George Gascón Used to Serve with the Los Angeles Police Department. In December, He’ll Become LA’s Chief Prosecutor.
The race for Los Angeles County District Attorney was officially called on November 6, when former Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey officially conceded in the race against George Gascón. Gascón beat Lacey with 53.7 percent of the total vote, leading by an estimated 229,000 votes.
Gascón was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 13. He is an army veteran whose previous California-based jobs included serving with the LAPD for 30 years, and acting as San Francisco District Attorney from 2011 through 2019
On September 28, before mail-in voting in California officially began, Gascón issued an open letter to the Los Angeles community via his website in which he pledged to reopen four cases regarding officer-involved shootings, if he were to win the race. Jackie Lacey had declined to charge these officers previously.
The four reopened cases include the shooting of Brendon Glenn — an unhoused and unarmed man — by an LAPD officer in 2015; the shooting of Ricardo Diaz Zeferino by Gardenia police in 2013; the shooting of 19-year-old Hector Morejon by Long Beach police in 2015; and the shooting of Christopher Deandre Mitchell by Torrance police in 2018.
In the same letter, Gascón also listed five cases he has “concerns with, that are beyond the statute of limitations or that remain open.” This list included the 2019 murder of Ryan Twyman and the recent August 2020 murder of Dijon Kizzee, both at the hands of LA sheriffs.
Gascón is a standing advocate for Assembly Bill 392, which addresses police use of force and was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019. This bill limits the circumstances in which police can use lethal force, and according to Gascón’s open letter, “District Attorney Jackie Lacey did not support this effort, either because she believed the prior standard which enabled police to use force in more circumstances was appropriate, in order to appease the law enforcement unions that are financially backing her, or both.”
The four cases that Gascón will be reopening all occurred prior to January 1, 2020, which means that the more restrictive legal standards for use-of-force established by Assembly Bill 392 will not apply when evaluating the case. For the five others that Gascón has concerns for, however, the bill’s strict definition of circumstances under which homicide by a peace officer is deemed justifiable will be applied.
In comparison to Lacey, Gascón’s priorities mark a shift toward more progressive criminal justice reform. Max Szabo, Gascón’s Director of Communications and Policy, says that he has been widely regarded as the “Godfather of Progressive Prosecution” far before Gascón began his campaign for LA District Attorney.
“[Gascón] was finding alternatives to incarceration and proving, frankly, that we can reduce incarceration and enhance safety simultaneously, before that became popularized — I would say, four or five years ago — [when] we started to see a wave of District Attorneys across the country be elected on that platform,” Szabo said. “He's considered to be kind of like the founder of the progressive prosecution movement.”
During Gascón’s term in the Bay Area, he made headlines for implementing an artificial intelligence tool that hides race information when prosecutors are making charging decisions. Szabo says that Gascón plans to implement a similar tool in Los Angeles.
Though progressives have voiced loud skepticism about his relationship with the LAPD, Szabo says Gascón has pledged not to take money from police unions. This highly differs from Jackie Lacey’s close ties with the police; during the District Attorney primary election against Gascón, law enforcement unions contributed over 75% of the total $2.2 million raised by Lacey. Gascón’s campaign outspent Lacey’s by around five million dollars, but no funding came from police departments.
“There's a conflict of interest that occurs when you receive money from an individual or a group that represents people who are going to be involved in conduct that is going to come under your consideration,” Szabo said.
Of Gascón’s many planned initiatives to reform LA’s law enforcement system, Szabo says he plans to expand Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD). The LEAD program aims to connect low-level drug offenders at high risk of recidivism to community-based health and social services, instead of sending individuals directly to jail cells. According to his campaign, LEAD has been shown to “effectively disrupt the cycle of individuals with behavioral health issues through our criminal justice system.” This initiative, and others like it, were described in Gascón’s 11 policy papers released throughout 2020, leading up to his election.
Through these papers, Gascón reaffirmed his pledge to step away from capital punishment and try to rescind exisiting death sentences. Gascón criticized Lacey’s support for capital punishment throughout his campaign, noting that death row has a disproportionate minority population.
Gascón’s policy papers also included promises to hold oil and gas companies accountable for their harm to the environment; work to create an alternative sentencing program; strongly implement Assembly Bill 392; make police officer misconduct records accessible to all of the public; establish county wide standards for police body-worn cameras and in-car video systems; create an Independent Investigations Bureau focused on investigating and reviewing officer-involved shootings, in-custody deaths, and all other excessive use of force cases; adopt a policy prohibiting retaliatory charges for individuals who speak out against the police; and expand efforts to protect the unhoused and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
This is a hefty list of promises, and it is safe to say that Gascón will not be able to implement them all on day one. Szabo says that some planned changes will be enforced more quickly than others, like prohibiting the death penalty and no longer prosecuting juveniles as adults. For the more expansive types of reform, Sabzo says “it’s going to take months, if not years to implement the broader vision for reforming and reimagining criminal justice in LA.”
Gascón’s approach to the housing and homelessness crisis focuses on promoting behavioral health. He plans to establish Behavioral Health Justice Centers that would act as alternatives to traditional criminal justice interventions. This way, those who commit low-level crimes can be treated for mental health disorders in secure short-term or long-term housing, rather than in county jails and prisons that “tend to exacerbate mental illness and further traumatize individuals,” according to Gascón’s website.
“I am deeply committed to taking this county, the largest county in the country, the most carceral county in the country, in a different direction...We continue to insist on taking the mentally ill and putting them in a concrete box, as if that somehow is going to cure their illness,” Gascón said at his meeting with BLM-LA. “We continue to criminalize poverty, and then we act surprised when we, as a county, have the largest homeless problem in the country.”
In terms of homelessness prevention, Gascón says he will implement a comprehensive eviction defense program and work to reduce eviction filings. He also aims to improve the quality of life for the unhoused through empowering efforts to clear the criminal records of unhoused people in LA County, and creating a Homelessness Advisory Board comprised of people who are currently or have previously experienced homelessness and have had contact with the criminal justice system.
“I used to say the system is broken, and I have come to the conclusion that the system is doing exactly what it is designed to do,” Gascón said.“In this country, policing, prosecution, a lot of it has deep roots in the institution of slavery. And once the Civil War ended, and slavery as far as a legal institution ended, it was policing and prosecutions and just the whole body of laws that came about to ensure that the people who were formerly being enslaved will now be enslaved to other things.”
George Gascón will be officially sworn in as the 43rd District Attorney of L.A. County on December 7, 2020.
