LA Times Recommends Keeping Los Angeles DA Gascon ‘In Place’
It’s time to move past George Gascón
By Katy Grimes, January 22, 2024 4:29 pm
Article originally published by the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys.
By Ryan Erlich
On Sunday morning, the Los Angeles Times endorsed George Gascón in the District Attorney’s race.
Their justification? Voters should “reject the nonsense and keep Gascón on the job and criminal justice reform in place.” The editorial board returned to that theme in their closing sentences. “Voters were right to pick him in 2020,” they wrote. “They ought to keep him in place for another term.”
Notice that language: “Keep him in place.”
Their editorial was not what one would call a “positive” or evidence-based endorsement. They didn’t argue that Gascón has “earned” a second four-year term. They didn’t point to any new proposals. They didn’t lean into statistics. There was no tally of exonerations. No list of successful prosecutions. No citation to a declining crime rate. No mention of cases filed against law enforcement officers. They didn’t even discuss his second-term agenda; in fact, it’s not clear that one exists.
Instead, they clung to a false premise: that failing to keep George Gascón in office will mean the end of criminal justice reform in Los Angeles.
They’re wrong. But they’re not alone.
Like their counterparts at the Times, some prospective voters also believe that Gascón’s highest political worth is that he simply occupies the office. If he’s in charge, the argument goes, L.A. can’t turn back the clock to the tough-on-crime policies of the past.
But what they don’t realize is that keeping Gascón “in place” means that we can’t move forward either, as an office or as a county.
And if you are truly committed to improving public safety in a just, compassionate, and sustainable way, herein lies the problem.
Gascón’s presence “in place” may prevent backsliding, but stasis for stasis’ sake is not progress. And electing Gascón to a second term as District Attorney won’t accelerate criminal justice reform; if anything, it may delay and inhibit it.
Why? Because George Gascón is a public pariah, as stale as the status quo. He has lost significant electoral support. He has alienated core county leaders, making “buy-in” from key stakeholders almost impossible. The business community dislikes him. So do those for whom violent crime is a destructive reality of life, not just an inconvenient statistic. He has become a counterproductive agent for change, just like he was in his final term in San Francisco.
Voters are looking for real solutions. They don’t like what’s going on and they don’t feel safe. Substantially more of them disapprove of Gascón’s job performance than approve of it. But they don’t want to “go back” to the way things were before. They support reform and they want to move forward, beyond Gascón, in a different direction.
And, frankly, so do many of my colleagues in the District Attorney’s Office.
We are sick of the old debates, and we’re tired of the wide, reactionary pendulum swings in state and local criminal justice policy.
We want something different: progress.
This campaign is not a binary choice between keeping Gascón “in place” or going back to the policies of the past, no matter how much the Los Angeles Times wants it to be. It’s actually a much more important choice between keeping Gascón “in place” or moving past him and pushing reform forward in a more constructive and effective way.
Those running for District Attorney, and their supporters, should keep this in mind.
Here’s a message for those candidates: you don’t need to convince voters to fire Gascón. They are ready to do it. But you must convince them that your version of tomorrow will be better than his. Be more than just your Day One plans to “repeal” his special directives. Stop telling us what policies you’d “bring back.” Start explaining what you’d do differently. Be specific. Be modern. Be bold. Be forward-looking. Be progressive.
Los Angeles is a big county and serving as its elected District Attorney is a big job. We’re facing generational problems that need and demand transformative solutions: on homelessness, mental health, addiction, economic insecurity, environmental injustice, intolerance, and political incivility. Our office can, and should, lead on those issues.
We can’t afford to think small, to go backward, or, as the Times suggests, “keep in place.” It’s time to go beyond who and what we have. It’s time to move past George Gascón. It’s time to move ahead.
Published at the California Globe with permission.
Ryan Erlich is Vice President of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys (ADDA), the collective bargaining agent representing over 800 Deputy District Attorneys working for the County of Los Angeles.
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Word on the street is that the L.A. Times is HEMORRHAGING money now and almost dead. Tens of millions injected into this rag every year, only to produce more unreadable garbage and lose more readers.
Last time I checked (in the waiting room at my doctor’s office years ago) their print version was as thin as a grocery store advertiser. Can’t speak for the online version —- haven’t been there either in many years. Apparently I’m not alone. The point of view is all-propagada-all-the-time. Apparently they have lost any influence they had even as a propaganda rag.
We don’t have troubles enough in L.A.? Who needs it?
I totally encourage Gascon and the criminals to remain in L.A. They can also defund the police all they want. I live in Orange County and want to discourage all the homeless and criminals from moving down here. They have to go somewhere and up there is much better.
If we actually had any honesty or integrity in “our” media, such as the LA Times, they would have shredded our so-called president long ago. Even before senility/dementia, he was a traitorous pos pedo scumbag. As “our” media ignores the reality of what a disaster he is, you really can’t trust them on anything.
I have a question for the LA times editorial board. Has crime risen under DA’ Gascon?
LA Times has an odd way of describing criminal justice reform.
[Homicides have been on a downtrend from 2016 to 2019, going from 287 homicides to 226 homicides. However, there was a significant spike in homicides in 2020 and 2021, when there were 335 and 380 homicides respectively.]
I guess if they think higher crime rate is reform then by all means keep Gascon in!
https://medium.com/datala/a-data-driven-exploration-of-crime-trends-in-los-angeles-6124c2980eda
“Be modern. Be bold. Be forward-looking. Be progressive.
Los Angeles is a big county and serving as its elected District Attorney is a big job. We’re facing generational problems that need and demand transformative solutions: on homelessness, mental health, addiction, economic insecurity, environmental injustice, intolerance, and political incivility. Our office can, and should, lead on those issues.”
Sounds like the entire LA DA office is full of “fellow travelers” and that getting rid of Gascon is not going to improve things much. Being soft on the anti-social elements of the city while chasing out the productive elements is exactly why LA is in the mess it is in right now.
They need all the crime to have something to report on.
The LA Times is irrelevant and hopefully Soros DA Gascón will also soon be irrelevant after the election?
Of course they do….
@JohnB hit the nail squarely – they need the coverage of all the chaos that the criminal element will commit with a limp-noodle like Gascon in the DA’s office….
I also concur with the Orange County writer – leave him in place and attract the scumbags to El Lay and leave the surrounding counties alone….