Tough choice

I feel as if I'd written this post before -- and I more or less did -- during the primary race which left Los Angeles County with the choice of either reelecting incumbent District Attorney Jackie Lacey or replacing her with George Gascón, a former San Francisco D.A. But it keeps happening: well-known national and Southern Californian progressives like Bernie Sanders and Maxine Waters, Dolores Huerta and Jackie Goldberg, even usually less knee-jerk partisan commentators like Ezra Klein, even San Francisco's new progressive D.A. Chesa Boudin, keep telling me that Gascón is part of the new wave of progressive prosecutors who are bringing less punishment and more justice to criminal law enforcement.

As someone active for years in trying to bring to some measure of justice to bear against trigger-happy cops who killed Alex Nieto, Amicar Perez Lopez, Luis Gongora Pat, and Mario Woods in 2014-15, I find the fulsome endorsements of Gascón disorienting. Gascón was AWOL in the context of these police killings, refusing to charge police officers in any of them.

Not that Gascón's current endorsers are "wrong," because elections are binary events from which you can't always get what you want. When voting, you have try to get what you can. But let's apply some nuance here.

I understand that Jackie Lacey, though the first woman and the first African-American in the D.A. role in Los Angeles, is not a progressive choice. She too has failed to charge cops who kill and is notable as one of the few D.A.s in the state still bringing special enhanced murder charges that carry the death penalty. The California death penalty system is totally dysfunctional and our current governor has made clear that no death sentences will be carried out on his watch. She's just wasting money and legal angst by continuing to bring these charges. In the context of the current racial reckoning, the Black Future Project is picketing her house, demanding she resign!

But George Gascón is not a simple alternative. On formal, high profile, declared policies -- he's been a valuable voice among a law enforcement community hooked on punishment. He has supported bail reform, ending the war on drugs, clearing old marijuana conviction records, and alternatives to incarceration for juveniles.

But on charging decisions, his record looks highly political in the bad sense of trying to avert criticism from powerful detractors. Though he backed a "Blue Ribbon" study of police malpractice (and its indictment of police practices is quite incendiary,) somehow no cops who killed on his watch in San Francisco had to face a jury. He may have rightly judged that under the law as then written it would have been hard to convict, but the community was left feeling hung out to dry. Did the lives of these men matter?

Yet when powerful establishment forces line up to push him, he'll overcharge and posture on a bad case. I'm thinking of the high-profile shooting of Kate Steinle by a dumb and dazed undocumented immigrant. This tragedy was clearly a murderous accident, but Donald Trump and all our national Know-Nothings were screaming for blood. Gascón's charges against the shooter all demanded a finding of malevolent intent to reach a guilty verdict; the jury wouldn't and couldn't convict. Gascón demonstrated he can be pushed around; L.A. progressives, take note.

If I lived in L.A., would I vote for Gascón? I guess so. It would be hard, but I believe in making tactical choices with open eyes. And if this guy manages to win, folks better stay ready to get after him ...