LA's Progressive DA Making the News - Progressives Typically Don't Prosecute Petty Theft Cases
'He’s Remaking Criminal Justice in L.A. But How Far Is Too Far?'

To keep people out of prison, George Gascón is risking everything: rising violent crime, a staff rebellion and the votes that made him district attorney.

Last December, when George Gascón took over the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country, he made a complete break from the past. His inaugural speech as district attorney of Los Angeles County at once thrilled progressive activists and alienated many of the lawyers sizing up their new boss. Standing alone at a lectern as a pandemic precaution, Gascón put his hands to his forehead and half-bowed, yogi-style, to thank the judge who swore him in over a video connection.

Gascón leveled an all-out attack on the status quo. The new district attorney described being arrested as “traumatic and dehumanizing,” lifting his hands for emphasis. “Our rush to incarcerate generations of kids of color,” he said, has torn apart “the social fabric of our communities.” Signaling that the police should expect new scrutiny, Gascón promised to review fatal shootings in the county by officers, going back to 2012.

He turned the argument for the “tough-on-crime approach” of other local law-enforcement leaders on its head, blaming their strategy for an eight-year rise in violent crime. He accused his opponents of making “unfounded and self-serving claims” about how more punishment increases public safety. “The status quo hasn’t made us safer,” he said, jabbing his fingers into the air. Continue Reading

In effect, Gascón was telling his new staff that they had been not guardians of the public, as they might have believed, but rather agents of harm. He backed up his words with an even more confrontational set of directives, delivered to every employee in his office over email before he even finished speaking, at 12:02 p.m. Gascón’s orders touched nearly every aspect of the criminal-justice system. He mandated an end to seeking cash bail, the death penalty, the sentence of life without parole and the prosecution of anyone younger than 18 as an adult. And in a rare, if not unprecedented, move by an American prosecutor, Gascón declared his intent to effectively end very long sentences — in pending cases as well as new ones — for some of the most serious crimes, including murder.

Gascón’s speech was unmistakably aligned with the goals of the progressive activists who propelled his campaign. “We felt like, wow, we could have written that speech,” says Lex Steppling, the director of Dignity and Power Now, a Los Angeles-based group that urges sweeping reform of the “megacomplex of mass incarceration,” as Steppling calls it.

Inside the prosecutor’s office, about 900 deputy district attorneys (as rank-and-file prosecutors are called in Los Angeles) and an additional 1,100 staff members clicked through the nine attachments of orders, which would go into effect the next day. There were no explanations or scheduled question-and-answer sessions or channels for feedback.

To many prosecutors, Gascón’s speech and orders felt like a hostile takeover. They remembered an interview he gave during his campaign in which he referred to employees who might oppose him if he took office as “internal terrorists.” The image was indelible. “I heard that and thought, OK, I consider myself an honorable man,” a veteran prosecutor says. “The lines are clearly drawn.”

In the last year and a half, the work of reform-minded prosecutors across the country has been complicated by a spike in killings. The murder rate remains far below the terrible peaks of the 1980s and ’90s, and crime overall has fallen slightly. The escalation is national — in small as well as big cities — affecting places with more traditional prosecutors as well as those like Los Angeles. And the rise in violence, which also includes an increase in aggravated assault, has coincided with the anomaly, and profound dislocation, of the pandemic.

But while there is no clear evidence that the progressive policies of prosecutors are responsible for the rise in violence, no one knows for sure what is causing it or how to reverse the trajectory. (Such uncertainty bedevils the search for the cause of any momentary crime trend.) Tough-on-crime advocates blame reform-minded district attorneys, accusing them of releasing the wrong people and making their communities unsafe.

It’s a well-worn law-and-order attack, repurposed from Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon starting in the 1960s, that is now being leveled against the self-identified progressive prosecutors, who have become a growing national phenomenon in the last five years. These new district attorneys have won in metropolitan areas all over the country, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Kansas City, Orlando, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco and St. Louis. They succeeded at the polls in large part as a response to the protests for racial justice that began in Ferguson, Mo., a few years earlier. Local organizers who wanted to hold the police accountable and end mass incarceration saw prosecutors’ offices as the best vehicle for taking political power.

The new breed of district attorney threatens a deeply entrenched system, with tentacles in multiple agencies and the backing of many of the police officers, judges, rank-and-file prosecutors and probation and parole officers who determine what justice, or at least law enforcement, actually means day to day. Some of those insiders stiffly resisted the calls for change. When Larry Krasner took over the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia in 2017, more than 100 lawyers and employees walked out the door; Krasner also dismissed 31 others. (Gascón, by contrast, couldn’t clean house: In Los Angeles, prosecutors have the rare benefit of civil-service protections and a union.) Local law-enforcement leaders in Kansas City, Kan., tried in 2018 to block District Attorney Mark Dupree from receiving county funds to review past wrongful convictions. In Boston, Rachael Rollins faced a bar complaint the same year from a national police group accusing her of “reckless disregard” for state law. Opponents inside and outside prosecutors’ offices also foiled change simply by slow-walking it.

In most states, misdemeanor charges make up about 80 percent of the criminal docket, and nationally, 10.3 million people, many of them accused of nonviolent offenses, churn through local jails every year. Nearly two-thirds of the jail population have mental-health problems, according to estimates by the Urban Institute. So the new prosecutors pushed for more mental-health services, as well as drug treatment and stable housing. And in the first few years after their elections, district attorneys like Krasner, Wesley Bell of St. Louis, Kim Foxx of Chicago and Eric Gonzalez of Brooklyn helped significantly reduce the jail population in their cities by largely ending the practices of locking up people for possession of marijuana or petty theft and demanding bail for nonviolent charges.

Mercy for violence, however, remained more sparing. Some reform-minded prosecutors treated it like political dynamite. When Bell took office in 2019, for example, he promised to expand alternatives to incarceration and end warrants for minor felonies while doing more to “aggressively prosecute serious and violent crimes.”

From 2016 to 2019, the reform-minded district attorneys benefited from falling crime rates. The welcome drop included murders and shootings as well as property crime and other offenses. As they headed into their first re-election cycle, the prosecutors had a win-win pitch: Despite all the prophecies of doom from their opponents, their efforts were saving money and improving lives without endangering public safety.

But the recent rise in violent crime has muddied the picture. In 2020, fear started to pulse through community meetings, local news coverage and casual conversations among worried allies, including mayors and City Council members. Suddenly on defense, the district attorneys struggled to keep pressing for change — to take risks. “It has absolutely made the job harder,” says Foxx, the state’s attorney of Cook County, which includes Chicago, who was elected on a platform of reform five years ago. “As macabre as it is, there were people who were waiting for this moment. It allows for the convenient scapegoating of prosecutors who advocate for justice reform.”

Foxx had to address a roughly 50 percent increase in murders and shootings from 2019 to 2020 while campaigning for re-election. Her Republican opponent ran a TV ad called “Too Many Children Murdered,” which quoted Chicago’s police superintendent saying there were “zero consequences” for some gun arrests. Foxx noted that the rise in murders and shootings mostly affected low-income families in Black neighborhoods. “A significant proportion of the victims we see have criminal backgrounds themselves,” Foxx says. “It’s an inconvenient truth for many who use the banner of victims that most of our victims have not been the ones they have empathy for traditionally.” nytimes.com