By the time singer-songwriter Fiona Apple introduced the practice of courtwatching to millions of Americans last year, urging them to go observe the basic machinery of the criminal legal system at work, these programs had emerged all over the nation. Typically, they’re piloted by people critical of mass incarceration who hope to shed light on the everyday abuses defendants suffer when nobody’s looking. In Los Angeles, organizers visit one of the county’s 36 courts twice a month. In Baton Rouge, the Reverend Alexis Anderson is at the local courthouse almost every day. “Everywhere you’ve got a court, somebody needs to be watching it in real time,” she told me.

A new courtwatching effort has sprung up in San Francisco in recent years. Like the other groups, Stop Crime SF volunteers attend hearings and take notes. They emphasize the importance of transparency and public accountability. “San Francisco courts are notoriously opaque,” the group’s founder, Frank Noto, told me.

But Stop Crime SF is approaching courtwatching from essentially the opposite direction. Noto and his fellow members want harsher sentences for people with repeated violations, and they’re highly critical of judges who let people out on their own recognizance, meaning without money bail, to await trial. “At a time when drug overdose deaths are at an all-time high, many chronic drug dealers and other repeat violent felons are free on our streets because of overly lenient court rulings,” the group said in an August statement.

Now, as California’s March 5 elections approach, Stop Crime SF’s sister c(4) organization, Stop Crime Action, is jumping into the city’s judicial races and working to oust two sitting judges whom it says are fueling this crisis, Michael Isaku Begert and Patrick Thompson. The group, which is also led by Noto, is championing Chip Zecher and Jean Myungjin Roland, Begert and Thompson’s challengers, who are also running with heavy tech and venture capital money and support from the local police union. 

The response from Bay Area progressives has been furious, with City Supervisor Aaron Peskin urging voters to “reject this right-wing attack on San Francisco’s judiciary.” LaDoris Cordell, a former superior court judge in Santa Clara County, south of San Francisco, said she worries that “you may see a sea change in how judges behave” if Stop Crime SF’s effort succeeds and Begert and Thompson are removed. 

“These judges are going to start handing down harsher sentences and who is it going to impact?” Cordell told Bolts. “Poor people, people of color, and here we go again.”

San Francisco has in recent years been embroiled in an intense debate over policing and incarceration that attracted national attention when the city elected and then quickly recalled progressive DA Chesa Boudin. In the years since, Boudin’s critics have continued blaming progressive reforms for crime and drug problems in the city, benefiting from an alliance with a fleet of billionaires who have used their considerable resources to boost politicians and legislation with a more punitive approach.

The latest offensive against San Francisco’s judges fits into this broader playbook. Still, the fact that advocates for greater punishment are using an approach crafted by proponents of criminal legal reform renders it more confounding. On its own, courtwatching is essentially neutral, and its empirical nature seems to render it trustworthy. The question is: Who’s watching? And what happens next?

The California prison population ballooned from just over 21,000 in 1978 to over 175,000 at its peak in 2006, driven in part by some judges’ tendency to maximize sentences. And the perception that voters would only support tough-on-crime officials has also shaped how the judiciary has approached its work. 

“When I started as a baby judge, and I was first appointed, one of the older judges came to me and said, ‘Look, if you don’t want to get reversed in criminal cases, just throw the book at everybody,’” Cordell recalls. 

Later, when she ran for reelection, Cordell was attacked for being too soft with defendants. “My opponent was this hard-nosed DA, and he put out, ‘she’s just a Rose Bird clone,’” she told me. That’s a reference to former California Chief Justice Rose Bird, who faced years of reprisals from conservative groups for overturning death sentences as unconstitutional. In 1986, residents voted decisively to remove her from office. 

Cordell prevailed and secured reelection, though, ultimately staying on the Santa Clara superior court from 1988 to her retirement in 2001.

These battles have picked up in recent years. Santa Clara voters recalled Judge Aaron Persky in 2018 after he gave Stanford student Brock Turner a three-month sentence for sexual assault. Turner was required to register as a sex offender for life, but after the case made national news, some onlookers found the sentence unforgivably light and levied a campaign against the judge. 

Inversely, also in 2018, four San Francisco public defenders ran from the left against sitting superior court judges; all lost, though one of them was elected the following cycle. In 2022, Angelenos elected a public defender to the bench who ran on a goal of lowering incarceration rates and criticized sitting judges for stubbornly resisting sentencing reforms. 

Progressives’ wins in judicial races came alongside their takeover of DA offices in San Francisco in 2019 with Boudin and Los Angeles in 2020 with George Gascón, outcomes that intensified pushback from critics of criminal justice reform. 

Noto, a former lobbyist for real estate developers, started Stop Crime SF as a neighborhood group back in 2017, advocating for more resources for police and new legislation to prevent car break-ins. The group promptly took on Boudin after his election and later supported the effort to recall him. That November, Joel Engardio, who was Stop Crime SF’s executive director, ousted an incumbent supervisor. 

During this time, the group expanded its scope to scrutinize the bench, building a courtwatch program to get volunteers to study how judges responded to property crimes. “We wanted to make sure that judges understood, that the district attorney understood, that these are important too and they just couldn’t ignore this,” Noto told me. Eventually they began tracking responses to violent crime and drug offenses as well. 

Stop Crime SF’s approach gained a powerful ally when Brooke Jenkins was appointed DA by Mayor London Breed to replace Boudin. Before her appointment, Jenkins was paid over $150,000 to consult for Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a group that heavily supported the recall effort and has also backed Stop Crime SF. 

Jenkins promptly clashed with local judges. When she said she would prosecute some 16 and 17 year olds as adults, the lowest age state law would allow, a veteran judge, J. Anthony Kline, refused to send any young people into the adult court system. In response, Jenkins’ office began blanket-challenging him, which effectively removed Kline’s entire case load. Jenkins also told ABC that “judges are refusing to make sure that these individuals stay in custody, and that has to change.” At a town hall in the summer of 2023, the DA excoriated local judges for releasing defendants with multiple drug offenses pre-trial, rather than keeping them locked up. 

Zecher, one of the candidates endorsed by Stop Crime Action, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he was inspired to run by a comment Jenkins made urging challenges to sitting judges. Zecher, a corporate lawyer on the board of UC Law San Francisco, did not agree to a request for an interview for this article.

Boudin believes his successor has been “scapegoating” judges to deflect from her own responsibility, also pointing to Breed, an ally of Jenkins who last year vociferously criticized a federal judge for upholding a ban on of homeless encampments as long as the city lacks sufficient shelter beds. “They both leaned so heavily into the doom-loop, fearmongering approach to defining San Francisco as a way to get me out of office, and now they own the problems and the perceptions,” he told Bolts. “They can’t shake it and so they’re looking for someone else to blame.”

Breed, who like Jenkins is up for reelection in November, is also championing a wide-ranging ballot measure on March 5, Proposition E, that would expand the powers of the local police; Stop Crime Action has endorsed it. Another measure, Proposition B, would increase the size of the police force, but only if the city creates new taxes to pay for it, a condition that troubles police advocates; one of its chief opponents, Axios reports, sits on the board of Stop Crime SF.

Over the last year, Stop Crime SF’s courtwatching program, and its accusations that the local bench is fostering crime, have morphed into an effort to outright remove two local judges whom the group says exemplify this behavior. Noto wrote in the organization’s newsletter in November that Begert and Thompson “have a demonstrated track record of releasing serious and dangerous offenders back into the public.”

Begert presides over several of San Francisco’s collaborative courts, where judges either try to formulate a treatment plan for people who are jailed, or get people into services as an alternative to incarceration. He also oversees San Francisco’s CARE court, where people close to someone with substance abuse or mental health issues can petition the court to mandate treatment—a program that has also proved controversial on the left because of concerns around civil rights.

Begert told Bolts in an interview that he believes he is being targeted because of his work on the collaborative courts, alleging that his critics are pursuing an agenda that’s single-mindedly punitive.

“Why me?” he asked. “Because I’m running these treatment courts, and these treatment courts are built on trying to address the underlying causes of criminal behavior, to increase public safety by reducing future conduct. And if your primary motivation is to impose punishments on people, or to accomplish what we call in legal philosophy retribution—that’s not furthering your objectives.”

Noto rejects the notion that he’s politicizing the judiciary. He says his group is largely looking to promote transparency, and that its decisions about which judges to target stem from external feedback.

In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, Stop Crime Action released what it called a judicial “report card” that rated judges whose terms end in 2024, and gave both Begert and Thompson (and no one else) failing grades. According to The San Francisco Standard, the group drew on cases that were tracked by courtwatchers and a variety of other factors, including a survey the group sent out to local trial attorneys. 

But the group only received roughly 25 answers—most of them, perhaps unsurprisingly, from prosecutors rather than judges and defense lawyers. Mission Local reported that the group misrepresented a single person’s assessment in a way that implied numerous negative reviews. 

“I have no objection to engaging with the public and having people see what we do,” Begert told Bolts. “I think we should have more of that. My objection is to coming into the project with a political agenda.”

The other targeted judge, Patrick Thompson, handles preliminary hearings; he evaluates evidence to determine whether the case will continue to trial. Much of the criticism against him in the Stop Crime Action report card centers on cases where he released defendants with past convictions on their own recognizance pending their trial. 

The San Francisco Chronicle found this month that, in a number of the cases, Thompson’s decision to release received no objection from the prosecutor on the case, meaning that all parties agreed the defendant should be released pending trial. Lara Bazelon, a law professor who advocates for criminal justice reforms in San Francisco, says pretrial detention is legally considered a final course of action. “It’s the resort only after every other less restrictive alternative has been considered and rejected,” she said. “And that’s because when you lock someone up pretrial, you’re taking someone that is presumed innocent, and taking away their freedom for weeks or months or even years at a time.”

Thompson did not respond to a request for an interview, nor did his opponent Roland, who currently works as a prosecutor in Jenkins’s office. 

The San Francisco Bar Association, the more traditional rating system for local judges, rates each of Thompson and Begert as “well-qualified.” Zecher and Roland received no ratings from the bar association because they declined to participate in the process, an unusual decision.

The president of the association told KQED in December that she’s worried about attacks on “the independence of the judiciary.” Boudin echoed that concern, telling Bolts that judges are constrained in how they can defend themselves; he pointed to state rules known as the judicial canons that prohibit judges from talking about the cases in front of them. “Unsurprisingly, they’ve chosen people who are uniquely vulnerable,” he said. 

Courtwatchers on the left view judges as too prone to detain defendants pretrial and throw the book at them—even beyond what the law requires. Stop Crime SF, meanwhile, sends its members into courtrooms to observe criminal cases with a form asking them to rate whether “defendants were held accountable for their actions by the court.” The form defines accountability, among other things, as whether a judge sets money bail and ultimately sentences someone at—or beyond—sentencing guidelines. 

Progressive courtwatchers elsewhere have taken note of the effort in San Francisco. And while their goals differ significantly, some say they support more scrutiny on the courts on principle, since they believe courts’ opacity to the public has produced harmful results overall.

Courtwatch LA also has a website, Rate My Judge, where community members and lawyers can weigh in on their experience in court. A lot of the negative reviews center on judges’ treatment of the people in their court, but some are outcome-focused, too—one judge’s page has several comments alleging that he categorically denies resentencing petitions. They also plan to challenge judges in the future, though they would not consider a score statistically significant until it was composed of at least 45 reviews.

“I think it is something the left has to sort out or at least accept as inevitably a two way street,” said Bazelon. “Courts are open to the public. There’s nothing unlawful or untoward about going and observing what happens in court. And I don’t think it should come as any surprise that it’s going to be a tool that both sides are going to use.”

The Los Angeles organizers tend to also distrust the assessments by professional groups like the bar association, arguing that while they’re purportedly neutral, they’re biased against candidates of color and women, and against lawyers opposed to the status quo. They say their approach brings in a different, necessary perspective.

“At the end of the day, it is a community tool,” said Titilayọ Rasaki, policy and campaigns strategist for La Defensa, the Los Angeles organization that runs Courtwatch LA. “I think it’s just a question of who’s in and who’s out in your community.” She noted that many of Courtwatch LA’s volunteers have had past contact with the criminal legal system. For these people, she said, “it’s a kind of reclamation, or a way of shifting your relationship to the criminal legal system that has probably impacted your life in vastly different ways.”

Rasaki and her colleague Gabriela Vázquez, deputy director of La Defensa, told me that they weren’t threatened by Stop Crime SF’s use of a similar playbook. In their eyes, the problem with what’s happening in San Francisco is not that incumbent judges face scrutiny or opponents; it’s the “scare tactics” employed against them. “If we have a drug overdose epidemic, the easy way out is just criminalizing people, or attacking judges,” Vázquez said. “What we’re seeing in the Bay Area is that they’re trying to take the easy way out and find scapegoats.”

Still, Rasaki said she welcomes anyone to courtwatch. If they feel comfortable with how poorly people are treated and how easily they’re incarcerated, she said, “that’s a value judgment for them… We can disagree and we can use different organizing strategies and the ballot box, I guess—this is where we’re duking it out. It’s a contention of ideals.” 

“If it gets more people in the courts, if it gets more discourse about what it is that the courts are up to, and whether or not they’re meeting the needs of our society—that’s a conversation I’m really trying to start,” she said.

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When Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his reelection bid in November 2022, it seemed to mark a default cessation of hostilities between him and the Board of Supervisors, the county’s five-member governing body. The conflict spanned his four-year tenure, from an early clash over Villanueva’s rehiring of a deputy fired for allegations of domestic abuse to his dispatching a team of deputies armed with battering rams to raid one of the supervisor’s homes just before the 2022 election. There was no shortage of choice words, either: At one point, the sheriff said the supervisors “need to be taken to the shed and they need to be beat down so they start doing their job.” 

Recently, though, Villanueva has reemerged from retirement with a novel provocation: He is seeking to join the ranks of the body he long antagonized. In September, he announced his bid for county supervisor, running against Janice Hahn, a centrist Democrat with deep roots in LA politics. Perhaps predictably, the other four sitting supervisors have endorsed Hahn, who promptly issued a statement calling Villanueva “a fraud and a failure.” In response, Villanueva told Bolts: “Janice Hahn is a fraud and a failure, hands down.” 

All this feuding can seem petty, but the stakes are quite literally life and death for some Angelenos. 

Jail deaths steadily increased each year Villanueva was in power. “Under Villanueva, the conditions in the jails deteriorated significantly,” said Claire Simonich, associate director at Vera Action, “[there were] people with serious mental illness being chained to chairs for days at a time, dozens of people being crammed together in overcrowded facilities.” 

In response to a request for comment on the jail deaths, Villanueva emailed Bolts: “Aw gee, did something called the pandemic happen during my tenure?” He also touted his efforts to reduce the jail population during the pandemic. However, a UCLA report found that despite an initial decline in the population, overall people were actually held in custody pretrial longer during the pandemic, in part due to the sheriff department’s practices. 

But the crisis has continued since Villanueva’s exit. At least 46 people have died inside LA County jails or elsewhere in the sheriff’s custody thus far in 2023. These numbers make the jails in Los Angeles deadlier than Rikers Island, the New York lockup that frequently makes national headlines for its intolerable conditions. An 18-year-old also died in one of the county’s juvenile detention facilities in May.

Part of the responsibility falls on Villanueva’s successor, Sheriff Robert Luna. But the county’s Board of Supervisors also possesses an extraordinary amount of power over this situation: it sets the county’s $46.7 billion budget, including how much money goes toward incarceration and how much goes to alternatives to incarceration like inpatient mental health treatment, and holds oversight power over county jails and the sheriff’s department.

“On the flip side,” Simonich said, “the board does have responsibility to build up the types of services that will prevent crime from happening in the first place and invest in housing, invest in mental health care, invest in substance use disorder treatment.” The supervisors have dragged their heels on funding for the mental health beds the county desperately needs, and continuously failed to close the dangerous and dilapidated Men’s Central Jail, a move they first committed to in 2019.

The showdown between Hahn and Villanueva, then, underscores just how drastically the sheriff’s department and the board alike have failed to protect the people in their care.

Their race may be resolved as early as the March 5 primary if a candidate receives more than 50 percent across District 4, an area in the county’s southern part. That’s a strong possibility, with only two lower-profile candidates in the race. Otherwise, Villanueva’s comeback bid may continue into a Top 2 runoff in November.

But local advocates are also eying the two other seats on the board that Angelenos will decide this election, hoping to put in place a stronger alliance next year willing to finally flex the board’s power to improve jail conditions. 

“The Board of Supervisors, apart from when they are forced to discuss in-custody deaths, have been entirely silent,” said Ambrose Brooks S., the campaign and advocacy manager for Dignity and Power Now, a member of the Justice LA Coalition. “This is urgent, this is an emergency, and their silence is not going to make us stop advocating for them to do something.” 

Thanks to a state transparency law that went into effect on New Year’s Day, 2023, the LASD now maintains an in-custody death tracker. As of December 18, the list includes 45 names: men between the ages of 20 and 91, most of them pretrial, who allegedly died by suicide, because of illness, or a drug overdose, or, in three instances, at the hands of another person. But the majority of deaths listed are attributed to “natural causes” or are pending a final autopsy report.

There is at least one person whose death is nowhere to be found on that list: Stanley Tobias Wilson, Jr. Wilson was a talented athlete who attended Stanford and went on to play football in the NFL. But unresolved trauma from childhood sexual abuse combined with CTE from years of football proved devastating to his mental health, his mom, Dr. D. Pulane Lucas, told Bolts. Last November, Wilson was deemed incompetent to stand trial for a recent break-in. Unbeknownst to Lucas, a judge ordered that her son be moved from where he was being held at Twin Towers, the county’s second largest jail, to Metropolitan State Hospital, which specializes in psychiatric care, by no later than Dec. 5. 

Nearly two months later, he was dead. A County Medical Examiner employee initially told Lucas he’d been found unconscious in his cell. “And then the story changed,” Lucas said. Now, they were telling her he’d fallen out of a chair and died of a pulmonary embolism while waiting to be admitted to Metropolitan. Lucas, who runs a policy nonprofit in Virginia, flew to Los Angeles to try to figure out what had happened, visiting the sheriff’s department to request records, then to Metropolitan, where her son had allegedly collapsed. “And that’s when they told me that they’ve never had anyone by the name of Stanley T. Wilson Jr. admitted,” she said. “I was blown away…now all of a sudden to get the message in person that Stanley did not die there and was never a patient there?”

Lucas sought another autopsy. “There’s blatant evidence of violence against him,” Jason Major, an autopsy technician who performed the independent death review, told Bolts. “He had a footprint on his face that’s clearly visible…he had abrasions on his knuckles, on his knees.” 

To Lucas, it is impossible to square the simple answer for her son’s death—a pulmonary embolism—with the errors, shifting narratives, and obfuscations surrounding Wilson’s death that she received from the County Medical Examiner’s office. (The office did not respond to a request for comment). Major and Lucas both believe that the truth is closer to the County Medical Examiner’s original version of the story; that Wilson collapsed and possibly even died at the jail, and that deputies transported him to the hospital after realizing that they were in flagrant violation of the judge’s order to transfer him months earlier. “They never even checked him in,” Major said. “He basically was dropped off, like Weekend at Bernie’s.” 

Nick Shapiro, the director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, says that Wilson’s case is characteristic of jail deaths in LA County. Fatalities that get chalked up as natural often stem from a complicated interplay of factors such as poor mental health treatment, racialized violence, and negligence, he told Bolts. “The Black population has been subject to specific racial violence from deputy gangs [within the jails]… there’s been very long-term, documented gang related activity in the mental health ward.” 

In a 2022 analysis of 58 autopsies of people who died in LA county jails between 2009 and 2018 (just a small fraction of the total number owing to the county’s refusal to release most records), Shapiro and his co-author, Terence Keel, the founding director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies, found that more than half of the deaths classified as “natural” exhibited signs of violence on the body. They also found that Black people’s deaths were much more likely to be categorized as “natural” than those of other races. “There’s a problem in thinking about ‘natural death’ being the same for incarcerated populations that have no free will to choose what they eat, to choose what they drink, to bathe themselves on their own schedules, to wear appropriate clothing for the weather,” said Shapiro. In a recently published follow-up report, the researchers conclude that these classifications serve to downplay the responsibility of deputies and other jail staff for these deaths, whether through negligence and deprivation of care or outright violence—essentially blaming incarcerated people for their own demise. 

“What we’re looking at is really capital punishment through other means,” Keel told Bolts. 

To Lucas, one of the most suspicious aspects of her son’s death was how the official story changed and coalesced over time: “They’re telling their story after the fact and it appears that they’ve all gotten together because they’re all saying the exact same little story, you know, word for word.” (Lucas said that LASD has refused to release video footage she’s requested). 

Lucas told Bolts that Wilson’s omission from the official LASD tracker leads her to suspect that there are other deaths missing, too. (She recently wrote an editorial for The Appeal exploring this issue). “Within one month of when they started counting—here’s Stanley,” she said. “The beacon to say: look, some of us aren’t being counted. And here’s Stanley with a mama who’s not just going to accept the medical examiner’s statement of how he died.” 

In September, Lucas flew once more to Los Angeles to attend a vigil for those lost inside county jails. The following day, she gave public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting. “While it’s too late for Stanley, I’m here to speak to the importance of providing needed services for inmates with mental health services, and also to support alternatives to incarceration,” she told the board. 

The board has a complex record on both of these issues. “Historically, the board has taken first steps to establish ‘care first’ practices in Los Angeles,” said Simonich of Vera Action. They’ve pledged to shut down Men’s Central Jail, established an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group to explore implementing a variety of services that can preclude jail time, and created a Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department to one day move pretrial services out of the Probation department and instead develop community programs to support people awaiting trial. “Where the board continues to falter is on follow-through.” 

Simonich told Bolts she wanted to see the board immediately commit to a clear timeline to close Men’s Central Jail, which has been responsible for a disproportionate share of deaths this year. “It’s now been more than two years since the board commissioned the report on how to close Men’s Central Jail, and no actual plan has been adopted. No timeline has been put in place,” she said. 

For Brooks S. of Dignity and Power Now, the single most important intervention to alleviate the jail death crisis would be for the Board of Supervisors, in collaboration with the County CEO, to fast-track funding for more county mental health beds. Dignity and Power Now has been working with a woman whose son was jailed about a year ago while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia ; a judge ordered him released to inpatient mental health treatment this fall, but he’s still in jail, and won’t be released until sometime this month because there are so few spaces available. “If there was no waitlist, all of the people who were ordered by the court for mental health diversion could go the day that the order is made,” Brooks S. said. “That would drastically decrease the jail population.” 

The board could see a serious shakeup in several directions during the 2024 elections, from the arrival of Villanueva to the replacement of its most conservative member by a staunch progressive. Two supervisors besides Hahn are up for reelection: Holly Mitchell, whom Justice LA considers the foremost champion of the ’Care First, Jails Last’ agenda, and Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican. 

Mitchell faces three challengers, at least one of whom is questioning her support for criminal justice reforms; the consensus among local observers is that she’ll be the clear favorite in a district that covers South Los Angeles and western portions of the county.

Barger, whose district encompasses LA County’s relatively conservative, exurban Northeast but also includes left-leaning cities like Pasadena and Burbank, faces a challenge from two progressive Democratic candidates, Assemblymember Chris Holden and Burbank Mayor Konstantine Anthony. Two other candidates, Perry Goldberg and Marlon Marroquin, are also in the race. (Here too, the top two candidates will face off in November if no one receives more than 50 percent on March 5.)

Though Hahn has dismissed Villanueva’s candidacy, her political choices in recent months appear directly influenced by his presence in the race. After the former sheriff blamed her for voting for a hiring freeze on deputies in 2022, Hahn spoke emphatically at a recent event against defunding the sheriff’s department, noting that the Board has increased LASD funding by over a billion dollars over the past decade, even boasting that her office had stepped in to pay for extra patrols in some unincorporated communities. Recently, she cast the lone vote against moving parking enforcement out of the sheriff’s department and into the department of public works, which would remove some funding from the sheriff. “To me, that suggests Hahn tacking to the right and specifically playing into law enforcement,” Brooks S. said. 

A spokesperson for Hahn emphasized to Bolts that the supervisor was concerned about rushing the measure without prior study. She added that fully funding LASD and investing in mental healthcare, job training, and youth programs was “not a contradictory effort.” 

One of Hahn’s other challengers, Rancho Palos Verdes City Councilor John Cruikshank, is also running to her right, calling for more detention and support for sheriff officers.

Meanwhile, Barger has recently demonstrated more serious interest in investing in mental health care in the county. But the supervisor has also long expressed support for building a locked mental health facility in place of Men’s Central Jail, which organizers have denounced as a jail by another name. When Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsay Horvath introduced a motion seeking to immediately reduce the jail population in April, both Barger and Hahn expressed their opposition, citing public safety concerns. (Solis ultimately withdrew the motion). “We are desperate for Supervisor Hahn and Supervisor Barger to take the situation in the jail seriously,” said Brooks S. 

In a statement to Bolts, Barger reemphasized her stance on closing the jail. “I believe Men’s Central Jail should be permanently closed and I stand by my belief that we need to replace it with a state-of-the-art facility that is secure, safe, and provides high quality care for those who pose a danger to themselves and the community,” she wrote.

Anthony, the Burbank mayor running against Barger, criticized her record in an interview with Bolts, including her support for a locked mental health facility to replace Men’s Central Jail. “On day one, if it hasn’t been agendized, I will agendize the closing of Men’s Central Jail,” he said. “I will absolutely vote for a speedy timeline. It’s well overdue.” Anthony also told Bolts he’d move to fast track mental health beds, as long as they weren’t supplied through Care Courts, a novel form of court-ordered mental health treatment championed by Governor Gavin Newsom that has drawn criticism from disability rights and civil liberties advocates. “We can build outreach centers…that the county simply funds, and [are] run by the local city or jurisdiction. We need to spread out the help,” he said. 

Holden, Barger’s other challenger, didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. He has supported police and prison reform at the state level, writing a bill known as the “George Floyd law” to establish greater consequences for police who fail to intervene when a colleague is using excessive force, and most recently sponsoring the Mandela Act, which would bring California in line with U.N. restrictions on the use of solitary confinement—including in the local Los Angeles jails. 

Anthony said he hoped to hasten the Board of Supervisors’ halting advancements towards a county system that prioritizes care over incarceration. “By running in this race and getting elected, I’ll be able to flip one of the seats that is preventing a lot of this progress, and hopefully that will get rid of many of the barricades that we’re seeing,” he told Bolts. 

Los Angeles faces the strange possibility of emerging from these elections with four supervisors who have expressed a commitment to advancing criminal legal reform at the county level—and Alex Villanueva. And while it may seem that just one supervisor couldn’t do much to throw a spanner in the works, Simonich of Vera Action cautioned that each member of the Board holds enormous power, from choosing what to place on the agenda for public hearings, which can have significant policy ramifications, to appointing commissioners, including to two separate boards with oversight power over LASD and the jails—and positions such as the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. 

Keel, the UCLA researcher, hopes that the March primaries spur a broader reconsideration of how the county responds to these deaths. He wants the Board of Supervisors to establish an independent medical board to provide a secondary autopsy for everyone who dies in state custody, “whether that’s in jail, or on the streets.” 

 “We are not helping to create a better county if we continue to just assume these people died as a result of their own will and their own poor biology, rather than saying, No, we’re culpable, we’re accountable,” he said. “We need to be thinking differently about inequality—and how the ultimate cost of inequality is death.” 

Correction (Jan. 2024): This article has been updated to reflect the final version of Terence Keel’s and Nicholas Shapiro’s report on LA County Jail autopsies.

The post As Los Angeles Politicians Trade Barbs, Jail Deaths Keep Mounting appeared first on Bolts.

Though it has been significantly overshadowed by French president Emanuel Macron’s controversial attempt to raise the retirement age, the legislation was passed in anticipation of the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, for which the city expects to receive over 9 million visitors from outside the city. The law will allow artificial intelligence programs to sift through video footage collected from public security cameras placed throughout the city, in order to analyze people’s movements in real time and detect suspicious or abnormal behavior.

“That could be, for example, detecting someone running, someone who isn’t moving, who’s static in public space, a face that’s covered up, someone doing graffiti—a lot of different things,” said Alouette, pseudonym for an activist with a French digital rights group that opposes the new law, La Quadrature du Net, and who didn’t want to be named due to privacy concerns.

The law has provoked an outcry from a number of privacy activists, civil society organizations, members of the European Parliament, and lawmakers from France’s left-wing political coalition Nupes. These groups claim that it vastly expands police power, invades individual privacy and civil liberties, and paves the way for further incursions. “We have a lot of evidence that these technologies cause a lot of harm, they lead to misidentification of people and wrongful arrest,” said Mher Hakobyan, Amnesty International’s Advocacy Advisor on AI Regulation. “We have very little evidence that these technologies actually do what authorities say.” 

Organizers in Los Angeles are paying close attention to the developments in Paris, with an eye to what might happen in Los Angeles when the city hosts the 2028 games.

“This kind of surveillance technology is part and parcel of hosting the Olympic Games,” said Eric Sheehan of the group NOlympics LA. “In Tokyo, they tried to pass for years this anti terrorism law and failed because people were not down. As soon as they had the Olympics approved, they passed that law using the Olympics state of exception as their reasoning.”

These concerns around automated video surveillance are the latest in a long list of reasons why NOlympics LA and French counterparts such as Non aux JO 2024 à Paris and Saccage 2024 object to the games. While the massive international events are typically celebrated as an economic boon for host cities, they also come with extraordinary human—and, often, financial—costs, and can give politicians cover to implement policies whose effects will reverberate long after the games end. Local governments around the world are becoming increasingly wary of the impact of the Olympics, with Paris winning the chance to host in 2024 after a number of other major cities withdrew their bids. 

The French government claims that the law does not allow for the collection of biometric data, information about the physical characteristics of individual humans such as fingerprints or DNA, which Alouette, Hakobyan, and others dismiss as semantics. “They say, ‘It doesn’t allow you to identify someone,’” Alouette told Bolts. In fact, she said, AI video surveillance “can automatically recognize someone because of their physical characteristics,” that the only real difference between the recently approved technology and facial recognition is that the algorithm is focused on the body rather than the face. “To us, it is biometric technology,” she said. 

While advocates of AI surveillance technology argue that it is necessary to increase security at major sporting events—a French National Assembly member who belongs to Renaissance, Macron’s party, argued that it could have helped prevent the deadly 2016 terrorist attack in Nice—skeptics worry that it will only serve to amplify the pre-existing biases of law enforcement. Alouette says this newly legalized surveillance would come down hardest on people who spend the most time in public space, who tend to be the poorest members of society—beggars, homeless people, or migrants selling their wares in the street. 

The 2024 Olympic village will be built in Saint-Denis, a working-class area just to the north of Paris that is home to Black and Muslim immigrant populations already subject to heightened scrutiny and aggressive intervention by the French police.

“This technology is being used in a context which is already very hostile to people from certain communities or backgrounds,” said Hakobyan. “How you determine what is abnormal or problematic behavior is, of course, very ingrained and embedded in racist presumptions, but also ableist—because if a person with a certain psychosocial disability can behave in a way which from a normative point of view can be viewed as aggressive.” AI has evinced extraordinarily high rates of misidentification of people of color, for example, in some cases leading to wrongful arrests—something that was already happening long before the existence of AI technology.

“It allows [police] to hide behind an algorithm,” said Alouette, but “an algorithm learns according to the data you feed it.”

As written, Article 7, which contains the law’s video surveillance provisions, is an “experimental” measure that will expire by the end of December 2024, but two lawmakers recently issued a report recommending the use of AI video surveillance be extended beyond the timeframe of the Olympics and add in real-time facial recognition as well—which could be voted on as early as September 2023. 

All of this comes as the European Parliament attempts to significantly restrict the use of algorithmic surveillance technologies via its AI act, which represents the first global attempt to comprehensively regulate the use of artificial intelligence. European law supersedes that of its member states, meaning that France would be out of compliance with regional standards if the AI act passes. But “France is one of the most influential member states in the EU. It has a lot of say in how the act is being developed,” said Hakobyan, noting that France has also used its influence on the European Council, one of the union’s executive bodies, in “trying to water down provisions in the act, so it doesn’t go against what they’re doing nationally.” (The act will become law once the Council and the European Parliament finalize their respective stances on the act and agree on a compromise, which is expected to happen before the end of the year.)

Sheehan of NOlympics LA sees many similarities between the new French law and plans already underway for the 2028 games in Los Angeles. “The LA ‘28 Organizing Committee is excited to announce that they’re going to be using facial recognition for all tickets to the games—meanwhile, French politicians are trying to try to sneak it through,” he told Bolts. 

He also noted that a contingent of LA2028 Olympic Planning Committee officials and LAPD officers, including police chief Michel Moore, had in 2021 traveled to France to discuss both countries’ security preparations for the games with their French equivalents. “The way that it’s policed in every large city around the world is very similar,” he said. 

Sheehan, like many skeptics of the LA 2028 Olympics, foresees a repeat of the 1984 Los Angeles games, which led the LAPD to crack down on street homelessness and rapidly accelerated police militarization in the years after. “In Los Angeles, we’re already seeing evictions, we’re already seeing people being removed—literally for Olympic hotels,” he said. 

Meanwhile, while much of the debate over the law in France has centered on Article 7, Natsuko Sasaki with the anti-Olympics group Saccage 2024 says that there are other concerning aspects as well. Article 12, for example, imposes a 7,500 euro penalty and six months in jail against anyone who enters Olympic premises without a ticket, a move that has been interpreted as an attempt to quell political demonstrations. It could build on existing French laws that are already being used to crack down on public protests against Macron’s recent increase in retirement age and cost of living hikes. “It criminalizes the actions of militants…If we do something at the stadium,” she said. “And so we can’t. We can’t allow ourselves to pay this sort of fine.” 

“Our collective says that we want to cancel the games. That’s the official line. But I’m Japanese and I saw that even Covid didn’t cancel the Olympics,” she said, referencing the 2020 Tokyo games, which were postponed until 2021, then ultimately held without spectators because of the pandemic. For Sasaki, the fight against the Olympics is a marathon, not a sprint. Though Tokyo went ahead, it so soured the Japanese public on the games that the mayor of Sapporo, which had applied to host the 2030 games, recently announced that the city would delay its bid to host. “For us, after Paris, it’s finished,” she said, “but the Olympics continue.”

The post France Enables AI Surveillance Ahead of 2024 Paris Olympics, Alarming Privacy Activists appeared first on Bolts.

The result was pandemonium. Police helicopters hovered overhead long into the night. On the ground, LAPD surrounded and kettled protestors and journalists alike and commenced with mass arrests, including at least 16 members of the press; an officer broke one protestor’s arm with his baton. A year later, a UCLA report would confirm the protestors’ worst suspicions about the approach: vanishingly few of the unhoused residents of Echo Park Lake had been placed in long term housing, the whereabouts of many were unknown, and at least six people had died since being evicted from the encampment.  

To Hugo Soto-Martinez, then a union organizer, Echo Park Lake evinced everything wrong with his representative’s approach to homelessness. “This was, without a doubt, the most egregious abuse of power that I’ve ever seen, exhibited by a council member to the most vulnerable community of our city,” he told Bolts. Soto-Martinez decided to challenge O’Farrell, casting the incumbent’s actions as a symbol of the cruelty and ineffectiveness of the city’s response to its ever-growing unhoused population. He won his election decisively last month, beating O’Farrell by 16 percentage points, and was sworn in as city council member on Sunday.

Soto-Martinez joins a new, three-member bloc of progressives on city council who vocally oppose criminalizing homelessness and support expanding tenant protections and deeply affordable housing. Nithya Raman, a former urban planner who joined the council two years ago, has been defending such an approach since then. And Eunisses Hernandez, an abolitionist organizer, won this year against sitting council member Gil Cedillo, who had deployed a similar strategy of encampment sweeps at his district’s MacArthur Park. Raman and Hernandez both supported Soto-Martinez’s campaign, and all three beat incumbents to secure their seat, a rare feat in LA politics; Raman’s win in 2020 marked the first time it had happened on the council in 17 years.

This week, in their first council session, Soto-Martinez and Hernandez quickly paired up to try to extend the city’s eviction moratorium. And Raman’s team is hopeful there will be strength in numbers going forward. “We’re hoping with some of these new friends in the city council, we can work with them to create a more citywide approach to the issue,” Josh Scarcella, Raman’s homelessness deputy, told Bolts.

These council members are coming to power in a city context that has been transformed by the election of Karen Bass as LA mayor and by the recent passage of Measure ULA, a high-value property sale tax that will fund tenant protections, affordable housing, and homelessness support to the tune of nearly a billion dollars per year. “This is a very unprecedented amount of funding that will enable the city to address the housing crisis at its roots—by both providing housing as well as preventing homelessness in the first place,” said Laura Raymond, the co-chair of the committee behind the measure. Its implementation will be overseen by a 15-person committee, and Raymond said that the coalition that fought for Measure ULA is recommending candidates like housing organizers, formerly homeless people, and tenants who have lived in affordable housing units. 

Meanwhile, Bass, who had made housing affordability and humane solutions to homelessness a cornerstone of her campaign, declared a state of emergency on homelessness this week as her first official act as mayor, a move that allows the city to expedite affordable housing and homeless housing projects, among other things. She committed to getting 17,000 people off the street in her first year, saying the city would “make sure we are using every resource possible at the scale that is needed to save lives and restore our neighborhoods.” The progressive council members have expressed support for Bass’s approach, though some local organizers warn that it may put too much emphasis on speedy solutions rather than the long-term planning that may be needed.

With this sea change, Angelenos are facing an extraordinary opportunity to implement alternative models on housing and homelessness—and with that comes intense pressure to prove that their approach carries a better chance of getting more people off the street, humanely, than the city’s current methods of criminalizing homelessness. 

Eric Ares, Hernandez’s incoming director of housing and homelessness, wants to undo what he sees as the prevailing framework by which people conceive of the city’s homelessness crisis. “There’s this false choice: either you accept the status quo, which is the tents as they are in our streets, or you criminalize,” he said. “The people that got voted on to join city council, many of them got voted on to explicitly explore the things that weren’t being addressed:Increasing tenant protections, building more housing intentionally at all affordability levels, especially for those who need it most, non-law enforcement crisis response.”

For much of the past two years, the city council’s work on homelessness has been consumed by fierce debate over the existence and expansion of anti-camping ordinance 41.18, which outlaws the presence of encampments near shelters, parks, schools, bridges, and other infrastructure. (An analysis by the recently elected left-leaning city controller, Kenneth Mejia, estimates it now stretches to include 20 percent of the city’s territory.) Only Raman and now-former councilmember Mike Bonin have consistently voted against 41.18. Council members can also propose individual 41.18 locations within their district, which must be approved by council. 

In one meeting, Hernandez’s predecessor Cedillo successfully lobbied for 28 new enforcement zones in his district; meanwhile, Raman has never proposed a 41.18 zone in her district.

“In the past year, it’s a little bit of ‘every council district for themselves’ when it comes to homelessness,” said Scarcella. Within her district, Raman has established a homeless outreach team, including staff who work on legislation, liaise with service providers, and do direct outreach to encampments. 

The council’s three left-leaning members met regularly in advance of the new session, which began December 13, and both Hernandez and Soto-Martinez are taking cues from Raman’s approach: hiring staff dedicated to homelessness and housing, establishing direct connections to homeless constituents and encampments, and expanding access to public restrooms, a stunning privation for most unhoused people in LA. 

Both newcomers also denounced 41.18 on the campaign trail, and their offices told Bolts that they will not establish new 41.18 zones in their districts. “It just simply doesn’t work,” Soto-Martinez told Bolts. He also is advocating to stop using armed officers in encounters with unhoused people as a matter of course, and for the establishment of an unarmed response team, similar to Denver’s STAR program. 

But both offices will have to quickly figure out how to respond to the daily displacement to which homeless people in LA are subject. During his campaign, Soto-Martinez promised to end the practice of comprehensive sanitation cleanings, often called “sweeps,” which regularly dislocate unhoused people, lead to the destruction of their belongings, and often involve police. But on December 13, Soto-Martinez’s first week in office, the mutual aid group LA Street Care noted on Twitter that the new council member had not acted to cancel a number of sweeps that were scheduled to take place in his district the following day, despite dangerously low temperatures. Within hours, Soto-Martinez’s office had downgraded the sweeps to a so-called “spot-cleaning,” according to LA Taco reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray, a designation that means that nobody is moved and that the LAPD is not involved. 

Kris Rehl, an organizer with LA Street Care, went to all three sites, and was heartened to discover that the office had kept its word. “All three were just cleanings, what was reported,” Rehl said. “The fact that he was so responsive so quickly has made us really optimistic.”

Things get murkier when it comes to the 41.18 zones that Soto-Martinez and Hernandez’s predecessors have already established in the two districts. Scarcella said that the council office doesn’t control whether police enforce the anti-camping zones that exist in Raman’s district owing to the city-wide elements of the ordinance; the office is still trying to determine the best way to handle these situations. “Our goal is to work diligently with the individuals, provide outreach, and try to get them indoors,” he told Bolts, noting that LAPD is more likely to hold off on enforcement “if they see that there’s work being done, and there’s outreach being conducted.” Ares echoed that view. “The plan is to work with all the different partners that we have to ensure that whenever possible, we are leading with care and with services,” he said. 

For all three council members, the end goal is to craft policy for the entire city based on the care-centered models they implement within their own districts. 

The most critical element will likely be proving that they can get people off the streets and into housing.

Raman’s office has prioritized non-congregate housing like motel rooms, rather than shelter beds, in its efforts to get people into the pipeline to long term shelter. Her office was the only one to open a temporary housing site in 2021 called Project Roomkey, a former hotel with nearly 100 rooms, and residents were both allowed to stay as long as they needed and offered assistance on-site in seeking permanent housing. They have successfully rehoused 55 people through the site, which is temporarily closed pending a funding extension, are currently converting a recently purchased site for their permanent housing initiative, Homekey. “Her office has made tremendous improvements in connecting people with housing,” said Rehl. 

Roomkey shut down in late 2022, which Soto-Martinez has criticized, calling it “LA’s most effective sheltering program” and arguing for it to be extended and improved. Bass wants to extend the program, which was federally funded. 

Soto-Martinez also hopes to implement adaptive reuse (renovating existing infrastructure) as a quicker solution alongside building permanent housing—and eventually, social housing. He has his sights set on St. Vincent Medical Center, a massive, vacant hospital complex in his district. “We can refurbish these buildings much faster,” he told Bolts. 

Hernandez told Bolts in February that she would fight to ensure that new developments in her district contained more units for low-income tenants. Ares spoke of the importance of having a joint strategy: speeding up the process of building new affordable housing while preserving the many existing affordable units in danger of expiring, using public land to build social housing, expanding access to temporary shelter, and keeping people in their homes in the first place. “We have to do all those things at once or else we’re not going to see the changes that everyone wants,” he said, invoking Measure ULA’s comprehensive approach to the city’s housing crisis. The measure devotes the bulk of its funds to affordable housing, including construction, adaptive reuse, and preservation, but also covers emergency rent relief and other tenant protections. 

To make citywide changes, they will have to convince other council members of their approach. 

Bonin, who was for some time the lone voice against criminalization on council, declined to seek reelection this year; the district’s new councilmember, Traci Park, is a firm supporter of 41.18, along with several colleagues. But there are a number of other council members who could side with the bloc on issues of housing and homelessness. And the balance of power could shift more fundamentally as well: in the wake of a leaked conversation filled with racist comments between three members of the LA city council and a union leader, Nury Martinez resigned as council president, leaving her seat up for grabs; Kevin de León, meanwhile, is desperately clinging to power amidst universal calls to resign and a recall attempt. 

On the first day of the new session, that tenuous state of play was succinctly illustrated by Soto-Martinez’s first motion in council, which Hernandez co-presented, to remove the Jan. 31 end date from the ongoing pandemic emergency that has protected renters from eviction. They needed eight votes for it to pass, and three other council members joined with Raman to support the motion. With de León absent and Martinez’s seat lying vacant, though, they fell short by just two votes. 

With the outgoing council having voted to end the city’s eviction moratorium on Jan. 31, thousands of tenants who are behind on their rent could lose their apartments. “We definitely know that the increase in homelessness in LA is very much directly tied to the need for expanded tenant protections,” Ares said. Raymound said Measure ULA will allocate enough money to fully fund access to a lawyer for tenants facing eviction; such counsel can greatly increase the chances of people being able to stay in their homes but is not currently mandated in LA the way the right to a public defender in criminal law cases is. Both Soto-Martinez and Ares told Bolts that their offices want to codify a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction this session. 

Jacob Woocher, a tenant lawyer who organizes with the LA Tenants Union, says the council needs to go even farther to support tenants. He pointed to Raman’s touting of a universal just cause ordinance passed in October. “Just cause without rent increase protections—I don’t want to say it’s meaningless, but it’s much weaker,” he said. “If the landlord can’t get you out for any ‘just cause,’ what they can do is give you an $1,000 rent increase, wait 90 days for that to take effect, and then when that takes effect, and you can’t pay your rent—then you’re kind of screwed.”

Woocher said that he wanted to see the new city council members prioritize the needs of rent-burdened tenants and the homeless community over their relationships with their counterparts on council. “I just hope that they are willing to rely on the communities that put them in office and not be afraid to challenge their colleagues—and know that if they do go out on a limb, for tenants and for unhoused people, that the communities and organizations that have been organizing around these issues will have their back.” 

The post New Progressive Bloc on LA Council Wants to Reshape How City Responds to Homelessness appeared first on Bolts.

Angelenos ousted Alex Villanueva, a first-term sheriff dubbed the “Trump of LA” who fashioned himself as local reformers’ chief antagonist; Villanueva lost by twenty-one percentage points to Robert Luna, the former Long Beach police chief who pledged to reform a department that faces a mountain of abuse allegations. They also approved a ballot measure to allow the County Board of Supervisors to remove any sitting sheriff from power for cause, illustrating a growing skepticism toward the office itself. And they have likely chosen Lindsey Horvath, a West Hollywood council member who has championed alternatives to policing and incarceration, as their next District 3 supervisor over her opponent, Bob Hertzberg, a centrist Democrat who was endorsed by the union that represents sheriff’s deputies.

These outcomes represent the latest in a series of victories for local organizers who have sought to rein in the power of the sheriff and transition Los Angeles away from policing and punishment and toward services. “The community has shown in these last election cycles that they want more accountability over the systems that are imposed on them,” said Ivette Alé-Ferlito, the executive director of La Defensa and former coordinator of Justice LA, the coalition behind many of these wins. In 2020 alone, LA County voters already enshrined greater sheriff oversight and approved Measure J, which would redirect hundreds of millions of dollars from the department into community services.

But policy changes haven’t always followed these triumphs at the ballot box. Two years after its passage, Measure J has yet to be implemented. Shutting down LA’s notorious and decrepit Men’s Central Jail, which Alé-Ferlito called “a money pit for the county,” is becoming a marathon fight; the county’s jail population recently hit a two-year high of 15,000 inhabitants, nearly half of whom haven’t been convicted of the charges against them.

One immediate obstacle has been the obstruction put up by Villanueva, who has refused to obey subpoenas from the Civilian Oversight Commission, as required by an initiative passed by voters in 2020. The defeated sheriff has also crusaded against efforts at criminal justice reform in the country, including going on national television to deride reform efforts, ordering a search of the home of one of his critics, and supporting failed efforts to recall the reform-minded District Attorney George Gascón. 

But local organizers stress that the issue goes far beyond any one office-holder. Though this year’s Measure A may have been crafted with the unabashed defiance of a subpoena-flouting, trash-talking Villanueva in mind, its proponents highlight the fact that it will act as a check on any and all future sheriffs of LA County. “It’s not just the ability to remove them for cause,” said Alé-Ferlito. “It’s also the threat of removal that is significant.”

Most organizers in Los Angeles see Luna’s victory as more of a repudiation of Villanueva than a ringing endorsement for the former Long Beach police chief. “He comes with his own baggage,” said ACLU lawyer Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, who leads the Check the Sheriff Coalition that lobbied for the inclusion of Measure A on the ballot this year. During Luna’s tenure, the Long Beach Police Department was far from scandal-free; the law enforcement data analysis site “Police Scorecard” gave it one of the worst scores in the entire state. 

People who have lost loved ones at the hands of sheriff’s deputies say they will be watching Luna closely. “We know Robert’s history in Long Beach, and we’re already hearing him give promises in these press conferences that Alex gave four years ago,” said Stephanie Luna (no relation) on a recent livestream hosted by Justice LA. Stephanie is the aunt of Anthony Vargas, who was killed by LASD in August 2018.

Alé-Ferlito said LASD itself is plagued with problems that precede its outgoing leader. “[Villanueva’s] vile rhetoric is actually ingrained in the actions of the institution itself,” they said. “Ultimately, it is a tall order for [Luna] to actually bring the massive, bureaucratic, violent institution of the sheriff’s department to heel.”

The coalitions’ focus on institutional change appears to have resonated with voters. As of publication, Measure A has 71 percent of the vote and has received about 200,000 more votes than Villanueva’s challenger. “That Measure A is well outperforming Luna is testament to the fact that people are seeing that it’s not just a matter of who the sheriff is,” Kwon told Bolts. “We need to bring about structural change, and real meaningful checks and balances in civilian oversight and accountability.”

The power to enact these policies lies largely in the hands of the county’s board of supervisors. “The board, of course, continues to be one of the key decision makers,”  said Kwon, noting that when the Check the Sheriff coalition first recommended the measure a year ago, it also proposed a number of other changes the board could make, including strengthening civilian oversight and implementing a number of transparency measures. Of these, only Measure A has become a reality, though the board has taken steps to create a fund for families of people killed by the department and increase public access to LASD records.

Holly Mitchell, who was elected to the board in November 2020 after serving in the state legislature, has emerged as the board’s most stalwart champion of sheriff oversight and alternatives to incarceration. Mitchell is part of a progressive bloc on the five-member board with Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl.

Kuehl’s retirement this year opened the door to a possible end for that tenuous coalition given the support one of the candidates received from the association of sheriff’s deputies. But the more progressive contender, Horvath, leads by 4.5 percentage points as of publication; while tens of thousands of ballots remain to be counted, those tabulated since Election Day have favored her. 

Organizers are hopeful that Horvath’s arrival would shore up the progressive majority and allow the board to take bolder action. “Her win sets us up to have more aligned elected officials on the board—but we still need to apply pressure to get that money allotted for Care First,” said Janet MarLee, a member of Justice LA executive committee member Essie Justice Group. 

As a council member for West Hollywood, Horvath lobbied to slightly reduce the city’s contract with LASD over time and increase the presence of unarmed community responders, who are trained to de-escalate situations. She was also an early supporter of Justice LA’s fight to stop two new jails from being built to replace Men’s Central. “Very few political officials in seats were willing to speak up publicly against jail expansion and for alternatives—and Lindsey Horvath did just that,” Alé-Ferlito said. “She has been diligent about learning the nuances of our policy work.”

Recently, Justice LA has criticized the board for failing to address the jail crisis. Despite voting to begin the process of shutting down Men’s Central Jail in early 2021, the board hasn’t come up with a timeline to do so, and local organizers have criticized Kuehl and Solis for watering down recent reforms. Meanwhile, 55 people died inside the county penal system in 2021, whose conditions have been described by watchdogs as “barbaric” and “medieval,” and which is currently reaching population levels not seen since the early days of the pandemic. A number of organizations and individuals sued the city and county this week to challenge the local bail system, faulting it for keeping people locked up based on how much they can pay rather than how much of a danger they pose to the community.

MarLee told Bolts that her 18-year-old nephew sat in jail for three years before he was sentenced. “Fighting a case inside—opposed to being free and being able to just show that you’re a sustainable member of the community—is difficult, right? Because you’re showing up in your jumpsuit and they’re looking at it from that perspective, that he’s a criminal already,” she said. “7,000 out of 15,000 people are locked up in LA county jails who are pretrial, and they’re there still only because they can’t afford bail or they don’t have access to supportive services that they need.”  

MarLee is also the primary caregiver for her sister, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia 20 years ago. LA’s profound lack of institutional support for people with mental healthcare needs who can’t afford to pay exorbitant rates for private care have left her cycling between the streets and jail. MarLee’s sister would benefit greatly from the services of the Office of Diversion and Reentry, which has been extraordinarily successful in supporting people and forestalling recidivism since its creation in 2015 but has butted up against limits imposed by the LA County CEO. 

Mitchell has pushed for its expansion, and the board recently voted to add over 700 mental health beds, but Alé-Ferlito said it’s nowhere near enough. “We need thousands of mental health beds being built in our communities to be able to divert folks with mental health needs out of the jail system,” they told Bolts, noting that the closure of Men’s Central Jail, one of the movement’s core demands, could free up funds to do so.

“Programs like ODR would be life changing for my family,” said MarLee. “We’re doing our best to take care of our family members, but we’re really ready for LA County, the board of supervisors, to fund the need that we have for the 3600 beds.”

Voters within the city of Los Angeles also signaled a desire to explore alternatives to policing, rejecting the mayoral bid of Rick Caruso who ran on expanding the Los Angeles Police Department, and electing Kenneth Mejia, who ran for controller on educating voters about the size of the LAPD budget. A civil rights attorney who called for reducing prosecutions lost the election for city attorney, though. In Long Beach, a mayoral candidate backed by police unions was also trailing as of publication. But debates over jail and the LASD have crystallized around the county’s institutions. 

Now, the ultimate test for Justice LA’s vision will be moving dollars out of the carceral system and into community programs. A more solid progressive bloc on the board could also help supervisors take on the county CEO, Fesia Davenport, who is responsible for crafting the budget and whom organizers have blamed for the fact that recent budgets haven’t honored the desire for transformative change reflected in voters’ endorsement of Measure J. Alé-Ferlito told Bolts that Mitchell, Solis, and Horvath will “really need to be working together to hold the line on the policies that have already been passed…the board has the power to actually take back their budget and they need to have the political will to do that.”

To Alé-Ferlito, this will also be the test for Luna’s leadership at the sheriff’s office. They aren’t impressed by the reforms Luna has endorsed, including more training for deputies and mental health and substance abuse programs in jails and “on the streets,” as the candidate’s website says. “All those policies are a red herring to what really needs to happen,” they said. “When we’re looking at you know, reforming the sheriff’s department, it’s usually a code for ‘we need more money.’”

“What the county should be doing is diverting folks with mental health needs out of the jail system and funding programs like ODR accordingly to be able to receive them,” Alé-Ferlito told Bolts. “If he’s willing to support the development of mental health treatment outside of his department, great. We’d love to have an advocate in the sheriff’s department saying ‘we need less money.’”

The post Los Angeles Voters Ousted Their Sheriff—and Then Just Kept Going appeared first on Bolts.

But plenty of elections were kicked into November runoffs. In Los Angeles County, home to a quarter of the state’s population, nearly every important race extended to the fall. And in San Francisco, the June recall of reform DA Chesa Boudin triggered a new election to replace him.

Will the scandal-tarred Los Angeles County sheriff, dubbed the “Trump of LA” by his critics, win a second term? Will progressives make gains on the Los Angeles city council, just weeks after a racism scandal forced one member to resign, or on the county’s judicial bench? Will reform prosecutors gain a new ally in Oakland? Will Sacramento ramp up policing against homeless people? Below is Bolts’s guide to the ten elections we are watching most closely in California—and some honorable mentions.

1. Alameda County district attorney

Nancy O’Malley, Alameda County’s longtime DA and a former president of California’s DA association, has been a vocal critic of many of the legislative reforms and ballot initiatives that progressives have championed to reduce incarceration. O’Malley is retiring this year, leaving deputy DA Terry Wiley, whom she has endorsed, to run against civil rights attorney Pamela Price, an outsider candidate and a strong critic of O’Malley’s failure to address racial disparities in the county’s justice system. “If you are a Black person in Alameda County, you are 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white person,” she told Bolts. “That’s an unacceptable, intolerable level of racial injustice that just called me to action.” 

Wiley casts himself as sympathetic to reform, stressing his efforts to improve the juvenile justice system and reduce racial disparities from within. But he also presents himself as a moderate alternative to Price, which has won him the support of an array of law enforcement unions. Price is more squarely in the mold of progressives who have won DA offices elsewhere in the country: she has committed to never charging children as adults and centering restorative justice initiatives. Both candidates are also running in the shadow of horrible gun violence in Oakland. The winner will be the first Black DA in Alameda, a county of more than 1.6 million residents that encompasses the cities of Berkeley and Oakland. 

2. Los Angeles County sheriff

Under Alex Villanueva’s leadership, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department has been marred by scandals and investigations into abuses and organized violence—enough to fill a book, Bolts reported in May. And the sheriff only drew more scrutiny since then as he ordered the search of the house of one of his chief critics in September.

In the runoff, Villanueva faces Robert Luna, who has accumulated his own controversies while heading the police department in Long Beach. The incumbent’s critics have still rallied around Luna, including Eric Strong, a more progressive challenger who was eliminated in June after coming in third. Whoever emerges victorious, local progressives have made it clear that they are circumspect about any talk of internal change given a history of failed reform, and they are pressing for more independent oversight: Angelenos are also deciding on Measure A, which would enable the county’s board of supervisors to remove a sheriff from office. 

3. Los Angeles County judges

Progressive organizers in Los Angeles have crafted a relatively novel tactic this year: electing judges who want to reduce incarceration. Judicial elections are some of the most opaque and sparsely covered races in U.S. politics, but judges  hold a great deal of discretion when it comes to bail, sentencing, and resolving cases without incarceration. Most judges are former prosecutors, and very few judges have backgrounds as public defenders; a recent study found that judges with public defense experience tend to avoid incarceration more frequently and hand down shorter sentences

Enter four candidates—three public defenders, and one civil rights attorney—who formed an informal slate, each running in a separate countywide race. Holly Hancock, Anna Slotky Reitano, Carolyn “Jiyoung” Park, and Elizabeth Lashley-Haynes all made it into the “Top 2” runoffs of their respective races in June. “We need judges that recognize and appreciate addiction programs, mental health programs, rehabilitation programs—we need judges that are going to implement restorative justice,” Lashley-Haynes told Bolts this spring. 

4. Los Angeles mayor 

Aided by over $80 million of his personal fortune, Rick Caruso, a billionaire mall developer and former Republican, burst onto the scene with a mayoral campaign centered on “cleaning up LA” and on responding to a rise in violent crime by strengthening the LAPD. Unusually for such a large city, Los Angeles has a “weak mayor” system, but the office still has a lot of power, and Caruso’s candidacy captured national attention as a test of Angelenos’ appetite for a law-and-order mayor. In June, Caruso came in behind U.S. Representative Karen Bass, a Democrat and a former physician assistant and community organizer who founded an influential community organization in South LA.

At first glance, it’d be hard to imagine two more opposite candidates. But Caruso has reinvented himself as a Democrat and talks up his support for reproductive freedom to win in this liberal city, despite past statements and donations. Bass, meanwhile, has veered to the right on issues of criminal justice and homelessness. She has distanced herself from progressive policies and politicians like DA George Gascón and has emphasized uncontroversial reforms like providing police officers with more training. The candidates’ relative convergence on these issues is captured by their joint support for 41.18, the controversial ordinance banning homeless encampments in wide swaths of the city; local housing advocates have criticized the ordinance for spurring constant displacement while doing nothing to actually solve homelessness.

Angelenos still have a sharp choice to make on homelessness and housing since their ballot also features Measure ULA, which would fund housing development and homelessness prevention efforts via a 4 percent tax on the sale of properties worth over $5 million, and a 5.5 percent tax for properties worth over $10 million. The measure, branded the “mansion tax,” is projected to raise between $600 million and $1.1 billion annually. It has the support of tenants rights organizations and homelessness advocates, but neither Bass nor Caruso have endorsed it.

5. Los Angeles city council

This powerful city council was left in tatters in early October after a tape leaked that featured three council members exchanging in a conversation filled with racist and cruel remarks. Council president Nury Martinez resigned in disgrace, while her colleague Kevin de Léon, whose term ends in 2024, appears determined to keep his job; the third councilmember, Gil Cedillo, already lost his re-election bid in June to abolitionist organizer Eunisses Hernandez. 

Even before the scandal, Los Angeles was in the midst of a power vacuum, and several council races on the ballot this fall will further decide its upcoming politics.

In District 13, which covers most of the eastside neighborhoods Echo Park, Hollywood, and Silverlake, labor organizer Hugo Soto-Martinez is challenging incumbent Mitch O’Farrell. O’Farrell has supported the expansion of anti-camping policies across the city, advocated for increased police funding and presence in Hollywood, and attacked his opponent for supporting the reduction of police budgets Soto-Martinez, meanwhile, favors setting up more unarmed response teams and has taken aim at O’Farrell’s decision to clear a large homeless encampment from Echo Park Lake in March 2021, which led to mass arrests of protestors and journalists. O’Farrell’s office offered short-term housing and services in advance, but very few of the people living in the encampment still have housing, and several have died. 

In District 11, which covers the city’s west side, councilmember Mike Bonin is retiring; he was one of the council’s few consistent votes against criminalizing homelessness. Though he has at times downplayed comparisons with Bonin, civil rights lawyer Erin Darling’s policies align most closely with the outgoing council member’s: he opposes 41.18, and wants to get police out of traffic stops and nonviolent disturbances. Darling’s opponent Traci Park has opposed Bonin’s efforts to create more housing for homeless people, even bringing a lawsuit against the conversion of a motel near her home. Park wants to increase police presence across the city—the Los Angeles Police Protective League called her “law enforcement’s choice.” 

6. Los Angeles city controller

Ordinarily, this obscure and habitually misunderstood office would not warrant inclusion on such a list. But Kenneth Mejia, one of the two candidates in the Nov. 8 runoff, has brought a creative approach to his campaign, Bolts reported in July. He is proposing to use the office to increase transparency around the city’s finances and show residents just how much public money is being spent on policing–and what exactly that money is going toward. 

Mejia put up  a billboard that visualizes the size of the police budget. His campaign has put out data visualization tools that map LAPD traffic and pedestrian stops, and aggregate LAPD vendors in order to increase transparency. Mejia faces Paul Koretz, a city council member and former lawmaker who emphasizes a more traditional approach to the role focused on correcting government inefficiencies.

7. Los Angeles city attorney 

A heated race for Los Angeles city attorney has become yet another exemplar of a   debate playing out nationwide over whether to leave low-level offenses out of the criminal court system.  

The office handles only misdemeanor cases; it also defends the city against lawsuits filed against it. Civil rights attorney Faisal Gill announced this summer that he would impose a 100-day pause on filing misdemeanor charges in order to evaluate whether to establish a more permanent ban on certain charges. (Bass, the mayoral candidate, eventually withdrew her endorsement of Gill after facing attacks over it by Caruso). Gill has also said he won’t enforce LA’s controversial anti-camping ordinance. His opponent Hydee Feldstein Soto has taken a very different approach, responding to Gill’s 100-day moratorium by saying, “You might as well take a bulletin board and say, ‘Bad guys from all over the world, please come to Los Angeles.” 

8. Sacramento’s housing referendum, Measure O

Sacramento, like many California cities, has faced a sharp rise in people experiencing homelessness. Voters are now deciding whether to ramp up policing with a ballot measure that would outlaw camping on public property; the measure would also require that the city create new shelter spaces. The measure aims to comply with a court ruling that cities in California can only enforce anti-camping ordinances if they have shelter beds available. But local housing advocates say the support offered is inadequate. 

They decry this push-pull dynamic of offering people shelter and criminalizing them for not having it, and they warn that it leads to an endless cycle between streets, shelters, and jail. “We keep funding police to do Band-Aid work instead of finding solutions,” Asantewaa Boykin, co-founder of a crisis response team that works with unhoused individuals, told Bolts. “I feel like I’m screaming at a wall.”

9. San Diego County sheriff

Home to California’s deadliest large jail system, San Diego has been hit by damning reports about the conditions that are contributing to this crisis. After the sheriff resigned earlier this year amid scandals, the jail’s dangerous conditions became an unusually prominent issue in the race to replace him. But even as the candidates talk about reducing deaths, Bolts reported in June that they bring vastly different commitments to the table. 

The candidate who went furthest in proposing changes, Dave Myers, lost in the June primary; this paved the way for a Nov. 8 runoff between Undersheriff Kelly Martinez, who is endorsed by the association of deputy sheriffs, and John Hemmerling, a Republican who is generally critical of criminal justice reform. 

10. San Francisco district attorney

Chesa Boudin, the prominent reform DA, was recalled in June after a campaign fueled by anger about growing homelessness and petty theft, propelled by opposition from the city’s powerful police union, and heavily funded by dark money. Mayor London Breed, a frequent critic of Boudin, appointed the recall surrogate Brooke Jenkins to serve as interim DA. The transition has brought a sea change to the DA’s office: the dismissal of 15 staffers, including a complete turnover at the unit that investigates police violence against civilians, and reversals of key Boudin policies, including his moratoriums on gang sentencing enhancements, on seeking cash bail, and on charging children as adults. 

In the upcoming special election, Jenkins will defend her new seat against two challengers. The first is attorney Joe Alioto Veronese, a critic of both Boudin and Jenkins who is positioning himself as tough on crime and corruption. The progressive lane is occupied by John Hamasaki, the former police commissioner and critic of  the San Francisco Police Department, who has lambasted Jenkins for her close relationship with London Breed and acceptance of large sums of money from the recall campaign.

Honorable mentions

Of California’s 58 counties, only three have contested DA runoffs in November—Alameda and San Francisco (see above), as well as Imperial, on the state’s southern border—and seven have contested runoffs for sheriff. (See Bolts‘s full list of candidates who ran for DA and sheriff this year across the state.) 

In such an immense state, many other local elections will shape criminal justice policy. 

In Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles, policing has been a major faultline in a mayoral race between two council members. The Long Beach Police Officers Association, which is supporting Suzie Price, has attacked Rex Richardson for his past support for reducing the police budget in favor of community alternatives; progressives are criticizing Price for opposing a fund to defend undocumented immigrants. But Long Beach has a ‘weak mayor’ system, and a council-appointed city manager enjoys a lot of power—including appointing the police chief. 

Oakland voters will also elect a new mayor. With ranked-choice voting, they will decide which of ten candidates will replace outgoing mayor Libby Schaaf, who has consistently supported expanding the budget of the Oakland Police Department, which has been under federal oversight for years. 

And an election for one of the five seats on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors could either shore up the board’s progressive majority or dissolve it. This is the body responsible for deciding the county budget, which includes funding for the sheriff department and for mental health or youth programs. Incumbent Sheila Kuehl, who is termed out, is a critic of Villanueva and she has been a champion of the county’s “Care First, Jails Last” policy, which aims to fund alternatives to incarceration. Running to replace her are West Hollywood city council member Lindsey Horvath, who recently helped secure a reduction of the number of sheriff’s deputies contracted to patrol West Hollywood in favor of unarmed community response teams, and state Senator Bob Hertzberg, a moderate endorsed by the association of L.A. Deputy Sheriffs.

But suspense in one election that was once seen as a potential barnburner has deflated.

Rob Bonta’s bid for a full term as attorney general was dubbed by Politico in the spring as the major bellwether for the public’s appetite for criminal justice reform. But Bonta, who has a long record as a reform-friendly politician that he has cultivated since becoming attorney general in 2021, received 55 percent of the vote. That’s roughly on par with the Democrats running statewide for governor or lieutenant governor. Independent candidate Anne Marie Schubert, a DA who gained national attention for pressing the case against criminal justice reforms, came in fourth with 8 percent and was eliminated from the runoff. Bonta now faces Republican Nathan Hochman, who also staunchly opposes the reforms pursued in the state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who appointed Bonta last year and is running for a second term, has also enjoyed significant leads in the governor’s race. 

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the county that the city of Richmond in in.

More coverage of criminal justice in the California midterms

Sacramento Ballot Measure Pushes Policing to Address Housing Crisis

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Auditing the Status Quo in Los Angeles

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The Movement to Decarcerate Los Angeles Targets Judicial Elections

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Ducking Racism Scandal, Orange County DA Turns to Dog Whistles

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Abolitionist Organizer Wants to Fill Los Angeles Power Vacuum

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Oakland’s Sheriff Is Ousted After a Long Tenure Leading Deadly Jail

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“Fool Me Once”: Scandals and Abuses Fuel Unease Toward ‘Reform’ Talk in Los Angeles Sheriff Race

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Meet the Other Two Northern California DAs Facing Law Enforcement Blowback

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San Diego Race Will Decide New Leadership For California’s Deadliest Jail System

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The post California’s 10 Most Critical Elections for Criminal Justice and Policing appeared first on Bolts.

Last summer, a billboard with an unexpected image graced the intersection of Olympic and Crenshaw boulevards in Los Angeles. Near advertisements for personal injury lawyers and recently released television shows hung a bar chart illustrating how the city spends the public’s money. A green rectangle representing police spending under the mayor’s proposed 2021-2022 budget dwarfed the numbers for housing and homelessness, stretching all the way to the right-most side of the frame to represent over $3 billion. The caption asked simply: Is Mayor Garcetti’s Budget Good For You?

The billboard was put up by Kenneth Mejia, the frontrunner in the race for Los Angeles city controller. Mejia has taken a creative and unconventional approach to campaigning for a position that is habitually misunderstood and hardly ever considered exciting. In running for the elected office responsible for audits, financial reporting, and the city’s payroll, he has used public records requests to glean data on everything from LAPD traffic stops to the residence of every LA city employee, presenting the information in easy-to-use online platforms, plastering it on billboards like the one at Olympic and Crenshaw, and promoting it relentlessly on social media. 

Thus far, these efforts have paid off: Mejia won the endorsement of the L.A. Times editorial board, which commended him for using his campaign “to demonstrate the kind of transparency-and-data-driven controller he would be.” In June, in a crowded, seven-person nonpartisan primary, the 31-year-old candidate finished first with 43 percent of the vote, more than 100,000 votes ahead of longtime city council member Paul Koretz. Mejia and Koretz are now set to face off in a November runoff. 

Mejia’s campaign strategy builds on the efforts of groups like the People’s Budget LA, a coalition of organizations led by Black Lives Matter LA that argue that the city’s spending priorities should look very different. His approach—to visualize and publicize the chasm between the city’s current budget and demands for reform coming from the community— follows the logic behind campaigns like the People’s Budget Report, released during the George Floyd uprisings in mid-2020, which polled thousands of residents and juxtaposed their budgetary priorities with Mayor Garcetti’s “Justice Budget” proposal. 

This sort of campaign has deep roots in Los Angeles: In 2003, the nascent Youth Justice Coalition, which is now a member of People’s Budget LA, mounted a “dollar for dollar” campaign with the goal of massively expanding funding for youth centers, intervention workers, and jobs. “That was essentially a youth-led campaign to urge city officials to invest the same amount of dollars they do into law enforcement and criminalization spending into youth development,” said the group’s media coordinator, Emilio Zapién. 

Meijia shares the fundamental goal of these campaigns: to engage voters in the city’s budgetary process, reframing something commonly viewed as abstract and opaque as a willful process of resource allocation—one that affects everything from what neighborhood you can afford to live in to where in the city you’re most likely to get arrested. 

“I’m hoping that we can have a more transparent LA, especially with funding, and that’s what I want to bring as city controller,” Mejia told Bolts. “Like, nothing’s hidden, you can’t hide it. You’re going to show it and you’re going to explain why you did it.”

To those who would dismiss him as just an activist, Mejia has a quick rejoinder: he’s also a certified public accountant, a qualification that few city controllers possess. “In the past, the controller position has been used as a placeholder position for career politicians who just need a job,” Mejia told Bolts. “That’s why a lot of people don’t know where their money’s being spent or if it’s being used effectively or efficiently.”

Francine McKenna, a lecturer in financial accounting at Wharton who also maintains a newsletter about auditing and accounting issues, says it’s much more common for city controller candidates to be politicians looking for a stepping stone than actual financial professionals. “I can’t remember anybody ever running a campaign saying, ‘I’m actually an accountant with a CPA and I know how to do this stuff,’” McKenna told Bolts.

McKenna first found out about Mejia’s campaign on Twitter. In an interview, she praised the candidate’s online engagement and use of public records to inform residents about the city’s payroll, affordable housing, LAPD arrest and homelessness criminalization zones, and more. “He’s using the skills and the background that he brings as a CPA, as someone who’s worked in public accounting and consulting,” she said. “He’s bringing those to the table and saying, here are all the ways that we think citizens should have greater transparency in terms of where the need is—and how that compares with where money is spent.” 

Mejia possesses a somewhat unique background, having worked both as an auditor for the massive accounting firm Ernst & Young and as a tenants rights and housing activist. At 31, he has already run for national office twice, on the Green Party ticket, before deciding to re-register as a Democrat and focus on local electoral politics. “Everything that I cared about—homelessness, housing, policing, the environment, transportation—it was like, ‘oh, this is all on the local level,’” he recalled.

If Mejia’s third bid for office proves successful, he will occupy a strange place in Los Angeles politics. “At its core, the controller has an immense responsibility that’s probably second only to the mayor and the city attorney—but at the same time, it has extremely limited power.” said Rob Quan, an organizer with Unrig LA, which works against the influence of money in politics locally. The controller cannot investigate other elected officials. The office also can’t set its own budget, and can’t in any way compel the rest of the city government to accept its recommendations. The roughly 130-person department is chronically underfunded. According to Jeremy Oberstein, the former chief of staff to current controller Ron Galperin, much of its auditing resources are taken up performing mandatory, time-consuming reports on the Department of Water and Power and the city’s airports and sea port. 

Quan predicted that it might be difficult for Mejia to completely square his big-picture activist mindset with some of the realities of the position. “I think it’s pretty safe to say there’ll be that tension there,” he said. 

But despite these limits, the city controller does have one key arrow in their quiver, Oberstein said: the discretion to perform an audit “at any point.” The vast, sprawling city budget—nearly $12 billion for the upcoming fiscal year—is theirs to examine, sift through, and hold up to the light. And while city controllers don’t have the ability to enact policy, their reports can still influence public discourse and potentially translate into change. 

Ultimately, the job is quasi-journalistic in both its emphasis on investigation and communication, as well as its indirect ability to influence outcomes, McKenna says. “You have to find a way to communicate sometimes difficult information or information that seems technical or seems kind of narrowly focused. You have to find a way to say: this is important.”  

Quan agreed that the credibility and persuasiveness of a city controller’s reports have everything to do with the level of influence the position can wield. “Your audits can just be headlines, or they can translate into real policy change,” he said.

Mejia acknowledges the limitations of the office but says he hopes to use his audits to motivate constituents to speak up for political transformation. “We don’t have any policy-making power—we can’t change anything, pass rent control, we can’t stop evictions,” Mejia said. “Our power as controller is we provide data and the facts and the numbers for people to use. And then they are the ones who push the policymakers to make systemic change.”

One critical element of the job is the ability to reach people where they’re at. Oberstein stressed that Mejia is not the first to creatively visualize data—Galperin’s office has won awards for its work on data transparency. From the perspective of Youth Justice Coalition’s Zapién, however, Mejia has done a better job getting it into the hands of a wide array of people.

“My role as media coordinator is to be able to collect information that is going to be accessible to our folks, and share with them in a way that feels accessible and not intimidating or overwhelming or confusing—because these systems are designed to be complex and confusing, so that our people don’t feel like they have access,” Zapién told Bolts. “Are you sharing things in a way that it’s accessible to the people doing the work on the ground, regardless of whether we agree with you fully politically or not?”

Zapién noted that he often screenshots Mejia’s resources and sends them to colleagues. They’ve proved useful tools for illuminating the budgeting decisions behind young people’s daily experiences: why LAPD harasses them on the way to and from school, or why they only have only one youth center. “When we actually look at the numbers,” he said, there’s a powerful connection between how the city chooses to spend its money and the outcomes for its residents: “Of course, what do we expect to happen when we’re spending all this money on law enforcement and lockups and not in youth development?”

Mejia’s campaign is working on creating more campaign resources to add to those he’s already released. Next up is a database on the most expensive lawsuits the city has paid out, a map of park inequity across LA, and a big report on the LAPD—“so that people can have a one-stop shop on understanding, like, where the hell’s my $3.2 billion going?” the candidate told Bolts.

“At the end of the day, the controller is—by charter—a job that is open to redefinition,” Oberstein said. “The goal of the job, in my mind at least, should be to drive lasting change. And you do that by creating relationships and speaking truth to power.”

On that matter, the two runoff candidates take opposite approaches. Koretz, Mejia’s opponent in November, has campaigned as an insider, touting his close relationships at City Hall. Mejia flips that logic on its head. “As an outsider and a CPA, I can hold people accountable,” he told Bolts. “We don’t owe the establishment anything because we’re not part of it to begin with.”

In recent weeks, the two candidates’ diametrically opposed relationships to the status quo have boiled over into open conflict. Mejia is a sharp critic of the city’s approach to homelessness, which is characterized by widespread criminalization. Koretz, meanwhile, has been an architect and staunch defender of that approach. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Mejia’s website recently posted a map and analysis of the city’s anti-camping policy, 41.18, showing that unhoused people would be banned from sitting, sleeping and storing belongings in about 20 percent of the city under an expanded version of the law. This statistic has pushed  public debate on the issue, quickly becoming a talking point repeated by activists and local media alike. At a city council meeting on Aug. 9 to vote on the matter, members of the Services not Sweeps Coalition, which has a good deal of overlap with People’s Budget LA, disrupted the event, testifying vociferously to the law’s inhumanity. “I just want help,” one unhoused woman sobbed. 

Mejia was there alongside them. “We’re here at City Hall today to support our unhoused neighbors,” he tweeted. (The candidate has downplayed his involvement with the People’s Budget LA, telling Bolts, “our campaign’s relationship is just providing financial information about the city.”) After protestors were forced out of the chamber by police, Koretz blamed his opponent, saying: “Just because Kenneth Mejia and his band of anarchists tried to break up two different meetings, we’re not going to stand for it. We’re going to take the action that we need to take.” The city council ultimately voted 11-3 to go ahead with the expansion.

One of Mejia’s central goals is to audit the city’s sweeps of encampments and other ways officials have criminalized people who sleep on the street. “I think what you’ll find is tens of millions of dollars being spent on these sweeps—and you’ll notice that the performance metrics of getting people housed from the sweeps are terrible,” he told Bolts. “I’m hoping that we can show just how much the city has failed on tackling homelessness.”

The post Auditing the Status Quo in Los Angeles appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note: Robert Luna and Alex Villanueva clinched the Top 2 spots in the June 7 primary; Luna then prevailed in the November general election.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has made a national name for himself as a swaggering, autocratic leader hostile to any challenge, however minor, to his power. He has alternately denied the existence of the murderous deputy gangs that plague his department, and said he’s neutralized them. Under Villanueva, the department covered up at least one incident of deputy violence against someone in custody. He has defied subpoenas from an oversight commission established by LA County’s governing body, the five-member Board of Supervisors. He has bullied and maligned those who question his authority: suggesting that the supervisors, all women, needed to be “taken to the shed and they need to be beat down so they start doing their job”; calling LA County’s Inspector General a Holocaust denier; and threatening to use the power of his agency to investigate a LA Times reporter assigned to cover his department. Most gravely, Villanueva has presided over a force that has killed dozens of civilians, and a jail system, the largest in the county, in which 55 people alone died in 2021. An exhaustive list of scandals and abuses could fill a book.

Villanueva is up for reelection this year: the primary is set for June 7, and if he does not get over 50 percent of the vote, there will be a general election in November. It’s hard to imagine how a man who has garnered a reputation as “the Trump of LA” could win reelection in the multiracial, heavily working class, staunchly Democratic panoply that is LA County. For everyone from centrist Democrats to the activist left, four more years of Villanueva is an unthinkable prospect. But none of Villanueva’s eight challengers has raised much money or emerged as a major threat. “It really feels like a very unsettled race,” said David Levitus, the Executive Director of LA Forward Action, a local progressive member group.

A county-wide race in a county of ten million people is expensive, and a sitting sheriff has only been defeated once in over a century—in 2018, when Villanueva ousted then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell, who took office in 2014 after the previous elected sheriff, Lee Baca, resigned amid a corruption scandal that ultimately ended in his criminal conviction. Villanueva himself ran on a reform platform in 2018, campaigning to “clean house” at the department and garnering the support of many Democratic clubs and even progressive organizations. He then broke nearly every promise he made during that campaign, alienating his former supporters; the LA County Democratic Party has since called for his resignation. “A lot of people were burned really bad,” said Levitus. “They’re like: fool me once.”

This hesitance speaks to a growing suspicion about the department itself—one that is already fully realized in much of Los Angeles’s activist left. 

“The people who really control the ground [in LA]—they fundamentally don’t believe the sheriff’s department should exist,” said Lex Steppling, Director of Campaigns and Policy at Dignity & Power Now, an LA-based abolitionist organization that fights for currently and formerly incarcerated people. Supporting any candidate for sheriff—who, by virtue of California law, must have a law enforcement background—is in direct conflict with many people’s politics, and there is understandable skepticism about how much one person can change a department with an entrenched history of violence. 
Many stakeholders believe it’s more important to focus time and energy on limiting the sheriff’s power, no matter who ends up in the seat, and are pushing for an amendment to the LA County charter that would bolster county and civilian oversight of the department. For others on the left, however, ousting Villanueva could still make a material difference to those most affected by the sheriff’s department. “On the other hand,” said Steppling, “you have people saying, Yeah, but you know, it does exist—so while it exists, do you want Villanueva to win again?”

It’s worth noting that my own experience with LASD has not been limited to reporting on the department. Almost exactly two years ago, I was arrested by Los Angeles Sheriff’s deputies for violating a countywide curfew while protesting the police murder of George Floyd, and held in the back of a freezing cold bus for approximately five hours, my hands ziptied behind my back. The arrest momentarily propelled me past the line that separates the experience most white, middle-class Angelenos have with LASD—minimal—from that of communities most often targeted by the department: Black and Latinx people, the poor and unhoused, people struggling with mental illness, and the department’s vocal critics. When I was released, I realized I didn’t know much about the agency that had just exerted total power over my life, and neither did most other middle-class white people I knew in LA.

In the intervening years, the public image of the sheriff’s department has changed quite a bit. The deputy gangs that fester in the department are now national news, thanks to the dedicated work of a few people and a 15-part series by local independent reporter Cerise Castle, who has provided a comprehensive account of their inner workings and human toll. In a statement, LASD denied the existence of gangs within the department, referencing “unproven allegations regarding deputy sub-groups,” and added: “due to multiple active investigations and pending ligation [sic], we are unable to comment further at this time.”

Slow but sure progress has been made by local organizations working to establish oversight and accountability for LASD. But at the same time, very little has changed. Jail deaths and deputy shootings have risen every year since Villanueva took office, and the sheriff is increasingly defiant of attempts to curb his authority. “He’s such a loathsome figure, and he just gets more and more antagonistic,” Steppling told me.

This history of illusory reforms has left Los Angeles voters who care about ending the well-documented abuses of the department in an awkward position. 

Among the crowded field of candidates seeking to unseat Villanueva, Eric Strong’s policy platform reflects many of the immediate demands from the activist left in Los Angeles. An almost 30-year department veteran, Strong has centered his campaign around eliminating deputy gangs, supporting alternatives to incarceration such as mental health services, and establishing full data transparency and accountability to impacted families. He also opposes the construction of a new jail to replace Men’s Central Jail, a decrepit facility that local activists have been struggling to shut down for years.

Strong, who is Black, has spoken of having family members incarcerated and even losing a loved one to police violence. In an interview, he recalled his first negative experience with law enforcement: “I was 16 years old, driving my dad’s car—and getting pulled over, getting pulled out of the car, thrown on the ground, roughed up a little bit. And I know I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Strong’s dad was also a cop, so to him, the two officers who’d treated him poorly were just outliers. But over the years, as he started working for the Compton police and then became a deputy when that department got absorbed into LASD, he began to see how the problem went beyond individual officers. At LASD, he spent several years in internal affairs, where he says investigating deputies accused of wrongdoing helped him realize the extent of misconduct and corruption inside the department. “If there’s a policy violation or a crime, A to Z, somebody in this department has done it,” Strong said. “And that was very shocking to me.” 

Strong also noticed a pattern of deputies seeking to retroactively justify their actions rather than evaluating them honestly—he called it the “write it right” mode of filing reports. “If it’s a bad shooting, we need to call it a bad shooting, period,” he told me. And pervasive cronyism meant that some deputies, especially people of color, had careers ruined over missteps, while serious misconduct barely affected the trajectory of others. While he was at Internal Affairs, he said, “We saw a new emergence of deputy gangs, particularly in our jails.” An investigation he led into a 2010 Christmas party brawl between members of the 3000 Boys, a gang that started at Men’s Central Jail, culminated in the termination of six deputies, though he says still more should have been fired. 

As the primary nears, Strong has accrued endorsements from a number of local Democratic clubs and progressive groups, including the Progressive Asian Network for Action and LA Forward Action. Levitus said that though he was fully prepared to forgo a primary endorsement and take a broader anyone-but-Villanueva stance, his membership was surprised and impressed by Strong. “We felt like he was well positioned to go in there and try to clean up the department as much as possible, given the disaster that it is,” Levitus said. “I wish I had known about him sooner.”

For months, Strong struggled to gain traction and raise the type of money that would boost his name recognition. “It just comes down to: is his campaign going to get the resources needed to platform itself?” Steppling asked. “If Strong is able to platform himself, I believe he’ll win.”

With Villanueva dug in and openly scornful of anyone who questions him, he has many challengers promising to reform the department, calling out deputy gangs and paying lip service to transparency and accountability. Much of the Los Angeles Democratic establishment is split between two other candidates: Cecil Rhambo and Robert Luna. Both men have garnered endorsements from a long list of unions, Democratic clubs, and local and state politicians, though there is plenty in both of their records to undercut any reformist claims. 

Rhambo has a history of on-the-job shootings and was one of two assistant sheriffs during a jail abuse scandal that sent both of his superiors, Sheriff Baca and Paul Tanaka, to federal prison (Rhambo went on to testify against both men, but an ACLU class action suit alleged that he had also been aware of abuse  inside the jail). Under Luna’s watch, the Long Beach Police Department targeted gay men in sting operations until as recently as 2016, took pains to conceal and destroy internal communications, and spent tens of millions settling use of force, wrongful death, and civil rights lawsuits. Police Scorecard, a site that compiles and evaluates data from police departments around the country, ranked Long Beach PD the second-worst in the state.

Luna’s campaign emailed a statement defending his record at Long Beach PD and emphasizing that he is “the only major candidate in the race who comes from outside the sheriff’s department.” Rhambo’s campaign didn’t respond to my questions. 

For some, the fact that prominent groups and officials are still taking these candidates seriously despite their troubling records is further evidence that the election is a red herring. “Who’s to say that the next sheriff won’t be as bad or worse, right?,” asked Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, an ACLU lawyer and LASD critic. “It’s hard to imagine, but it can happen. I mean, it happened with Villanueva.”

One of Villanueva’s strongest critics has been the coalition Check the Sheriff, which includes local racial justice and immigrants’ rights organizations like the ACLU SoCal, Black Lives Matter LA, Dignity & Power Now. The coalition came together in February 2019, just a few months after Villanueva was elected. “Some folks started asking, do we need to recall this guy?” Kwon, an active member, recalled. “After some healthy conversation, we concluded that what we really needed was structural change. I mean, if you get rid of the head of the monster, the monster is still there. It’s gonna grow another head.”

Right now, only voters can remove Villanueva, but a more law-enforcement friendly Board of Supervisors could further empower him by jettisoning two, relatively recent mechanisms for outside scrutiny: the Office of Inspector General and the Civilian Oversight Commission. The coalition is accordingly pressing for an amendment to the LA County charter that would give the Board of Supervisors impeachment powers, clarify its authority over the sheriff’s department, and codify civilian and county oversight. Strong is the only candidate in the race who has publicly stated his support for Check the Sheriff’s charter amendment. 

The coalition is also working on ending the targeted harassment of families who have spoken up about the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of LASD. A joint report last year documented how sheriff’s deputies have repeatedly tailed, surveilled, pulled over and searched, arrested without cause, recorded, and taunted the family members of Paul Rea and Anthony Vargas. “What these families have been facing is persecution by the state,” Kwon said. “It would actually meet the definition of persecution in refugee law.”

For people who have been on the receiving end of the department’s violence, this race is especially painful—and complicated. Some have thrown their weight behind Eric Strong; others are avoiding the race altogether, or focusing on other organizing goals. Kwon noted that most of the impacted families in the Check the Sheriff coalition wanted nothing to do with the race.

Jonetta Ewing first encountered Strong on Instagram. Ewing’s partner, Dijon Kizzee, was killed by sheriff’s deputies in August 2020 while riding his bike in South LA. While logged into a shared ‘Justice for Dijon Kizzee’ account, she came across an Instagram post of Strong’s that referenced his candidacy. “What are you going to do [to] help the families that have lost loved ones to the LASD?” she asked.

To her surprise, Strong wrote back. “This man sent his condolences,” she told me. “That’s the only one I have heard in almost two years.” No one else associated with the sheriff’s department had apologized to her for Kizzee’s killing, and Strong’s willingness to do so meant something to her. They started messaging, and he gave her his phone number. “He was just open,” she said. “What other police do that?”

Recently, Ewing organized a Zoom call where Strong met with several families of other people killed by LASD deputies. She says it took time to convince others to join. “You know, the families—we’re angry and we’re hurting,” she said. “That’s going against everything that we protested—saying fuck the police and then trying to work with the police?” But from her perspective, the meeting had gone well. “He was on there for like two, three hours,” she said. “He let everybody speak.”

Ewing can’t vote for Strong (she lives in neighboring Kern County) but she’s been making up for it by telling everybody she can about him. “I just feel like this is our chance,” she said. She compared the election to the 2020 presidential race, and the most recent Los Angeles District Attorney race: Joe Biden and George Gascón were both imperfect, she said, but they were better than their alternatives.

Helen Jones, an organizer with Dignity & Power Now, felt warier. Her troubles with the LASD go back to well before Villanueva became sheriff: Jones’s son, John Horton, died under suspicious circumstances at Men’s Central Jail in 2009. She believes he was beaten to death by members of the 3000 Boys gang, and settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the county in 2016. Practically ever since Horton’s death, she has been organizing to reduce the power of the sheriff alongside DPN and Check the Sheriff. The day before we spoke, she attended a meeting where the Civilian Oversight Commission had agreed to bring the amendment to the Board of Supervisors. “It’s moving forward,” she said. 

Jones had attended a sheriff candidate forum and came away totally unimpressed by nearly all of the candidates. She appreciated what Strong had to say, especially regarding the closure of Men’s Central Jail, an issue close to her heart. But it was hard to countenance supporting any candidate with such a long history at LASD, or to trust that anyone with that much time inside the department wouldn’t just bring more of the same. “I just feel we don’t need nobody that’s tied to the Sheriff Department,” she told me. 

Strong told me he understood that perspective, and that he’s glad that disillusionment with Villanueva has created a higher bar for candidates seeking to replace him. But he took pains to distinguish his record at LASD from those of opponents like Rhambo or former LASD division chief Eli Vera. “I’ve always been somebody, throughout my career, that has spoken out,” he said, referencing Rhambo and Vera’s close relationship to disgraced former sheriff Baca and undersheriff Tanaka. (Vera’s campaign also did not respond to a request for comment). 

Jones thinks the law requiring candidates for sheriff to have a law enforcement background needs to change, and even though she doesn’t support any particular candidate, she hopes that whoever becomes sheriff will dismantle the deputy gangs. “Get rid of them,” she said, “It has no place.” She is still focused on working to tear down Men’s Central, the jail where her son died. “And at the same time,” she told me, “I wish that a forensic team can also go through there and spray Luminol everywhere.” She said she wants to see how much blood is there.

*This story was updated to include a statement LASD sent after publication.

The post “Fool Me Once”: Scandals and Abuses Fuel Unease Toward ‘Reform’ Talk in Los Angeles Sheriff Race appeared first on Bolts.

It was 2020, the height of the pandemic, amid broad-based efforts to get as many people out of jails and prisons as possible. The prosecutor wasn’t even in the courtroom—she was calling in on Zoom due to COVID-19 safety protocols. But none of that seemed to matter to the judge on the case, who ordered Slotky Reitano’s client to jail after he showed up late to his court date.

Slotky Reitano eventually got the case dismissed and secured her client’s release, but something about the experience—the trivial nature of the charge, the way the judge seemed to want to punish him—stuck with her. What if someone else had been on the bench that day? “I think criminal courts, in particular, are very dehumanizing,” she told Bolts. “And they don’t have to be.” 

Now, Slotky Reitano is running to become a judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court. While each judicial seat is fought over in a separate election, she has formed an informal campaign ticket with three other progressive candidates—Holly Hancock and Elizabeth Lashley-Haynes, who are also public defenders, and Carolyn “Jiyoung” Park, a plaintiff’s attorney with background in civil rights and labor law. Each member of the slate faces a crowded field in their own race, with between two and five opponents. If no candidate gets above 50 percent in the June 7 primary, the top two vote-getters will move to a November general election. 

The four candidates on this progressive slate all say they are running because they believe that judges should use their power to take aim at mass incarceration, rather than reinforce it. They also are hoping to disrupt the prosecutor-to-judge pipeline that dominates courts in Los Angeles and across the nation. 

“We need judges who are going to do something different than send everyone to prison,” Lashley-Haynes told Bolts.“We need judges that recognize and appreciate addiction programs, mental health programs, rehabilitation programs—we need judges that are going to implement restorative justice.” 

These unconventional candidacies are the fruit of a growing movement in Los Angeles that aims to connect the dots between judges and broader efforts to reform the criminal legal system, spearheaded by a coalition of local progressive organizations called Transforming the Judiciary. “Our work is to demystify the law for folks, to bring more community voices into the courts, so that we can leverage power,” said Titilayọ Rasaki, who works on policy at La Defensa, an organization dedicated to ending pretrial incarceration that is part of the coalition alongside other organizations like Court Watch LA and Ground Game LA, and the public defender’s union. In 2021, La Defensa launched a site called “Rate My Judge” that invites Los Angeles residents to share their experiences with local judges.

“We need to understand that the judiciary is really the heart of the matter—the heart of mass incarceration,” Rasaki said.

Rasakialso said that they ran an in-depth interview process gauging candidates’ interest in alternatives to incarceration and work in the community before endorsing the four members of the progressive slate, which calls itself “The Defenders of Justice.” Brittani Nichols, an organizer with Ground Game LA, told Bolts that the coalition is hosting a series of campaign events for these candidates, and that it may help them canvass as well. 

Similar bids to “flip the bench” and elevate progressive judges are taking root in other parts of the country. In recent years, slates of public defenders and other outsider candidates have run—often successfully—on decarceral platforms in Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh, among other places.

But efforts to organize around these offices are also running up against the stark fact that judicial elections are some of the most opaque and sparsely covered races in American politics. “It’s nearly impossible to hold those judges to account when no one understands what they do or who they are,” Nichols said. Sitting judges in Los Angeles County often run unopposed, a reality that Hancock, who first ran, unsuccessfully, in 2018, called “appalling.”

It is also often difficult to differentiate between candidates. For one thing, there’s just not that much information available to voters. Slotky Reitano recalled, laughing, how a former therapist called her up and asked her advice on who to vote for in the last judicial election, assuming—incorrectly—that she might have some special insight into the merit of the various candidates. “You couldn’t even Google them!” Slotky Reitano said.

Many candidates, including those on the progressive slate, opt to invoke unobjectionable values like “fairness” and “dignity” on the campaign trail, and the California Committee for Judicial Ethics Opinions forbids judicial hopefuls from campaigning on specific promises about how they would rule. But Hancock, Lashley-Haynes, Park, and Slotky Reitano also say they share a concrete set of guiding principles that have been shaped by their professional experience representing people targeted by law enforcement. Lashley-Haynes spent four years defending minors with severe intellectual disabilities, for instance, while Hancock heads a division dedicated to expunging unhoused people’s criminal records so that they can access housing.  

In individual interviews with Bolts, all four expressed similar philosophies about the criminal legal system, including a belief that Los Angeles County spends too much money incarcerating too many people, and a commitment to using alternatives to incarceration whenever possible if elected. “Los Angeles County has the largest jail system in the nation,” said Park. “We still have crime—because we aren’t addressing the root causes of crime.” The three public defenders say that mental illness, addiction, violence, and poverty often underlie the crimes that their clients commit. “I have had many, many cases where my defendants now were victims a few years ago, and I can’t tell you the number of cases [where] my defendants were victims as children,” Lashley-Haynes said. 

All four candidates on the slate stressed that they would implement these principles by making use of pre-existing laws and programs, something they say many judges are not currently doing. “There’s a mental health diversion law on the books,” Lashley-Haynes said, “but right now in LA County, we have judges that are refusing to follow that. We have judges that are refusing to see SUD, substance use disorder, as a legitimate mental illness, even though it’s in the DSM-5.”

Over Hancock’s twelve years working as a public defender, she has found that judges she worked with were often initially resistant to implementing sentencing reforms that voters have passed over the past decade. “They fought everything,” she told Bolts. She also noted that judges often seem to accede to the desires of the prosecutor on the case: “There was just a pretty constant deference to the prosecution.” 

In Hancock’s view, these tendencies have a lot to do with the fact that most judges start out as prosecutors, a professional affiliation that can align with tougher-on-crime views. One doesn’t have to look far for examples of prosecutorial involvement in anti-reform political lobbying: in Los Angeles County, the union that represents deputy district attorneys has long fought criminal justice reforms. The union recently held a vote on whether its members wanted to recall DA George Gascón, a progressive who has dramatically shaken up criminal justice policy and clashed with other public officials since he came into office in 2020. Over 97 percent of those who voted said yes.

Many prosecutors are running for judge again this year. Across the four elections that feature the progressive slate candidates, there are eight Los Angeles deputy DAs who are also running. 

Bolts reached out to these eight candidates to ask about their views on the current reforms in Los Angeles, and whether they also believe the county resorts to too much incarceration. Two of them responded through a spokesperson with a general statement. “I believe we can seek justice and still believe in public safety,” said Sharon Ransom, who is running against Slotky Reitano in a crowded race for superior court seat #60. “Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.” Ryan Dibble, one of three candidates in judicial race #67, which also includes Lashley-Haynes, spoke of supporting alternatives for incarceration “on a case-by-case basis,” mostly for low-level charges. “My goal is to be as balanced as possible in my approach,” he told Bolts. 

There are more than 150 judicial elections on the Los Angeles County ballot in June; a handful of other public defenders are running for judgeships, though they are not part of this four-candidate progressive slate. Public defender Patrick Hare joined them at a campaign event last month.

A forthcoming study of the federal bench lends support to the notion that electing or appointing judges with a public defense background may lead to less incarceration. Political scientists Maya Sen and Allison P. Harris found that judges who have worked as public defenders are less likely to sentence defendants to prison, and more likely to hand out shorter sentences when they do. 

Judge Allison Williams, a former public defender who was recently appointed to the Sacramento Superior Court by California Governor Gavin Newsom, said she believes that public defenders’ “extensive interaction with the community and the public has given us a different perspective that I think really can enhance our system of jurisprudence.” 

Slotky Reitano agrees. Being a public defender, she said, is sort of like being a trial attorney and a social worker at the same time. “We know exactly what’s going on with most clients,” she told Bolts. “We know all about the programs that are available and the alternatives.”

Still, there has long been a stigma around public defenders seeking judgeships. “I think historically, our society said that public defenders weren’t smart enough—public defenders didn’t have the ability to be fair and impartial—public defenders had too much of a bleeding heart to become judges,” Williams said.

President Biden has changed the tide at the federal level by appointing public defenders to the bench at a record rate, culminating with his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year. That momentum has yet to carry over to state courts, though, where governors still rarely appoint judges with such backgrounds. California has not had a former public defender on its state supreme court in decades.

Los Angeles organizers are hoping to forge another way.  “A person who has spent their career defending the most marginalized in our communities, they know they have to deal with a wider array of tools. They’re trying to leverage all the community resources that they have in their disposal,” said Rasaki. “That kind of perspective wearing a robe is transformative.” 

Editor’s note: During an interview with Park, the author learned that Park has helped file a class action suit on behalf of Black Lives Matter protestors who were arrested by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in 2020. The author was arrested by the LASD for protesting during that time period, and then talked about the events to lawyers volunteering with the National Lawyers Guild, which is an organization that among other things provides legal assistance to protesters, but is not actively involved in the litigation.

The post The Movement to Decarcerate Los Angeles Targets Judicial Elections appeared first on Bolts.

At just 32, Eunisses Hernandez already has a long record of organizing wins steeped in abolition. She has worked to remove drug enhancements from the state’s penal code, close a notorious Los Angeles jail and halt the construction of others, and champion a historic Los Angeles County ballot measure reallocating hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to community programs and incarceration alternatives. So it may come as a surprise to learn that for a long time, Hernandez wanted to become a cop.

Growing up in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood Highland Park, Hernandez saw that her family and friends’ relationship to police was mostly fearful and antagonistic. People in distress didn’t call 911 because they dreaded immigration enforcement more than the immediate threat. Police profiled her cousin so often that when he was eventually arrested, prosecutors accused him of being in a gang. Hernandez’s adolescence coincided with the Great Recession, and her family did anything they could to stay afloat and hold onto their home. They rented out rooms in their house, and one day, there was a fight between the couple that lived there. Hernandez felt helpless. She called 911, but when the police came, they only talked to her through the window of their squad car before speeding off, saying they had more important things to attend to. Maybe, she thought, she could do a better job than the cops who profiled her cousin, or the ones who didn’t even get out of their car when she called for their help.

For Hernandez, becoming an abolitionist was a long journey: one shaped by the complex experiences of her childhood and college years, and a policy and organizing career that moved her steadily towards prioritizing local action. Now, she is looking to bring this perspective into public office with a run for the Los Angeles City Council, where she hopes  to represent a district that includes Highland Park, Chinatown, and the heavily Central American neighborhood of Westlake. 

The area has recently seen the displacement of longtime residents, skyrocketing rent and housing prices, and the criminalization that has both accelerated those changes and followed in their wake. Hernandez accuses Los Angeles officials, including the councilmember she is challenging, Gil Cedillo, of failing to defend a community that has been targeted for gentrification. 

“I know this is very personal for her to be running in this district,” said Lex Steppling, the national director of campaign and organizing at Dignity and Power Now (DPN), a Los Angeles-based organization that organizes for the rights of incarcerated people. (Steppling supports Hernandez’s candidacy in his personal capacity.) “I’ve never seen a neighborhood flip that fast. And Eunisses has managed to stay there.”

Her bid to transform the priorities of local government comes in a decisive election year for Los Angeles, whose city government could go in any number of directions depending on the outcome of races like this one. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s likely departure as Ambassador to India has left a wide open election for City Hall, and the race to succeed him has already become a referendum on homelessness policy in Los Angeles. The city controller and the city attorney’s positions are both open as well. And there are eight seats up for grabs on the 15-member city council.  

In recent years, abolitionist organizers have achieved a series of previously unthinkable victories across Los Angeles County. Amidst this power vacuum at City Hall, the next test will be whether they can elect one of their own. 

Hernandez says her first real shift in political consciousness came during college, when she studied criminal justice at California State University, Long Beach. Most of the professors were former law enforcement officers, and the major felt like a crash course in the day-to-day of policing. But one instructor, Dina Perrone, taught classes on criminology and the War on Drugs, which Hernandez experienced as a revelation. She finally had a set of tools to interpret the experiences of her youth: the friends arrested for smoking weed, the mental health crises treated as crimes. And in learning about how other countries deal with issues of addiction and incarceration, Hernandez realized that another way was possible. 

After college, Hernandez worked at the Drug Policy Alliance for four years, helping pass Senate Bill 180, which ended drug enhancements that added up to 12 years to people’s sentences for past convictions, and implement Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana in California. There, she felt frustrated by “carve-outs”—policy concessions that exclude certain groups in order to get a law passed. “From what I’ve seen in policy development, we don’t go back for people we’ve left behind,” she told Bolts. 

In 2018, wanting to organize on a more local level, Hernandez moved to JustLeadershipUSA, where she became the Los Angeles campaign coordinator for JusticeLA, a large coalition of racial justice and civil rights organizations. Since its inception in 2017, Justice LA has chipped away at the infrastructure of mass incarceration in Los Angeles County. In February 2019, the coalition successfully pushed to cancel plans for a new women’s jail. That August, it also helped sink plans for a new mental health-focused jail, advocating instead for community-based, non-custodial treatment centers. “We won shit they said we couldn’t win,” said Steppling (DPN is a member of the coalition’s executive committee). “A lot of people point to [the coalition’s victories] as an example of what organizing is capable of,” he said, and Hernandez “played a really central role.” 

Though Justice LA comprises reformist organizations as well, the coalition is guided by abolitionist principles. Hernandez told Bolts: “Some basic questions that we ask ourselves in doing this work: will this policy decision leave anybody behind? Will this policy decision build something we’ll have to destroy in the future? Will this policy decision give more money and more power to the systems that are harming us? If it’s yes to any of those questions, then we have to go back to the drawing board.”

In early 2019, Justice LA successfully petitioned the Board of Supervisors to establish an Alternatives to Incarceration working group, which Hernandez was appointed to as a community stakeholder. The ATI working group would go on to produce a report, “Care First, Jails Last,” that laid out a roadmap for overhauling the county’s existing system of policing and punishment. Working from the findings of that report, the coalition fought for a ballot measure to redirect 10 percent of LA County’s general funds to incarceration alternatives like community programs, which passed in November 2020 with 57 percent of the vote. 

Implementation has been bogged down by bureaucratic delays, though the measure remains one of the most politically significant and financially impactful criminal justice reforms to emerge from the 2020 uprising. Jody Armour, a law professor at USC who supported Measure J, says the ballot measure centered on abolitionist themes rather than shying away from them. “#DefundThePolice part of Measure J was plainly communicated and ‘resonated powerfully’ with many voters,” Armour wrote on Twitter.

Along with Ivette Alé, a fellow Justice LA organizer, Hernandez also co-founded LA Defensa, a  women- and femme-led group that focuses on the judiciary as an understudied lever for carceral power (one early project was a website allowing residents to weigh in on their experiences with Los Angeles County judges). Hernandez still works at LA Defensa, but told Bolts she’ll step away soon to focus more fully on campaigning, calling the race a continuation of her community organizing. “We’re trying to take this—the wins, the experiences, the coalition—to City Hall, because right now, they’re not coming through for the people,” she said. 

Cedillo, Hernandez’s opponent and the incumbent District 1 councilmember, was a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run and received Sanders’s endorsement in February 2021, more than a year before the primary or Hernandez’s entrance into the race. The early endorsement angered many left organizers in Los Angeles, who have criticized Cedillo for voting to criminalize homeless encampments, ordering homeless sweeps in Westlake’s MacArthur Park, and failing to use his position as chair of the council’s housing committee to forestall gentrification and displacement in his district. Hernandez saw an opportunity. “That motivated other people to step up,” she told Bolts. 

Cedillo’s office did not respond to Bolts’s questions about his record and platform.

Hernandez says she wants to prioritize alternative crisis responses, such as sending trained mental health workers to some 911 calls instead of police. She supports the People’s Budget LA coalition, which has demanded a vast reallocation of funds from the LAPD to community care programs. “My goal is to build our work locally,” she said. “I want to be part of the budget committee.” 

She also wants to fight criminalization of homelessness. Hernandez told Bolts that she rejects Cedillo’s support for encampment sweeps and that she opposes a recent municipal ordinance Cedillo backed, 41.18, which restricts where unhoused people can sit, sleep, and store belongings. She also hopes to implement a Universal Just Cause ordinance to strengthen eviction protections for tenants and ensure access to counsel during the eviction process. 

If elected, Hernandez would join a city council that has long been unfriendly to progressive priorities. A small, two-person progressive coalition has emerged in the last two years, resulting in a number of 13-2 votes—notably on 41.18. But the bloc may soon vanish. First-term councilmember Nithya Raman saw her district distorted by the 2021 rezoning process, in what some believed was a ploy to reduce progressive voter power, and Mike Bonin, who has long been the council’s staunchest left voice, recently announced his retirement for mental health reasons, after a campaign targeting his work on homelessness came very close to triggering a rare recall vote. 

Still, Dahlia Ferlito of White People 4 Black Lives, a Justice LA coalition member, said they thought it was important for people with Hernandez’s convictions and movement background to seek office: “If it didn’t matter, then our opposition wouldn’t be doing everything humanly possible to ensure that we do not have a voice in the electoral sphere.” Besides Hernandez, there are a number of other left-wing candidates running for council this election season.

Hernandez will have the discretion to do more within her district, where council members have long enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. Right now, homelessness policy in Los Angeles is especially balkanized: laws are passed by the full council, but each member can interpret them somewhat differently in their own district. 

In one council meeting in January, Cedillo successfully got 28 locations in his district designated as enforcement zones under the homeless criminalization ordinance 41.18. Hernandez told Bolts she would decline to propose 41.18 locations in her district. (This is what Bonin, the progressive councilmember, has done in his district.) 

On one particular issue, she may get a chance to finish what she started with Justice LA. In 2019, the Board of Supervisors vowed to close Men’s Central Jail, an infamous and decrepit Los Angeles County penitentiary that Hernandez described as a “dungeon.” It’s a long road to closure, and then there’s the question of what comes after. “Men’s Central Jail now sits in my district,” she told Bolts. “I’m going to be a part of the plan to shut it down—and the community engagement that happens to inform what gets built on that land.”

The post Abolitionist Organizer Wants to Fill Los Angeles Power Vacuum appeared first on Bolts.