In December 2020, on the eve of taking the reins as the district attorney of Los Angeles County, George Gascón was up late trying to make a decision. He’d been elected weeks earlier on promises to change Los Angeles’ approach to criminal punishment, but he was hesitant on how much to shake up the system. “10, 11 o’clock at night, the night before I was being sworn in, I’m looking at two versions of what I’m going to say,” Gascón recalled in a recent interview at his office in Downtown LA. His first speech articulated a more incremental approach, but the more he looked at it, the more he became convinced that it would risk “business as usual.” 

He chose the second speech. 

The following day, Gascón announced a sweeping set of categorical, or ‘blanket’ policies, his office would adopt: no death penalty, no charging minors as adults, no life without parole sentences. Not rarely, or selectively—never, under any circumstances. Perhaps most consequentially, he vowed that prosecutors in his office would not seek enhancements, special circumstances that can add decades to someone’s sentence and affect tens of thousands of cases each year in Los Angeles County. 

Prosecutors are typically reluctant to delineate such clear-cut policies, preferring to protect the boundless discretion of their office. Even those who vow reform tend to merely promise to deprioritize certain practices without ruling anything out. But Gascón told me that it was important for him to draw clear lines in the sand, in part because he knew that he’d be walking into an office whose management team largely opposed his plans. “I wanted to make sure that this was going to be just not a bunch of political promises—this was going to be a real thing,” he said.

Nearly immediately, the new DA found himself under fire, including from staff in his office who bristled at being told not to use some of their regular tools. Almost as quickly, he announced a tweak to his enhancements policy, allowing exceptions for hate crimes and offenses against children and the elderly. And that was just the beginning. Many of the biggest inflection points of Gascón’s first term have revolved around the use of blanket policies: one court battle after his own deputies filed suit claiming that his directive to not seek enhancements violated the law, one protracted media storm involving a case that seemed to challenge the principle of never trying young people as adults, and two fizzled recall attempts by adversaries who said he was neglecting the duties of his office. 

Now, Gascón is defending his seat against 11 challengers, nearly all of whom are running to his right in the March primary. (The top two candidates will head to a November runoff unless someone clears 50 percent of the vote.) Many of his opponents are attacking the very idea that a DA should ever issue categorical policies. In fact, a number of them have contested his approach ever since 2020. The field includes four line prosecutors working in his office, several of whom are highly involved in the union that sued him and one who says she was demoted for questioning his directives; and a former attorney at the firm that filed the lawsuit.

At first glance, blanket policies might seem like an intuitive tool for reform prosecutors because they both embody a clear vision of change and help to enact that vision. “They’re actually very useful, smart policies to implementing what we care about, which is a less racist, more fair system where also we can put more resources into very, very serious cases,” said Jessica Brand, founder of the Wren Collective, a national organization that researches criminal legal policy and helps advise reform prosecutors. 

But Brand said she’s nonetheless hesitant about recommending such policies: “They’re latched onto in these hyper political ways.” Blanket directives like Gascón’s tend to become lightning rods for controversy, especially given that so much of criminal legal policy—and debate around that policy—in the U.S. is defined by the specter of extreme cases. 

One of the most indelible examples of this dynamic in modern American politics happened just across town from the Los Angeles DA’s office.

During a 1988 presidential debate held at UCLA, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, was asked if he would change his mind about capital punishment if his own wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered. His immediate answer—that he wouldn’t, given his deeply felt principles on the matter—is widely considered to have harmed his presidential bid; it remains seared in the minds of a generation of political observers, a cautionary tale about the perils of ruling anything out when it comes to criminal punishment.

Over 30 years later, Gascón ran on the gamble that the politics of crime had changed enough for him to rule out quite a bit more than just the death penalty, and he won in 2020 after making blanket promises as part of his campaign pitch. But the ensuing years only raised the stakes of that gamble, leading the DA to hedge in certain ways and double down in others. As he embarks on a difficult reelection campaign, I wanted to understand what Gascón’s tenure has revealed about the politics of transforming prosecution, especially in a place as vast and complex as Los Angeles. How do you set about making big changes to an entrenched system without sparking so much resistance that your ambitions founder? What does it take, in other words, to dispense with business as usual?

To understand why a reform DA would insist on a blanket policy despite the political risks, you first have to understand the status quo they’re fighting against. “This is an arcane system, and it’s not going to go gently and quietly into the night,” Cynthia Roseberry, acting director for the ACLU’s Justice Division and a former public defender, told me. “We’ve got to be bold in our strokes to change it.”

For reform DAs like Gascón, blanket policies are an effort to disengage from practices that they consider simply unconscionable: outdated, racist, overly harsh, or morally dubious. Gascón cites data showing that the death penalty is riven with errors and racial bias. He points to the fact that young people sent into the adult system can spend decades in prison for a mistake they made as a teenager. And he has underscored that sentencing enhancements, a product of the tough-on-crime era, can add many years of incarceration onto whatever baseline punishment has been determined to fit the underlying crime. “Do we send somebody to prison for way beyond their natural life, or do we send them for a period of time where they may be able to redeem themselves and come back?” Gascón asked me.

Blanket policies can put clear guardrails around a DA’s charging decisions, instead of them telling the public: just trust me. If you believe that the state shouldn’t be in the business of taking a life or that young people’s developing brains leave them fundamentally unable to grasp consequences the way an adult can, there’s no sense in judiciously applying the death penalty or charging juveniles as adults, the thinking goes—it simply shouldn’t be done at all. 

“When we think about removing something like enhancements, what we’re also saying is we know that they’ve been used improperly and there’s not a way to correct them in isolation,” said Roseberry. Mona Sahaf, who runs the Vera Institute’s Reshaping Prosecution Initiative, thinks that “it’s a big opportunity to shrink the footprint of the system.” 

Reformers also make the case that prosecutors have had a key role in exacerbating mass incarceration. Discretion is the lifeblood of their trade, but historically, prosecutors have almost always used that freedom to move in one direction—towards harsher punishment, even above and beyond what the law requires. Over and over again, they come down on some people harder than others: 45 percent of people serving a life sentence in California under the Three Strikes law are Black, as Gascón’s enhancements directive noted. Maria Gonzalez, the legal clinic coordinator at Los Angeles’ Youth Justice Coalition, has a loved one doing 100 years on an enhancement case. “That life is done. It’s gone,” she told me flatly. 

Other prosecutors who say that they share Gascon’s opinions about the death penalty, or that sentencing enhancements are broken, still prefer to say they’ll assess each case on its own, rather than draw a clear line in the sand. But to organizers like Melina Abdullah, a leader of Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter, this is just a way “to not make any commitments.” 

“You can’t just make decisions on a case-by-case basis,” she told me. “You have to have a set of legal principles that you adhere to.”

After all, DAs aren’t running around trying cases themselves—rather, they oversee large offices of deputies responsible for the day-to-day work of prosecution, who can easily ignore vague principles from up top. In fact, given that the professional norms of prosecutors tilt towards punitive sentencing, reform prosecutors have found themselves undermined by staff resistant to carrying out their changes. 

Announcing blanket policies, then, is a way for reform DAs like Gascón to use the power they do have to limit the power of their own office, and to tie the hands of the vast bureaucracies they oversee. Prosecutors don’t have the ability to directly stop police from racially profiling young men of color, or to edit the penal code, or to rectify the socioeconomic inequalities that can lead to gang involvement. What they can do is order their own staff to stop using gang enhancements. 

Or can they? Less than one month after Gascón took office, his line prosecutors took him to court, contending that his enhancements directive was forcing them to break the law. Legislators passed the STEP act, which established sentencing enhancements for gang affiliation, and Californians approved a “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing scheme; the lawsuit argued it simply wasn’t in Gascón’s power to forbid his deputies from using those tools. Gascón replied that voters elected him to upend the status quo, and that his role allowed him to direct his own staff. 

In February 2021, a judge ruled that Gascón did not have the authority to bar his prosecutors from seeking enhancements for prior strikes, or serious felony charges. As long as California’s “three strikes” law was on the books, it wasn’t up to him whether to enforce it. But the judge’s decision did leave him free to bar his prosecutors from seeking other forms of enhancements in new cases. Gascón argues that this ruling wasn’t a major blow to his plans because it only affected a share of enhancement cases.

“Quite frankly, it’s a very small piece, not only of the policy, but of the work,” he told me. At that point in 2021, the bulk of his vision remained intact. 

The backlash to blanket policies is politically and geographically contingent. In red states, even the appearance of one has led to preemption or removal by state officials, meaning that DAs trying to do things differently are often forced to be a bit cagier about their plans, while prosecutors in blue states tend to have more leeway. 

In 2017, Orlando’s prosecutor, Aramis Ayala, was taken off some high-profile murder cases by the Florida governor after she announced she would never seek the death penalty. In San Francisco, meanwhile, former DA Chesa Boudin encountered comparatively tepid criticism for his ban on death penalty cases, in part because two predecessors—Gascón and Kamala Harris—had already paved the way. “It was well within the heartland of San Francisco politics,” Boudin, who now runs UC Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center, told me. 

In liberal Los Angeles, Gascón’s death penalty ban has also not been seriously contested, even though the county lacks the precedent that San Francisco had; his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, was notorious for her embrace of capital punishment, and helped make LA County one of the nation’s leading counties in handing out death sentences. But Gascón went further. By attempting to address lengthy sentences for people who commit violent crimes, he struck what has long been a third rail in reform debates, even among people who agree that mass incarceration is a problem: questioning very lengthy sentences for people who commit violent crimes. 

The U.S. has often fashioned its approach to punishment in direct reaction to especially heinous or high-profile crimes—California’s ‘three strikes’ law, for instance, was motivated by the abduction and murder of nine-year-old Polly Klaas—and these crimes have animated debates around sentencing policy in a more ambient way, too. We have no shortage of infamous cases to draw from—serial killers, mass murderers, bizarre cases like Charles Manson or the Unabomber—and these people tend to loom very large in the popular imagination, even as they represent a microscopic percentage of Americans who commit crimes. This has meant that extreme outcomes—sentences of decades or even hundreds of years—have become commonplace, far more so than the extreme offender they were initially designed for. 

Today the specter of the “worst of the worst” continues to haunt criminal legal debate, often putting politicians who favor major policy upheavals on the defensive, like Dukakis answering Bernard Shaw’s question in 1988 in front of tens of millions of Americans. This is particularly fraught within the juvenile justice system, where the increasingly popular slogan that we should treat children as children, in accordance with newer research showing that brain development continues into the mid-20s, exists alongside the possibility of truly extreme cases. 

In Sahaf’s time working with reform prosecutors at Vera, she has observed that “it’s very difficult to make an absolute pledge never to charge a child as an adult and then carry through on it, because you see these exceptions happen…children do sometimes commit really atrocious crimes.” And eventually just such a case would land on Gascón’s desk: Hannah Tubbs. 

Tubbs’s case seemed to span the gamut of aggravating factors: here was someone who had sexually assaulted a child in a restaurant bathroom stall less than a year before turning 18, who was 26 by the time she was caught and facing punishment, who had already racked up an extensive criminal record, and who mocked the victim and expressed no remorse. “Nothing is ever unique, but it was as close to unique as you could [get],” Gascón told me. But he added that there were mitigating circumstances, too. His commitment to keeping the case in the juvenile system led to internal clashes, and then public opprobrium after jailhouse recordings of calls between Tubbs and her father were leaked to Fox News. 

“This clearly shows you the dangerous aspect of the blanket policies of George Gascón,” Jonathan Hatami, a prosecutor in the DA’s office and frequent critic who’s now running against him, told the LA Times—which, along with other local media, covered the case extensively. 

Facing the biggest fracas of his tenure, Gascón announced in February 2022 that he would alter his directives on life without parole sentences and charging juveniles as adults: instead of total bans, he was establishing two committees to consider “extraordinary” cases that might merit such special circumstances. Each committee would be staffed by three senior advisors, including one who publicly stated she didn’t agree with his about-face.

This approach, his office said, would “create a different pathway for outlier cases, while simultaneously creating protections to prevent these exceptions from becoming the rule.”

These tweaks may seem minor, since “extraordinary” cases are by definition rare and since Gascón created a structured process to evaluate them. But to some, their vague quality signaled a worrisome retreat from the principles the DA had run and won on. 

For the ACLU’s Roseberry and local advocates like those at the Youth Justice Coalition, even one minor charged as an adult is one too many. “The idea that we would approach them in any respect as irredeemable is a frightening prospect,” said Roseberry. “These children come to us having been shaped by circumstances and environments that are beyond their control.”

Other reform DAs have tried for a similar balance as Gascón: Boudin’s sentencing directive in San Francisco, for instance, created a presumption against enhancements but left room for them in “extraordinary circumstances,” as long as he or a deputy signed off. “From a legal standpoint, we were on stronger ground by writing into the policy discretion to make exceptions,” he told me. (Boudin did maintain a blanket prohibition against charging juveniles as adults throughout his two and a half years in office.) 

Still, Youth Justice Coalition communications director Emilio Zapién stressed that using edge cases to guide criminal legal policy making is destructive to the chances of the young people the Youth Justice Coalition works with. “For every really horrific case, like the one you’re talking about, the Tubbs case, there are 15 to 20 others [that show] transformation,” he told me. 

Zapién added that he found the whole debate around Tubbs to be cynical: “The folks that are arguing for more criminalization and incarceration of young people of color after the mainstream media sensationalizes one case as a political tactic… those folks already had those beliefs before.” 

At the time of the Tubbs case, Gascón had already weathered one recall campaign motivated by aspects of his categorical policies. One of the public faces of the recall was a woman, Desiree Andrade, whose son Julian had been brutally murdered. Under Lacey, his killers faced the death penalty or life without parole; once Gascón took office, those options were off the table. The words “Gascon [sic] REFUSES to prosecute juveniles as adults under any circumstances, even rape, murder or other heinous crimes, even if days shy of turning 18” were front and center on the campaign’s website. 

That recall attempt imploded after organizers failed to garner enough money or signatures–but they swore they’d be back, and some recall proponents took up the Tubbs case as a rallying cry. The second recall campaign that resulted also fizzled out about a year later. Ironically, it’s been the intensity of the opposition to Gascón, more than anything else, that has vindicated what many of his allies have said all along: prosecution is political.

Now the energy behind those efforts has been channeled into the upcoming election, with a number of Gascón’s loudest critics and recall supporters returning to run against him.

Nathan Hochman, a former Republican candidate for California attorney general, writes on his campaign website that Gascón’s blanket directives “demonstrate distrust in his prosecutors” and promises to restore prosecutorial discretion. His website names the elimination of blanket policies as a crucial component in his “blueprint for justice.” 

John McKinney, a prosecutor in the DA’s office, said at an October debate that he’d “repeal and replace” every directive Gascón announced on his inauguration day. Hatami, the frequent critic, has said that “blanket policies should all be revoked,” telling Los Angeles Daily News “I believe in discretion.” Eric Siddall, another prosecutor in Gascón’s office and the former vice president of the deputy DA union, has also vowed to make the issues targeted by most of Gascón’s blanket policies subject to a “case-by-case analysis” instead. Maria Ramirez, yet another prosecutor in the office, has used similar language. 

I reached out to the campaigns of a handful of the candidates for their thoughts on blanket policies. None responded by the article’s deadline. Jeff Chemerinsky’s campaign reached out after publication to say that Chemerinsky, a former federal prosecutor, would never seek the death penalty as DA, but that he would eschew other blanket directives.

Siddall, who has also insisted he is not opposed to progressive reform while criticizing Gascón for taking a “defendant-centered approach,” has made the same key concession to Gascón’s model, vowing to forgo the death penalty. Other candidates, meanwhile, have not ruled it out. It may not be to his advantage, but Gascón’s blanket policies set the terms of the debate.

Gascón has made more than a few political calculations of his own over his three years in office. As he approaches his first reelection test in March, he has kept in place some of his initial blanket directives, like his commitment to never seek the death penalty. During the tenure of his predecessor Lacey, 22 people were sentenced to death in LA, all of them people of color, but Gascón has never tried. His administration has also worked to resentence people who are already on death row to life without parole; his office told me it has secured that change for 29 people as of this week.

Meanwhile, the DA has altered some directives to define a process for considering “exceptional” cases, while preserving the central presumption of the policy. He has walked farther back from others, maintaining the goal of avoiding certain enhancements but without clear guidelines. And he’s been barred by the courts from pursuing still others. 

This convoluted landscape reflects Gascón’s concessions to his critics from the right, to be sure. But his case to progressives has also evolved: His record shows, he argues, that blanket policies altered by carve-outs can also accomplish his decarceral goals. “Do I think this has made a difference?” he asked me when we spoke. “I think it’s made a tremendous difference.”

Gascón softened his blanket prohibition against charging minors as adults, for instance, but this has not opened the floodgates to adult prosecutions.

As a result of his original policy, Gascón said that hundreds of teenagers per year who might otherwise have been sent to an adult prison are now being treated in the juvenile system. To Gonzalez, who spends her days in court advocating for young people on behalf of the Youth Justice Coalition, the change has been palpable. 

“LA County has made so much progress on helping our youth,” she said. “I’ve seen young people be under diversion and continue to go to school, graduate from school. Last year, we had two graduates that could have easily just been in a cell.” (Like her colleague Zapien, Gonzalez disagrees with Gascón’s decision to modify this policy).

Since Gascón modified his blanket prohibition in February 2022, the Juvenile Alternative Charging Committee had recommended that ten cases be transferred to adult court, according to the DA’s office. In the first transfer hearing to take place, the judge, J. Christopher Smith, actually overrode the committee, ruling that the teenage defendant wasn’t beyond rehabilitation and noting that he had cognitive deficiencies and a history of childhood abuse. The ruling echoed Gascón’s initial absolute commitment to the possibility of personal transformation even in cases where a young defendant had done something heinous; in doing so, Smith brought into sharper relief Gascón’s decision to retreat from that principle. 

Gascón told me that he actually agreed with the judge’s decision. But he also defended his office’s charging committee, saying they may have been influenced by the gravity of the crime, a double murder, and invoking the value of outsourcing these evaluations to an independent body. “I gave the committees full freedom to decide,” he told me. 

Separately, he called it “affirming” that state law had nearly caught up to his December 2020 blanket policy: In 2022, the California legislature raised the bar to try minors as adults, reflecting the changing consensus on juvenile culpability. (Gascón wrote a letter in support of that effort).  

Similarly, Gascón set up a charging committee tasked with determining whether a case merits a possible sentence of life without parole, and this committee has given prosecutors the go-ahead to seek that sentence some 23 times since February 2022, according to information gathered on the DA’s website. The office has applied a “special circumstances” enhancement, which requires a sentence of life without parole in the event of a conviction, in two recent high-profile and especially gruesome cases: a man who allegedly serially targeted and killed homeless people, and the son of a famous Hollywood agent who is accused of killing and dismembering his wife and her elderly parents. 

Gascón may have gotten what he wanted out of these cases: They are being widely covered in local media, but seemingly no one has invoked them in order to criticize the DA for being soft on crime. By opening the door to some life without parole sentence in high-profile instances, the DA had perhaps freed himself up to avoid that sentence in the vast majority of cases with far less scrutiny or blowback.

But just how far can he take this approach? The judge who ruled on the deputy prosecutors’ lawsuit in 2021 gave Gascón carte blanche to maintain his initial blanket policy barring other sorts of new enhancements—special allegations that would add on extra time for gang involvement or the presence of a weapon, for example. The DA’s office says it has maintained a blanket prohibition on gang enhancements. 

But on gun enhancements, Gascón has retreated from his initial categorical policy in a murkier way. In November, he told me that his office had been adding gun enhancements on a case-by-case basis, allowing line prosecutors to seek them if they get management approval.  

“We are selectively using those enhancements but it’s being done, again, much more thoughtfully,” Gascón said. 

I later asked Gascón’s chief of staff, Tiffiny Blacknell, why Gascón retreated from this blanket policy voluntarily. “It’s reasonable that there should be some exceptions to some of these directives, with the exception of the death penalty,” she said, adding that the DA had over time erected a management structure that he trusted to carry out his vision. “We’re using a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.” The office does not have a written policy governing when it’s appropriate for prosecutors to seek these enhancements. Blacknell said bureau directors make the final decision based on factors such as the severity of the crime and past criminal history. 

On this front at least, the DA’s current stance sounds a lot more like the “case-by-case” rhetoric of his challengers. This risks a return to the starting point that local progressives hoped to get away from: just trust me, I’m the one who can use this tool wisely. 

And that argument, Gonzalez said, wouldn’t slide with the people who elected him in the first place. “The community is bigger than the pushback he’s getting right now,” she told me. “The community is gonna stand up and say, ‘I don’t believe you.’”

Gascón says it’s easy to distinguish his commitment to reform from opponents who only pay lip service to it during campaign season, pointing to his record in office.

For organizers who work closely on policing, prisons, and sentencing in Los Angeles, there is a continuous need to decide whether they buy the DA’s revised case for change. Are his carve-outs a strategically savvy response to the backlash, or are they a retreat to punitive conventions? What’s the line between preserving some space for extraordinary cases and mirroring old paradigms of boundless prosecutorial discretion? In that ongoing assessment, many are balancing their frustration over Gascón’s walkbacks with an awareness of what he’s up against—what it takes to change an intractable system under the ever-present specter of Michael Dukakis. 

“I’m never a fan of a prosecutor because I think the system is fundamentally set up against Black and brown and Indigenous and poor people,” Abdullah told me. But she noted that the DA has pursued goals she sees as critical, including prosecuting law enforcement officers who engage in violence or corruption. “I think what he’s demonstrated is that chipping away at unjust systems can be helpful as we work towards transformation.” Gascón is walking a tightrope, she said: “How do you hold on to the principles that you say you believe in without losing your seat? And how do you balance the two?”

“Someone like me, I don’t believe in life without the possibility of parole. I don’t believe in ever trying a child as an adult,” Abdullah said. “But again, I’m not running for prosecutor.” 

This article has been updated with a response, received after publication, from the campaign of Jeff Chemerinsky on his policy views.

The post Under the Shadow of the Extreme Case appeared first on Bolts.

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.

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

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

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

Ahern has been sheriff since 2006, but he never once faced an opponent in any of his four prior elections. During Ahern’s long tenure, his county jail drew condemnation for its dangerous conditions. Santa Rita was the deadliest lockup in Northern California; a KTVU investigation found that 58 people have died there since 2014. A lawsuit alleging neglect of incarcerated people with mental health needs led to a massive settlement that will require the department to overhaul its treatment and suicide prevention practices. 

In the first contested election he ever faced, on June 7, Ahern only received 31 percent of the vote. Sanchez received 53 percent, and clinched the win without needing to go through a November runoff. 

Sanchez’s win is a stark reminder of how often local officials with immense power over the lives of their constituents, especially people of color and the poor and mentally ill, stay in power year after year regardless of their popularity, with no one stepping forth to challenge them. Local activists told Bolts that they have found it difficult to generate public outrage toward jail deaths, but they forced attention to the issue during the campaign and expressed satisfaction on Wednesday that voters seemed to have taken notice.

“Voters did not only overwhelmingly reject Ahern’s leadership, they rejected his failed harmful policies that have only resulted in countless lawsuits and loss of human lives,” Jose Bernal, the organizing director of Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, told Bolts via email.

Sanchez channeled the criticisms of Ahern’s tenure in her campaign. “He’s been of the status quo for 15 years,” she told Bolts in an April interview. She vowed to institute better communication with the public about jail deaths, establish support for families of people who die inside the jail, and create more programming so that people have work opportunities when they leave jail. At a January candidate forum, she said that people with mental illness do not belong in jail, calling for more alternative solutions. 

Sanchez also denounced Ahern for collaborating with ICE deportation orders and for promoting the militarization of law enforcement, including giving a platform to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia. 

But Sanchez will also enter the role as a consummate insider. Since early 2020, she has been the commander in charge of Santa Rita. 

Sanchez has faced pointed criticism of her own record overseeing the jail from local advocates. “While Sheriff Ahern bears the ultimate responsibility for the atrocities that have taken place in the jail, it is important to note that Sanchez is also at the top of the chain of command as the Santa Rita Jail commander,” Bernal told Bolts. 

When Sanchez spoke with Bolts in April, she acknowledged that Santa Rita had not transformed under her leadership. But she blamed the stasis on Ahern’s intransigence and said she had proposed changes that had been rejected by the sheriff. “It’s definitely a paramilitary kind of organization,” she told Bolts of the chain of command in the sheriff’s department. She also stressed her efforts to reduce the population in solitary confinement, saying that it had gone down from approximately 150 to around 50. She referred to it as “administrative separation,” the department’s preferred euphemism for solitary confinement. 

Similar results played out elsewhere in California, with other sheriffs under fire for abuses in their department losing their seats or performing underwhelmingly in the June 7 elections. In Los Angeles, where ballots are also still being counted, the unpopular but high-visibility incumbent Alex Villanueva has received a bit less than 32 percent of the vote as of publication to retired Long Beach police chief Robert Luna’s nearly 26 percent. This is the lowest result for a sitting Los Angeles sheriff since at least the 1940s, and it leaves Villanueva in a challenging position for this fall’s runoff. 

In San Mateo, the county just south of San Francisco, Christina Corpus beat six-year incumbent Carlos Bolanos. Corpus campaigned on a reform platform, criticizing her boss’s collaboration with ICE and advocating for better mental health services, including a mental health crisis response model led by clinicians and specially trained deputies. 

Corpus, like Sanchez, is an insider of the office she is now set to take over: she works as a captain in the San Mateo Sheriff’s Department. And in the upcoming Los Angeles County runoff, Luna’s tenure as Long Beach police chief is not without its own controversies, including a pattern of entrapping gay men in sting operations and a host of wrongful death and racial discrimination lawsuits. The department ranks only two percentage points higher than LASD on Police Scorecard, an online database that compiles data on law enforcement departments around the country.

California law requires that sheriff candidates have law enforcement backgrounds, which limits the field of possible candidates. The specter of Villanueva’s about-face after his 2018 win in Los Angeles—from would-be reformer who charmed local Democratic and progressive organizations, to defiant leader who reflexively opposes any attempt to increase oversight or accountability, and has reversed many of the modest reforms of his predecessor—hangs over the state’s sheriff elections. Many activists in Los Angeles and Alameda stayed out of the races, maintaining that these departments cannot be reformed from the inside and seeking other routes to limiting their reach. A local coalition in Los Angeles is proposing a charter amendment to codify civilian oversight and create a mechanism for impeaching the sheriff, for instance.

In Alameda, local groups like the Ella Baker Center, Oakland Rising, and the Anti-Police Terror Project have also been sharply critical of the consent decree that is meant to improve conditions at Santa Rita, arguing that it will only serve to confer more money and authority on the sheriff’s department. They are instead pushing for measures that would reduce the jail population and the sheriff’s powers in the first place.

“Real change and real safety will only come when we begin to see significant decreases in the jail population, significant divestment from the jail and significant re-investments into non-carceral health affirming resources, such as outpatient mental health services, housing and living wage jobs,” Bernal said.

In conversation with Bolts, Sanchez approved of the terms of the consent decree, saying, “We should have been able to identify this on our own.” She said some of the issues with Santa Rita stem from Ahern’s lack of focus on the jail and subsequent understaffing and underfunding, which are matters that the consent decree aims to address. 

When Bolts asked if she would work to implement the consent decree in a way that aligned with community groups’ demands for the department, Sanchez spoke of the importance of partnering with local organizations to meet the needs of people struggling with mental illness and homelessness, especially around the transition out of jail and back into the community. Sanchez also said she would be open to asking county officials to reallocate some of the funds that the consent decree allocates towards jail staff towards community organizations who work on continuity care. 

Soon enough, Sanchez will be the one in charge of making these decisions, and Bernal, who has been critical of the sheriff-elect for remaining too vague in her platform, will be watching. “We are prepared and ready to hold anyone in that office accountable,” he told Bolts. 

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

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Los Angeles County’s newly elected district attorney George Gascón resigned today from the California District Attorney’s Association (CDAA), the group that represents most California DAs and that is now fighting Gascón’s criminal justice reforms. 

Statewide prosecutors’ associations are among the most punitive forces in the criminal legal system, in California and elsewhere. While they are largely unknown to the general public, they have historically lobbied local and state governments to keep prison sentences long and to protect prosecutors’ vast powers.

Gascón, who took over running the nation’s largest prosecuting agency in December, chided the organization for its opposition to reform in an open letter published online today. Among other criticisms, the letter mentioned the CDAA’s failure to appoint a single person of color to its 17-member board of directors; its opposition a 2014 initiative that Gascón himself authored to lower the severity of some charges; its siphoning money away from environmental and workplace-safety prosecutions to instead lobby against legal-system reform; and its rejection of what Gascón said were “commonsense criminal justice reforms” backed by the majority of Californians.

“CDAA continues to be a member organization solely for those willing to toe the ‘tough on crime’ line,” Gascón wrote today. “For the rest of us, it is a place that fails to support us, our communities, or the pursuit of justice.”

The association has been one of the loudest voices in California urging Sacramento lawmakers and state voters to reject reforms. It has for instance opposed successful ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana or reduce penalties for drug offenses, and fought similar legislation.

“The CDAA has enjoyed a very cushy and close relationship with the California legislature for decades,” Anne Irwin, who heads the reform group Smart Justice California, told The Appeal: Political Report. “They have been unrivaled … and they spoke with one voice. They were able to influence a tremendous amount of legislation over the decades and able to shape criminalization in California.” 

Irwin added that Gascón’s decision could dramatically alter the CDAA’s power in Sacramento and continue to break apart the notion that prosecutors have “one voice.” Los Angeles County and its 10 milion residents represent over one fourth of California’s population.

Gascón, who is a Democrat, is the second sitting DA to leave the CDAA over its opposition to criminal justice reforms. San Joaquin DA Tori Salazar, a Republican, sounded a similar note last year when she announced her own departure, calling on state DAs to “look at ourselves, accept responsibility” for the “generational harm” caused by tough-on-crime policies.

Gascón, the former San Francisco DA and LAPD assistant chief, was elected last year against an incumbent DA on a platform that included progressive promises like never seeking the death penalty and not using sentencing enhancements to trump up “gang” charges against defendants in court. Since his election, he has instructed line prosecutors to not seek cash bail and to not use sentencing enhancements that greatly increase prison terms, among other changes.

But many of his own prosecutors have revolted. At the end of December, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys of Los Angeles County (ADDA), the group representing Gascón’s employees, sued Gascón to prevent him from enacting his promised reforms. A state judge blocked some of Gascón’s instructions last week.

In January, the CDAA filed an amicus brief in Los Angeles County Superior Court supporting the ADDA’s lawsuit against Gascón and claiming that Gascón’s reforms will ensure “the voices of victims fall silent and the might of the State has failed its most vulnerable.” 

The CDAA’s membership is dominated by prosecutors who advocate a much harsher approach to criminal justice than the one on which Gascón was elected. San Diego County DA Summer Stephan, a former Republican who now identifies as an independent, in January called Gascón’s ideas “unlawful” and attempted to wrest control of a high-profile double-murder case from Gascón’s office by claiming that the accused would not face enough prison time if found guilty.

Today, Gascón fired back and said it is instead the CDAA that is harming Californians.

“Ultimately, CDAA cannot claim a commitment to prosecutorial excellence while misappropriating millions of public dollars, ignoring the will of the voters, and fighting reforms that evidence clearly indicates will enhance safety, racial equity, and save scarce taxpayer resources,” Gascón wrote.

“This appears to be a publicity stunt to divert attention from his favoring criminals at the expense of victims and growing calls for his recall,” El Dorado County DA Vern Pierson, the current CDAA president, told the Political Report in a statement. (Pierson also blamed the organization’s diversity issues on the fact that Gascón himself unseated former L.A. County DA Jackie Lacey, a Black woman, last year.) “As for reform, the CDAA, in fact, sponsors many programs, including DA-initiated diversion prorams and courts for folks who have mental issues, are homeless or veterans. Our prosecutors are working to protect children who live in violent homes because we know they are more likely to become part of the cycle of violence when they reach adulthood.”

***

Gascón’s move comes at a time when a new generation of left-leaning prosecutors around the country is rethinking its relationship with the statewide associations  their predecessors have long supported. Besides lobbying legislatures around the country to adopt tougher statutes, these associations have worked to keep their own members in line.

In 2017, for example, after Orange-Osceola (Orlando) State Attorney Aramis Ayala announced she would not seek the death penalty in any cases while in office, the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association chucked Ayala under the bus and supported then-Gov. Rick Scott’s efforts to remove her from overseeing any capital cases. 

But these agencies are beginning to lose their grip on America’s criminal legal system. In 2018, Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner quit the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association and called the group the “voice of the past” when it comes to justice issues. Salazar followed suit by leaving the CDAA last year, and now some prosecutorial candidates are making this into a campaign issue. 

Earlier this month, three candidates running for DA in Manhattan told the Political Report that they would not join the District Attorneys Association of New York (DAASNY), that state’s prosecutorial lobbying arm, if elected. DAASNY, as is typical for these associations, has been fighting efforts to turn the corner from decades of draconian policies in New York It lobbied against New York’s 2019 landmark bail-reform law, for instance, and, since then, has even trained prosecutors on how to use legal loopholes to hold people pretrial anyway.

“Elected prosecutors have, until very recently, been seen as a pivotal part of the punishment system — there’s been a very clear pass-off, that begins with police, who then hand people off to prosecutors,” Irwin told the Political Report. “They’ve been on the same team, pursuing the same goal, which has largely been to hold people accountable through criminalization and incarceration, as much as possible for as long as possible.” 

***

In September, a set of California DAs formed a new lobbying association, the Prosecutors Alliance of California, with a stated goal of promoting policies more aligned with criminal justice reform. This came on the heels of a similar group that emerged in Virginia in July to lobby that state’s legislature to pass laws reducing incarceration rates and increasing alternatives to imprisonment.

The California group includes Salazar and Gascón, as well as San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and Contra Costa County DA Diana Becton, who are still in the CDAA.

Gascón himself had stayed in the CDAA until today, including throughout his tenure as the San Francisco DA.

In his letter today, Gascón said that, now that California has a progressive competitor to the CDAA, he no longer needs to support an association that won’t support him.

“I participated in CDAA for nine years,” he said. “I paid dues, attended our sessions, and assigned staff to the legislative committee all in hopes of building an organization that took account of my perspective and that of a majority of Californians. What has become clear to me after a decade of participation is that the organization is unwilling to change and grow with its members and our constituents.”

Roughly a third of California lawmakers represent Los Angeles County, and Irwin expects that the CDAA losing the membership of that county’s DA will alter the political pressures legislators face in the coming years. Sentencing reforms and bills that promote alternatives to policing are on the state’s agenda in the 2021 session.

“My prediction is that CDAA, like other law-enforcement groups facing their own falling out of public favor, will resort to what they know is their most potent tool to regain public trust: fearmongering,” she said.

This article has been updated with a statement from Vern Pierson, the El Dorado County DA and the current CDAA president.

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Death penalty opponents have made great strides over the last decade, getting states to outlaw the sentence or at least reduce its use. Now they’re gaining allies from local officials with direct power to shut down capital punishment: prosecutors. 

Last week, Deborah Gonzalez and Jason Williams became the latest candidates to win elections for district attorney after pledging to never seek the death penalty once in office.

Their runoff wins in Athens, Georgia, and New Orleans add to a string of similar results this year in Los Angeles County, Arizona’s Pima County (Tucson), Georgia’s Fulton County (Atlanta), Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), and Texas’s Travis County (Austin). Incoming prosecutors largely echoed advocates’ longtime claims, emphasizing that the death penalty is applied very unequally and that its use is inhumane and costly.

Their wins are poised to upend the culture of capital punishment in places that have been prolific in handing out death sentences, and advocates are preparing to press them to overturn these past sentences.

There are more than 200 people on death row from Los Angeles, where the DA election in November saw George Gascón defeat an incumbent who over the course of her tenure secured the death penalty nearly exclusively against people of color. Gascón took office this week and promptly repeated his campaign pledge to not just drop the death penalty in future cases but also review past death sentences, a step few prosecutors have taken.

“The death penalty does not make us safer,” Gascón tweeted on Monday. “It’s racist, morally untenable, irreversible, and expensive. And today, it’s off the table.”

Pima County has also been a death penalty hotspot. It leads Arizona counties in number of executions since the penalty was reinstated in 1976. But this fall voters elected as their chief prosecutor a former public defender, Laura Conover, who highlighted her past advocacy with the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty. Conover is not the first candidate with such experience to be elected. Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, who was the legal director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, won a prosecutor’s race in northern Virginia last year on a similar platform.

“It’s absolutely tremendous and exciting that this is taking place in Louisiana, and in Georgia, and in Virginia, states that have a long history with the death penalty, and of course Los Angeles County, one of the biggest contributors to the enormous Californian death row,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the 8th Amendment Project. “It’s supportive of the trend of the country overall moving away from the death penalty.”

These seven newly elected prosecutors who said they would never seek a death sentence are Democrats, even though Republicans haven’t been absent from the anti-death penalty movement. Support from some Republican lawmakers proved decisive in 2019 and 2020 when Colorado and New Hampshire’s legislatures repealed the death penalty. (The Political Report only analyzed candidate positions in the 28 states where the death penalty is still legal.)

Elsewhere, longtime prosecutors who have repeatedly used the death penalty lost re-election bids. Most notably, Ron O’Brien is on his way out in Franklin County, Ohio, after decades of zealously championing capital punishment. The incoming prosecutor, Democrat Gary Tyack, told the Political Report via a spokesperson during his campaign that he would support legislation to ban the death penalty but also that he would consider seeking it as long as it is permitted by the state. Patsy Austin-Gatson, the incoming Democratic DA in Gwinnett County, Georgia, told the Political Report the same thing this week. 

Advocates hope that more DAs will draw strong lines in the sand and rule out adding people to death row. 

But they also stress that, even with those who make such forward-looking commitments, more is needed. Prosecutors who oppose the death penalty should also use all legal and political means at their disposal to resentence people who are already on death row and to fight their executions.

“It’s really important … to push prosecutors not just to say, ‘I’ll refrain from using this harsh practice in the future,’ but to refuse to preside over it in the present,” said Ben Cohen, an attorney who works against the death penalty in Louisiana. “It’s barbaric to allow death sentences from the 1980’s and 1990’s to be executed on your watch.”

“A progressive prosecutor has to do more than sit on their hands,” he added.

Defense attorneys have had some success in recent years overturning sentences in Louisiana, but Cohen said he has not seen cooperation from the outgoing DA’s office in New Orleans, where there are five people on death row. DA Leon Cannizzaro did not seek re-election this year, and he will be replaced by Williams, who won in a landslide on Saturday after embracing a reform platform put forth by local organizers that included opposition to the death penalty. He did not answer a request for comment this week about how he will address people already on death row.

In Los Angeles, though, Gascón released a plan early in his campaign outlining how he would aim to get people off of death row “utilizing every legal avenue available to me.” 

“It’s completely transformative,” said Natasha Minsker, an attorney who is part of Gascón’s transition team on the death penalty. “The fact that Los Angeles County is now, as of today, going to stop pursuing death sentences and going to shift in a different direction … is a complete game changer.” No county in the nation has more people on death row than Los Angeles; Angelenos approved abolishing capital punishment in a 2016 referendum but the initiative failed statewide. 

Minsker outlined the range of tools that Gascón can use. Where there is active litigation over a specific legal or factual issue, he could concede arguments made by defense attorneys “and no longer fight for [death sentences] to be in place,” she said. Many appeals are handled by the attorney general rather than the DA, but Gascón could still file amicus briefs to assist people contesting their sentences.

Gascón could also request a resentencing hearing for someone on death row, Minsker said. DAs don’t necessarily have this power nationally; here it stems from California’s relatively new Section 1170(d), a statute that adopted in 2018 that expanded DAs’ powers to revisit old cases.

Minsker warned that courts retain ultimate say in whether to remove people from death row. “The real unknown here is the judges,” she said. “I’m concerned that we may end up in a situation where we have disparities based on who the judge is.”

It is usually prosecutors who are the greatest hurdle to ending or curtailing the death penalty. They routinely work to derail legislative proposals, including in Ohio, Oregon, and Wyoming over the last few years. Even DAs who campaigned on their discomfort with capital punishment have gone on to fight efforts to stop executions, such as Kim Ogg in Harris County (Houston). But Ogg had not outright ruled out seeking the death penalty during her 2016 campaign, a far cry from the stronger positions staked by the latest wave of winners.

One of those winners is, like Ogg, in Texas. In Travis County, which has executed eight people since 1976, José Garza ousted the incumbent DA after promising to not seek the death penalty and to review past sentences for legal or factual errors. He has also vowed to stand up to potential pushback from statewide officials. 

“We have an obligation and a responsibility to show people a different way of governing in the state of Texas,” Garza told the Political Report in June. 

In breaking their profession’s usual mold, prosecutors like Conover, Garza, or Gascón could indeed do more than affect the cases immediately before them. 

They may be able to make it harder for prosecutors’ powerful statewide associations to keep up their lobbying for the death penalty. And they can be influential allies for activists and lawmakers who are seeking to advance legislation or lawsuits against capital punishment. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner has joined legal efforts to overturn the death penalty in Pennsylvania, for instance, and this month, dozens of reform-minded prosecutors signed on to a letter spearheaded by the organization Fair and Just Prosecution that opposed the resumption of federal executions.

“We’re trying to have this conversation about [prosecutors’ role] in creating effective responses to reduce violence,” said Porter of the 8th Amendment Project, “rather than just getting caught up in fear-based politics.”

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