Unapologetic D.A. stands his ground
It’s not easy being George Gascón. The powerful San Francisco Police Officers Association routinely attacks the city district attorney for undercutting the Police Department with his criminal justice reform policies. Meanwhile, community activists charge that the D.A.’s political ambition has made him overly cautious when it comes to filing charges in highly charged police shooting cases and City Hall scandals.
Gascón has occupied the prosecutor’s office at the Hall of Justice for the past six years, an often unpleasant job made all the more so by the excrement that sometimes drizzles from the county jail bathrooms above. But nothing compares to the you-know-what-storm prompted by Gascón initiatives like the blue-ribbon panel on “transparency, accountability and fairness” that he created in 2015 to impose more oversight on the Police Department, after the uproar over San Francisco cops’ racist and homophobic
text messages. Or the D.A.’s leading role in last year’s losing Proposition 34 campaign, the anti-death-penalty measure that pitted Gascón against every police organization in the state.
If Gascón, who grew up in a poor Cuban immigrant family in Los Angeles County, was viewed as an outsider when he was hired as San Francisco police chief in 2009, he has become the Police Officers Association’s public enemy No. 1 as D.A. That’s why he finds it ludicrous when progressives accuse him of bending to police pressure by not moving more swiftly on the controversial shooting cases. “Listen to me for a minute,” he told me heatedly as he sat in his office last week. “Who has the POA targeted in every issue of their magazine? Actually I call it a rag, not a magazine. When I was running for a second term, every single person in my office got a letter from the POA, saying basically you should figure out a way to throw this guy out of office. They go out and make some bull— video about me making some racial remarks. Does it appear that I’ve been intimidated by the POA? Give me a break.”
And yet, outside the Hall of Justice each Friday, a group of grieving mothers and their supporters demands a day of reckoning for the San Francisco police officers who took the lives of their children. Public Defender Jeff Adachi joined the protest on Jan. 5, telling the news media that Gascón has taken far too long to decide whether to bring charges against the cops involved in the fatal shootings of Amilcar Perez-Lopez, Mario Woods, Luis Gongora, Jessica Williams and others.
“It’s been almost two years since Perez-Lopez was killed, and over a year since Woods was shot — and yet these investigations just drag on and on,” Adachi told me. “If you and I had been filmed shooting Mario Woods the way the police did, we would’ve been prosecuted in a hot second. There’s a double standard at work here. D.A.s have to work closely with the police, so in general they don’t want to charge officers because it undermines their relationship with the force.
“At the beginning, I told the families of Amilcar and Mario that I was hopeful there would be charges, because the evidence was strong. But now it seems clear the district attorney is not going to charge these officers — so why string these families along?”
It’s easy for defense attorneys to criticize a prosecutor’s slow and deliberate pace, Gascón responded, but he has to meet a higher burden of proof when assembling a case. “As a prosecutor you’re building something brick by brick by brick. And that requires time and engineering. As a defender, you just take a sledgehammer and try to break everything up.”
Gascón said that he lacked the staff to conduct proper investigations of police shooting cases until he received additional funding from the mayor last year. Previously, the prosecutor’s office was dependent on the Police Department itself to take the lead on these cases. But his new 14-member unit, which he is still assembling, now gives him the expertise to conduct independent investigations, the D.A. said.
Gascón is finally able to reveal when he will make a decision on the four most controversial deadly force cases. In the case of Perez-Lopez, he said, the decision will come “sometime before the end of February … and I think (the decision about) Mario Woods will come shortly after that. I’m about 90 percent sure that Woods, Williams and Lopez-Perez will all be completed before the summer. Gongora will be a little longer because we only have so much bandwidth.”
Gascón said he knows that “no matter what decision I make, I will have 50 percent of the people against me.” Like I said, it’s not easy being George Gascón.
But it’s even harder being a mother like Gwen Woods. Gascón recently agreed to sit down and speak with the mother of Mario Woods, the 26-year-old man who was shot more than 20 times as he was walking away from the half-dozen cops who surrounded him. “Every person who’s gone through what I have has the right to look the man in the authority in the eye,” she told me. “I asked him, ‘Did you watch the video? Do you think it was right what they did to my son?’ And he said, ‘No, it was wrong.’ ”
Gascón confirmed her account. “I told her no, I don’t think it was right. I think the shooting should not have occurred. But what I also told the mom is that there’s a difference between whether I think something should have occurred or not and whether it’s a legally prosecutable case.”
And so Gascón will soon be taking positions on cases so politically and emotionally charged that his decisions could tear apart the city. He knows it confers a terrible responsibility on him. If he were as politically calculating as his critics allege he is, said the D.A., he’s “an idiot” for taking on this job.
But Gascón’s woes are not Gwen Woods’ concern. She thinks only of finding some measure of justice for her late son. “It was just Mario and me. He was my baby, the reason I got up in the morning to go to work. They took that all away when they said his life wasn’t worth living.
“One day Mario asked me, ‘What do you think of this guy Stalin.’ He asked those kind of questions all the time; he was a funny kid. He told me, ‘I read where Stalin said if a man wasn’t contributing to society then he deserved to die.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Mario, I don’t believe that. Nobody has the right to tell you that. God has a plan for everyone.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I agree, Mom.’
“I keep thinking of that conversation. It was so easy for the police to decide that he should die that day.”
San Francisco has become such a cold and callous city, she said — particularly for young African Americans like her son and for Latinos, even if they were born here. “If you can’t keep up, get out of the way.” Mario wasn’t perfect, she said, but he deserved his day in court. “You shouldn’t be judged and executed on a street corner.”