Gascón finds his moment in D.A.’s race in L.A.

Former San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón seemed on a daunting course last fall when he left to challenge his twoterm counterpart in Los Angeles as a progressive reformer. It’s never easy to engage a county of 10 million people on any issue, and police misconduct and racial inequities in the criminal justice system were hardly topofmind issues for most voters at the end of 2019.

Gascón had the additional barrier of a nearly full deck of establishment endorsements for incumbent Jackie Lacey, the first woman and first African American to hold the office. She ran unopposed for a second term in 2016.

Lacey fell just short of winning outright in the March 3 primary. She had 48.6% of the vote, with Gascón reaching the November runoff with 28.2%.

Then the world began to change in dramatic fashion.

The coronavirus pandemic began to burrow deep into the nation just as the final count was being tallied in late March. Shelterinplace orders put a halt to traditional inperson campaigning. It became an allconsuming matter for Americans — until George Floyd’s horrific May 25 killing by Minneapolis police jolted the nation into a reckoning about the ingrained disparities in the treatment of African Americans in everything from their experiences with police officers on the street to sentencing laws.

The protests in Los Angeles were among the largest and most intense. Suddenly, the issues that Gascón had been championing for years had come to the fore. Suddenly, Lacey’s record of failing to bring charges against officers who used deadly force — and the 22 death penalty convictions her office obtained, 21 of which were men of color — came under heightened scrutiny.

Suddenly, her highprofile endorsements began to evaporate, most notably Rep. Adam Schiff, DBurbank. Mayor Eric Garcetti, an early Lacey supporter, suggested he was reconsidering. “I’m looking closely at it,” he said.

I thought it was a perfect time to catch up with Gascón.

“Frankly, people that were not return

ing my calls weeks ago are calling me, and they want to help,” he said by phone Wednesday. “It’s all good because it was really about a movement ... a lot of people will recognize it started in San Francisco in 2011,” when he began his tenure as district attorney.

Gascón had always been a bit of an outlier among his fellow district attorneys and deeply loathed by the police unions who spend plenty to help seat prosecutors with a more traditional lockthemup world view. That is not Gascón, even though he had been assistant police chief in Los Angeles and chief in Mesa, Ariz., and San Francisco before becoming district attorney.

Gascón campaigned to abolish the death penalty (Proposition 34, 2012), cowrote an initiative to reduce an assortment of felonies to misdemeanors (Proposition 47, 2014) and was among the first prosecutors in the nation to expunge marijuana convictions after Californians voted to legalize it (Proposition 64, 2016). He has been a leader in the push to eliminate cash bail, arguing that a suspect’s release should instead be determined by his or her threat to public safety.

A new study by the Public Policy Institute of California suggested that Prop. 47 has contributed to a “notable but modest decrease” in racial disparities in arrests and bookings. Still, police unions throughout the state blame it for an increase in property crime — though PPIC researchers have not found an effect on violent crime — and are funding a November ballot measure to pare back that and other reform measures. One of the union’s objectives: to lower the threshold for a felony to a third theft offense to an item over $250 (instead of $950 under Prop. 47).

“What needs to be said is that the proposal coming up on the ballot in November will cost billions of dollars,” Gascón said. “So it’s not only going to break the system financially, but it’s going back to the old days of exacerbating racism in the system while not necessarily adding anything to public safety.”

Not surprisingly, the police union in Los Angeles has been targeting Gascón, who was born in Cuba, as soft on crime and a “white guy carpetbagger.” Lacey, whose campaign has received a sevenfigure boost from police unions, has rejected calls for the State Bar to ban such donations from district attorney races — which happens to be yet another issue that has been getting elevated attention in the current climate.

These reform issues — and their profound effect on racial disparities — are now in the forefront of talk from living rooms to the streets. For a district attorney’s race, a reform agenda has gone from tough sell to impossible to avoid.

“Unquestionably, police accountability is a centerpiece and has always been,” Gascón said. “But I think it’s important for those who are thinking about this space to understand that there are many complexities. It should be prosecutor accountability, it should be about racism in the system in general and the way people are prosecuted and the way people are shunted.”

I had to ask Gascón about campaigning in a pandemic. It’s definitely different, sometimes awkward and in some ways more efficient in a county of 4,751 square miles with epic traffic jams. He previously spent three or four hours on the road each day and attended three or four meetings. Now he does eight to 10 daily meetings from his house. The days of shaking countless hands and kissing babies may be gone for good.

“I think we need to find a much, much better balance,” he said. “Because it would be good for our environment, it could be good for family life for many people, especially young families who are raising kids,” he said. “I think there’s lessons that could be learned here.”

The lesson the political world will be looking for on Nov. 3 is whether Los Angeles is ready for change in what is being billed as the No. 1 test of the progressive prosecutor movement.