other Los Angeles County elected official up for reelection this year, also without opposition, and The Times will be filing a report card for him in coming days.
For Lacey, the bottom line is that she has been a good district attorney. She has earned a solid B.
The rub is that Los Angeles County — with the state’s largest criminal caseload and a population greater than New York City’s and in fact greater than or equal to that of 43 states — deserves a Grade A district attorney. And it needs one especially now, in this time of wrenching change in the justice system, with the long- overdue focus on recidivism, rehabilitation and realignment, and with the nationwide reconsideration of policing and prosecutorial practices. It needs a leader who can sift through the arguments, the emotions and the ideas of the would- be reformers and their detractors and push forward worthy changes, hold the line against bad ones and — crucially — be the visible and vocal point person to publicly explain the difference.
Too often, Lacey drifts to the wrong side of the line that separates prudence from timidity, but it doesn’t have to be that way. She has demonstrated that she can be the trailblazer that L. A. needs, for example when she spearheaded the diversion of mentally ill defendants from jail to community treatment.
Her leadership on that issue was in some sense a surprise, because on entering office she set a fairly unambitious agenda that focused on important but hardly groundbreaking programs such as fighting elder abuse and cyber- crime. She updated her office’s mission statement. She did some rebranding.
But when she saw the folly of continuing to cycle mentally ill defendants and convicts in and out of jail and the openness ( albeit reluctance) of county supervisors to treating inmates as patients, in community clinics rather than jails, in order to free up needed cell space and better protect the public ( by offering real treatment and making recidivism less likely) she came into her own as a district attorney. She led. The county now has an Office of Diversion and Reentry, and is rolling out programs, because Lacey stepped up.
Likewise, she established a conviction review unit to actively look into claims by people her predecessors or even her own prosecutors had sent to prison that they had been falsely convicted. It’s not the first such unit in the nation or even the state, but being part of the huge and inf luential Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office makes it a big deal and potentially a model for other offices.
She did her part to implement the program known as realignment, which gives counties responsibility for many convicted felons who until 2011 would have come under the purview of the state. That’s especially noteworthy because as a candidate she labeled realignment “a terrible mistake.” She was wrong — the program did not drive up crime rates. But since being elected, she has helped to make realignment work in Los Angeles County by instructing her somewhat resistant team of 1,000 prosecutors to seek “split sentences,” in which offenders who leave jail are subject to a period of oversight and assistance in safely and successfully returning to society.
If only she would show that same kind of vision and courage when it comes to other programs, like bail reform. Or like Proposition 47, the 2014 initiative that converts drug possession and several other nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors — which can help the state make smarter use of its criminal justice and incarceration resources by not clogging jails with people more effectively handled through alternative programs. Perhaps the measure’s supporters, such as The Times’ editorial board, ought to be pleased that Lacey took no official position, instead of vocally opposing it as most of the state’s other district attorneys did. Perhaps her neutrality was, for her, politically prudent. But it was not a demonstration of leadership, and it did not make use of the pulpit she possesses as chief of the state’s largest prosecutorial office. Today, when residents question whether the initiative has increased crime and whether it is properly being implemented, she is the official they should be able to look to for answers.
There is also the difficult issue of police shootings and other disputed uses of force by law enforcement officers, and the district attorney’s role in making sure not only that justice is done in those cases but that it is explained. Her decisions not to file charges in some high- profile cases ( she has indeed filed in others) often appear baffling. She responds that no one, whether a civilian or an officer, should be prosecuted if charges cannot be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. And she argues that her job is merely to decide whether to bring criminal charges, and it is up to police and courts to decide whether any given police practice is otherwise satisfactory. That may be true — but if she is not the one official to critique the entirety of the process, who is?
Her reluctance to take on a higher public profile is a somewhat puzzling contradiction, because she grants an unusual and welcome degree of access to advocates and community groups with ideas to share or concerns to express, including concerns about police shootings. There is no doubt some political risk in being more widely visible, but it is a risk that a leader takes on.
Questions have arisen as to whether any district attorney is necessarily too close to police to ever be entrusted with prosecuting them. So in one sense, Lacey’s task may not be that different after all from the one prosecutors faced in the O. J. Simpson era. She must constantly be ready to answer the questions: Is justice for all possible? Is it merely a function of power and inf luence? Is it a function of race? Do police lie, and do prosecutors cover for them?
Lacey must decide whether she is going to be a truly forward- leaning D. A., like those in San Francisco and Santa Clara counties, or a backward- looking one like most of the others — or simply a solid but too- cautious and too- quiet one, as she has sometimes been so far. That’s her challenge. Let’s have faith — or hope, at least — that her first term was a warm- up and that in her second she will be ready to earn her A.