I’d like to use this space to sort through some of the confusion on criminal justice reform and my work as district attorney of Los Angeles County, despite what you’ll hear on social media and from my opponents. Wading through misinformation and political rhetoric is never easy—especially right now in America—but it’s necessary so people can to make whatever informed decision at the ballot box aligns with their values.
Since I took office in December 2020, I have been vigorously focused on community safety and accountability. Our filing rates for violent crime remain in line with the historical average for the office. We have brought more than 100 charges for organized retail theft and are working with law enforcement partners to track down and disrupt the rings behind these highly coordinated crimes. Those unacceptable smash and grabs we see on TV are resulting in felony charges, but that doesn’t often make it to follow-up reporting and social media posts. And violent crime rates continue to fall in Los Angeles and across the country, after the nationwide spike we saw during COVID.
At the same time, I am deeply committed to righting the wrongs of the past. We have exonerated several men who each spent decades—up to forty years, in one case—in prison for crimes they simply did not commit. I am opposed to the death penalty, which reflects the clear will of Los Angeles voters. It is a deeply flawed, highly expensive and irreversible act for the state to take. When I took office, the District attorney’s Office had sent 22 individuals—all but one of them Black and Latino men—to death row and aggressively sought capital charges, despite the state’s moratorium on the death penalty. Now we no longer seek that charge; existing death row inmates will remain in prison for the rest of their lives but at a much lower ethical and financial cost.
Our approach to juvenile defendants is one of the most frequently misunderstood policies. The real principle can be boiled down to this: juveniles who commit crimes should be held accountable, but we need to find more appropriate and effective ways to do so. Sometimes that looks like community-based diversion for teenagers who need intervention from mental health professionals, not separation from their families—especially with the ongoing safety crisis in our juvenile detention halls. Sometimes that looks like a restorative justice approach, sometimes that looks like incarceration. What it should not look like is a 15-year-old kid being jailed along with 50-year-olds; nothing healthy or productive comes from that, and we should avoid it whenever possible.
Our approach to environmental justice holds not just companies but individual executives accountable in cases like a Watts metal recycling facility that had improperly disposed of poisonous debris for years, impacting the students and playing fields at Jordan High School next door. Those kids deserve to be focused on college admissions and football titles, not lead poisoning.
Similarly, we created the office’s first Labor Justice Unit to combat wage theft at a time when too many Los Angeles families are living paycheck to paycheck. We recently brought charges against a hospitality company on Catalina Island for a massive wage theft scheme that stole more than $500,000 from workers. Wage theft not only traps hard-working families in a cycle of poverty—many people don’t know that an estimated $1 billion is taken from workers each year in Los Angeles County—it is also competitively unfair to businesses that are doing the right thing and factor following the law into their business practices.
I’m proud of our work and grateful for the support of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, Planned Parenthood Advocacy Project, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and so many others in this race. I don’t expect to win everyone’s support but I appreciate the opportunity to at least bring some facts to that decision.
George Gascón is district attorney of Los Angeles County.
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