⏩ Joe Garofoli: How Bonta’s ideals will shape race in 2022.
Kamala Harris used to refer to herself as California’s “top cop” when she was the state’s attorney general. The current, more progressive Attorney General Rob Bonta prefers a different framing: He calls himself “the people’s attorney.”
He looks at his job as being the protector of the little person — or as Bonta describes it in his rapid patter, “our most vulnerable, voiceless, hurt, harmed, abused, mistreated, cast aside, forgotten.”
But some of that framing — and the issues Bonta supports, such as tougher oversight of the police — will be fodder for his conservative opponents. Bonta was appointed to the job by Gov. Gavin Newsom in
March after President Biden tapped previous Attorney General Xavier Becerra to join the administration as head of Health and Human Services. He faces an election in November 2022 to win the office in his own right.
Rivals are already raising big money against him for next
year’s race and seeking to cast him as a clone of two progressive district attorneys now facing recall threats: San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles’ George Gascón.
“Rob Bonta is a supporter of George Gascón and Chesa Boudin, and their philosophies in their district are, ‘Don’t put people in jail who’ve committed violent and serious offenses for the full extent of the law,’ ” Nathan Hochman, a Republican former federal prosecutor challenging Bonta, told me.
That’s a preview of the attacks that Hochman and Bonta’s other opponent, Republicanturnedindependent Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, will fire at him. Next year’s race is already shaping up to be a marquee California matchup. It will be watched nationally as an indicator of whether voters prefer more progressive prosecutors or a return to the toughoncrime policies that marked the California of two decades ago.
Bonta will have his hands full. Hochman, who has never held elective office, had already raised more than $500,000 before Wednesday’s filing deadline; Schubert’s campaign, which will file its first campaign statement this month, says it has already raised more than $1 million. Bonta’s campaign has collected $1.1 million. None will be starved for cash, given how intense feelings are about the issues that divide them.
One of Bonta’s top policies takes effect July 1. Starting then, Bonta’s Department of Justice will have more latitude to take over the investigations of fatal shootings of unarmed civilians involving police officers. That power comes from a bill that Bonta coauthored when the Alameda resident represented most of Oakland, Alameda and San Leandro in the Legislature.
Bonta told my “It’s All Political” podcast that his office plans to aggressively investigate those cases — not just review the work of local investigators and then rubberstamp their findings.
“We will definitely be on the scene and doing scene processing whenever possible,” Bonta told The Chronicle. “If it’s impossible, we’ll work collaboratively to make sure that we have all the necessary evidence.” Bonta said that could involve “getting involved in autopsies and all investigative components, from the investigation to the review of the evidence to the charging decision and beyond.”
That’s a different tone not only from Harris but from Bonta’s immediate predecessor, Becerra. Both were criticized for not aggressively pursuing police shootings of civilians more aggressively.
The change in attitude goes back to how Bonta approaches law enforcement. Like Harris, he grew up as the child of activists. However, her activist background was occasionally muted because she spent much of preSenate career straddling the line between progressive politics and serving as “the top cop.” Bonta came to the attorney general’s job after being a progressive legislator.
His father marched in Selma and organized for voting rights and civil rights in the 1960s. Bonta was born in 1972 in the Phllippines, where his parents were doing Christian missionary work.
They returned to the U.S., and the family of five moved to a trailer in La Paz, in the Tehachapi Mountains near Bakersfield, close to the headquarters of the United Farm Workers movement. Much of Bonta’s political perspective was shaped by the work his parents did there to organize Latino and Filipino farmworkers. They were close to Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino American leader in the movement.
“I saw my parents fight with and for everyday people, committed to a common goal to create success and to right wrongs,” Bonta said. “I saw they could do it. And it made me want to pick up the baton and continue the effort.”
Bonta’s efforts to make change are spurring his opponents to lump him together with progressive prosecutors who want shorter sentences and seek alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders. Schubert spent much of one of her early campaign events talking as much about Gascón and Boudin as she did Bonta. She said cities like San Francisco are “in chaos” because of liberal policies that imperil public safety.
While “chaos” might be political hyperbole, Bonta’s opponents represent a segment of Californians who backed “three strikes and you’re out” prison sentences a generation ago.
Bonta disagreed. Putting a twist on the “false choice” phrase Harris often used when she disagreed with a question’s premise, he called the lockemup or letemout choice a “false narrative.”
“It is wrong to say that they are mutually exclusive,” Bonta said. “That you either have to be safe and have neverending sentences and mass incarceration and overcriminalization or you can be just and fair and unsafe. Our system is broken.”
“Look at bail,” Bonta said. “That’s a prime example of how you can be more safe and more just and more fair.”
Bonta was among the legislators who led the fight to end a cash bail system that keeps a disproportionate number of poorer, nonwhite defendants in jail for long periods awaiting trial. Bonta backed legislation that would replace cash bail with a computergenerated system to do a risk assessment of a person’s potential to flee.
But California voters disagreed. Last year, they rejected Proposition 25, which asked if they wanted to uphold a 2018 state law eliminating cash bail. Bonta’s takeaway from the defeat: Californians “have not yet decided on what the appropriate replacement system is for the fundamentally broken, unsafe, unfair, unjust current money bail system.”
“That’s how transformation works,” Bonta said. “We recognize the problem, and then we decide on what the solution is to the problem.”
“Transformation” is a word that progressives often use to describe the type of change they want. Bonta doesn’t shy away from the comparisons to Gascón and Boudin, saying they “lead with their heart,” but adds, “I’m my own person with my own approach.”
“Anyone who is trying to compare me to someone else doesn’t know me,” he said, “or is deliberately looking away from my very long, deep, detailed record that is unique in its own way.”