So I was on the phone — OK, I was texting — with a longtime local prosecutor, now retired.
“So who you going with for DA?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m voting for George,” I replied. “Even though he’s gonna lose.”
“Same,” she wrote back. “Sigh.”
If it’s not easy being a supporter of a political candidate — in this case, excellent and honorable Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón — who the polls show is going down in flames, imagine being that candidate himself.
He’s everyone’s punching bag every time some scumbag sticks up a Stop ‘n’ Rob, as Los Angeles County crooks have been doing since we invented the mini-mall. If gangs of hammer-wielding thugs and thugettes love the sound of breaking glass down to the maxi-mall jewelry store, then it’s George Gascón’s fault, for sure, is the word on the street.
The money from justice-reform backers that buoyed his candidacy four years ago has dried up. Tech bros who gave him half a million then are giving a few thousand this time around. George is not gonna win.
I call the august DA “George” on the basis of having met him all of two times, in editorial board meetings. But they were really small, casual meetings. We had a real chance to visit and get to know each other. I’ve met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of local politicians in such meetings down the decades. Few have impressed me as much as George Gascón.
He is both more intellectual and more of a normal guy than 99% of the pols you’d care to meet. He arrived with no security or aides, no guns lurking in the hall. He’s dapper, in a good way, not a Tucker Carlson Brooks Bros. way. He’s trim and athletic. In conversation, he’s genuinely interested in the justice system issues of the day, and in how to get rid of the revolving-door prison-industrial complex — which, if you think is a fine plan toward creating a safer society, then you’ve got another think coming.
The petty thieves and unpetty ones too who you want locked up for decades are going to get out eventually. Holding them in hellholes for long periods of time without serious rehab programs with a lot of other bad guys is probably not going to get the results you had imagined.
I’ve often needed, in defending George over the years, to point to simple things in his amazing resume that those who paint him as a soft-on-crime liberal almost always confess they had no idea about.
He was born in Cuba, and his family were classic refugees from Communist oppression when they fled to America. They didn’t end up in Miami, but in Bell, the most working class city in Los Angeles County. He had so much trouble reading English that he dropped out of Bell High to join the Army in 1972, where he did earn his high school diploma.
He was a cop from the beginning — an MP. He got an honorable discharge as a sergeant. He came back to Cal State Long Beach for a history degree.
And then he became — no, Joe Voter, not a community organizer, union rabble-rouser or Socialist Workers Party apparatchik — a career police officer. Once he joined the LAPD, he soon was a sergeant, lieutenant, captain, commander and then deputy chief by 2002. After the (properly) wrenching Rampart scandal roiled the department, with the department (properly) under federal oversight, he was put in command of training at the Police Academy. When no new funds were actually provided for training, he found them himself, in a community-policing grant.
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He became assistant chief, second in command to Bill Bratton, and then chief of police in Mesa. Arizona, chief of police in San Francisco, and then San Francisco DA — he’d gone to law school while still a cop.
Unlike most of us, he’s seen it all, in law enforcement. And he saw what didn’t work: cash bail, so indigent people are stuck. Throwing thousands of Californians in jail for marijuana possession. Creating career criminals by putting 13-year-olds in Juvenile Hall.
He’s working to reform that nonsense. He’s not been the best at PR, or communicating with his prosecutors. But I’m going to vote for his re-election in hopes of continuing reform, as so many of you are not. You’re gonna be like that doctor this week who, giving me an X-ray, asked to see my card. “Newspaper guy, eh?” she said. “Yep.” “Can you believe that L.A. Times?” I thought she might lament their forcing my former boss to quit because her paper wouldn’t endorse the opponent of a convicted felon who a Marine four-star general calls “fascist.” Nope: “I can’t believe they endorsed Gascón again!”
I can. He’s a great DA. But I know he’s going to lose.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.