The race for top prosecutor in Los Angeles has become one of the most important criminal justice elections in the US this year, with Black Lives Matter activists pushing the contest to the forefront of national debates on racist policing and incarceration.
Jackie Lacey, the first woman and first African American to serve as LA district attorney, is facing a tough challenge from George Gascón, a former San Francisco district attorney who has positioned himself as a progressive candidate dedicated to police accountability and reducing the prison population.
The election comes as nationwide protests over police killings and racial inequality have highlighted the role of district attorneys as some of the most influential and least accountable players in America’s criminal justice system. And the top prosecutor job in LA oversees the country’s largest local prosecutor’s office, funneling defendants into the world’s largest jail system.
Quick guide Jackie Lacey v George Gascón: the key issues
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Jackie Lacey
Death penalty: sent 23 people to death row
Gang enhancements: supports enhanced sentencing based on alleged gang ties
Police killings: does not support stricter laws to allow prosecution of officer
Juvenile prosecution: transfers children to adult court in select cases
Incarceration: opposed reforms to reduce punishments for low-level offenses
George Gascón
Death penalty: opposes, would not send people to death row
Gang enhancements: would not pursue enhancements, due to discriminatory databases
Police killings: lobbied for changes to law, and has pledged to reopen LA cases
Juvenile prosecution: would not prosecute children as adult
Incarceration: pushed for less harsh punishments, supports reduced incarceration
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The race has drawn interest from across the country, with police groups pouring millions into Lacey’s campaign, and celebrities, tech billionaires and political heavyweights such as Bernie Sanders throwing their support behind Gascón.
“Everyone understands what’s at stake with the presidential race, but what affects us most on a daily basis is the DA,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA. “The DA determines what crimes are prosecuted, what crimes go unenforced … and whether we will continue to lock up Black and brown people with reckless abandon.”
Jackie Lacey’s historic win, followed by protests
A 63-year-old south LA native, Lacey joined the district attorney’s office as deputy in 1986. She wasn’t thinking about the power of prosecutors at the time, she told the Guardian, she was “just looking for a better job”.
During her first year on the job, her father was shot in his front yard in the city’s Crenshaw district. He survived, but the case went unsolved and it changed the Lacey family. “We became much more aware, much more fearful,” she said.
Lacey said the shooting shaped her view on victims’ rights, and helped motivate her in court as she rose up in the ranks. She was elected in a historic vote in 2012, becoming the first Black woman to take the lead of the agency of 1,000 lawyers.
Lacey quickly faced criticism from south LA residents and a Black Lives Matter movement that was growing in national prominence, and eventually wider backlash from liberal groups who viewed her approach as overly punitive.
They charged she had sent 23 people to death row as prosecutor, more than any other county in the US in recent years. All but one were people of color.
She has also done little to address the high incarceration rates of Angelenos, they noted, with LA locking up more people per capita than the majority of California counties. While she has made some progress on alternatives to incarceration, a recent study suggested that thousands in jail with mental illness could have been given services instead. And most people in jail are Black and brown.
Lacey has scoffed at the idea of broadly scaling back prosecutions: “Word gets around with the predators and with the criminal community that you can get away with stuff, and they will flock to your city … I want LA not to deteriorate,” she told the Guardian.
She also warned about the alleged risks of releasing people convicted of serious offenses, despite research showing that people serving life sentences rarely re-offend if they are granted parole. And she has fought for the right to continue prosecuting children under the age of 12, and to continue trying youth as adults, arguing heinous offenses merit it.
Among Lacey’s biggest flaws, critics say, has been her failure to rein in police violence, charging just one officer for an on-duty killing in her eight years in office. She declined to prosecute officers who were caught on camera escalating encounters, officers who had fired their weapons at unarmed civilians, and even a case where the LA police chief had publicly called for charges. Officers have killed hundreds of people during her tenure.
For the past three years, activists and family members of victims of police shootings, largely Black and Latino, have protested outside of Lacey’s downtown office every week.
“She really left us no choice,” said Abdullah, who organized the first protest in 2017 after Lacey refused to meet with Black Lives Matter LA.
“Police go out and murder people who are running away and Jackie Lacey protects them,” said Fouzia Almarou. Her son was killed by Gardena police while fleeing in 2018, in a shooting Lacey deemed justified self defense.
Lacey has repeatedly argued that the law gives officers wide latitude, and that she doesn’t want to bring a case she would lose. She told the Guardian she believed existing laws to be “appropriate”. “The truth of the matter is when somebody doesn’t want to be arrested and they start fighting, all bets are off, because one of these folks is going to have to take control of the situation,” she said.
George Gascón’s enemies: police and protesters
Many of the activists who’ve been fighting Lacey have thrown their weight behind her contender, George Gascón.
Gascón immigrated from Cuba at age 13, and grew up in Cudahy in south LA, where he said he struggled to learn English and eventually dropped out of school. “When we saw the sheriff’s department as kids, we run the other way,” he told the Guardian about his childhood years.
Gascón became a Los Angeles Police Department patrol officer, was promoted to assistant chief and eventually headed a police department in Arizona and then San Francisco. In 2011, he became the city’s first Latino district attorney.
Gascón fought bitter battles with law enforcement groups once he pushed to reduce punishments for low-level offenses and investigated racism in the police department he used to lead.
But like Lacey, he refused to prosecute police shootings, even amid intense public outrage. In 2018, Gascón cleared five officers who were caught on video shooting Mario Woods, a young man who held a knife but did not appear to pose any threat to the officers. “I voted for Gascón and I’ve lived to regret that,” said Gwen Woods, Mario’s mother. “He didn’t have a spine to stand up for what was right and he allowed the executioners of my child to get off.”
Unlike Lacey, however, the San Francisco district attorney did pursue changes to the law, arguing that it should be easier to prosecute: “I was very open about my frustration and saying that the shootings were unnecessary, but under the law at the time, we could not go any further.”
He successfully lobbied for a state law that would allow prosecution of officers who kill when force is “unnecessary”. If the policy had been in place when Woods was killed, he would have filed criminal charges, he told the Guardian: “If I have any regrets, it’s that I didn’t campaign sooner to change the law.”
Gascón has pledged to reopen some cases of police killings in LA and has campaigned on a number of other major criminal justice reforms.
“We can see incarceration and safety are not necessarily synonymous, and the fact that this is becoming more obvious to many, it’s very, very energizing to me,” Gascón said.
He said his office would not fight to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, has pledged not to transfer teens to adult court, won’t pursue the death penalty, and has vowed to abandon “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
The limits of ‘progressive’ district attorneys
Gascón has racked up a wide range of endorsements, from LA’s mayor, the California governor, vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and musician John Legend.
The LA public defenders’ union, took the rare step of supporting his candidacy because, lawyers said, they viewed Lacey’s approach as so punitive and regressive that it was worth campaigning for a challenger.
“[Lacey] continues the march from slavery to mass incarceration with her policies,” said Alisa Blair, a deputy public defender, who volunteered on the Gascón campaign’s policy committee. “Her entire legacy has been one of very archaic law and order punishment.”
Myesha Lopez, whose father was killed by LA sheriff’s deputies, said she considered a vote for Gascón as a vote against Lacey – and that she didn’t have confidence in either: “The only hope with him is that there’s enough public pressure to make him accountable. Either way, Jackie Lacey needs to go.”
Abdullah, too, said she was hesitant to personally endorse Gascón, noting that the prosecutor’s office will remain a part of an unjust system, and the nature of the job means she will be protesting him if he’s elected: “He knows that,” she said, adding that she did appreciate that he was willing to meet with her and other families of those killed by police.
Asked if she had any regrets about her handling of police killings, Lacey said no, but then later clarified: “I do wish I had spent more time with Black Lives Matter LA just trying to figure this out, because I do in my heart of hearts, feel we’re on the same side.”
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