DA is doing what he was elected to do
When a political candidate running on a brazenly reformist platform easily gains election, why be surprised when he begins to institute reforms once in office?
Yet that’s precisely the book establishment some Los Angeles prosecutors are throwing at new District Attorney George Gascón: You’re doing what you said you would do! Stop it! We liked Three Strikes, liked “sentencing enhancements,” liked mass incarceration! Plus they have been adding an additional charge: As you staff up your office, you’re hiring people who agree with you!
Gascón has placed public defenders in leadership roles in the department, for instance, along with the expected prosecutors. Here’s how a recent Los Angeles Times profile of his executive team paraphrases the DA’s managerial philosophy: “Building a justice system focused on rehabilitation, rather than punishment, requires the counsel of those who have seen clients’ lives ruined by excessively punitive sentences, he says.”
Which, again, is how Gascón got elected in November, backed by 53.5% of the voters in Los Angeles County to longtime former DA Jackie Lacey’s 46.5%. It wasn’t a case of good vs. evil; Lacey was the right leader of her department in her time. But times have changed. Voters in the county are tired of philosophies of justice being dictated by the economic interests of police unions and deputy district attorneys associations. Here was Gascón’s campaign promise last fall: “I will make our neighborhoods safer, hold police accountable to the communities they serve and reform our justice system so it works for everyone. I have reduced violent crime in every leadership position I’ve held while pioneering reforms to reduce racial disparities and end mass incarceration.”
Now that he has asked all county law enforcement agencies to provide the names of officers and deputies with records of misconduct that might hurt their ability to testify in court, Gascón — long an LAPD officer himself — won’t gain new friends in uniform. That’s not his job.
It’s one thing to seriously critique particular policies of Gascón. It’s another to act like he wasn’t just elected on a reformist platform. His charge from voters was to humanize the justice system, and that’s what he’s doing.