The Brief

This is an excerpt from Make It Make Sense, our pop-up newsletter on the 2024 election. If you want weekly updates through September on following the money this election season, sign up here.

Millions of dollars have been raised in this year’s race for Los Angeles County district attorney — but so far, the vast majority of it has been gathered in support of just one of the candidates.

Nathan Hochman, the criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor who is challenging incumbent George Gascón for the seat, has raised nearly $3.9 million for his campaign as of Sept. 16. That’s over five times more than Gascón, whose fundraising stands at around $678,000.

Independent groups — those that aren’t affiliated with an official campaign — have spent $1.8 million to support Hochman. So far, there’s been no independent spending to support Gascón.

We’ll break down how we found these numbers and what they actually tell us. But first, let’s back up.

Why is the district attorney’s race such a big deal?

Voters are choosing between two competing visions of criminal justice in L.A. County.

Gascón was elected district attorney in 2020 on his promises to work toward ending decades of mass incarceration and create a fairer criminal justice system. Since taking office, he’s stopped prosecuting many misdemeanors and seeking sentencing enhancements for other crimes.

But increases in property crime and viral videos of smash-and-grab-style robberies have made public safety a major talking point of this election. Recent polling shows that public support for Gascón’s approach has waned — not just in L.A. County, but also in other cities that elected similarly progressive district attorneys.

Hochman has vowed to reverse some of Gascón’s policies. The November election will be a test of whether L.A. voters want that, too.

Now, let’s take a look at the money. Because this is an L.A. County office, all the campaign finance information can be found on the L.A. County registrar’s website.

How much money has each candidate raised?

What we found: We added up the data for Gascón and Hochman going back to 2023, when they first started raising money for their respective campaigns. As of Sept. 16, Gascón raised a total of $678,784. Hochman raised $3,854,313. 

What this tells you: These funds — which can be found by searching both candidates’ records here and here — are the engines that keep campaigns going. They pay staff, they buy ads, they cover travel expenses, and a lot more. The sheer amount of money raised isn’t all that matters, but the more funding a candidate has, the more ability they have to get their name and message in front of voters. 

In 2020, when Gascón first ran for L.A. County district attorney against incumbent Jackie Lacey, the gap between funding totals was not so wide. Back then, Gascón raised about $1.3 million against Lacey’s $1.6 million.

How much money came from inside vs. outside LA County?

What the numbers tell you: This race could influence elections in other counties that face similar tensions over public safety and criminal justice, so it’s likely attracting money from outside L.A County. These numbers can help you gauge how much outside interest there is in a race and to what degree it’s powering the campaigns. It can also hint at what a candidate’s local support looks like.

What we found: Taking a look here and here, and extracting L.A. County ZIP codes from the data, we see that as of Sept. 10, about $381,000 of Gascón’s funds — or 57% of his total — came from L.A. County. Of the rest of Gascón’s money, about 23% of his total funds came from Bay Area counties and another 8% came from outside California.

For Hochman, the amount raised from within L.A. County was about $3.2 million, or 83% of his total funds. 

(Other counties in northern, southern and central California make up the rest of the totals for each candidate, along with contributions that didn't include a ZIP code.)

Where is independent spending coming from?

What this tells you: Who’s willing to spend big to back a candidate? Money raised by candidates comes with restrictions — a maximum of $9,000 per donor for this particular race. But there are no contribution limits for independent groups that want to support or oppose a candidate, as long as they’re not affiliated with an official campaign. 

What we found: When we took a closer look at independent spending (by looking here and here and filtering for independent committee spending in the 2024 elections), a few things stuck out:

• Two independent committees spent a combined $469,000 to oppose Gascón: 
  
  • Working Families, First Responders, and Small Businesses for a Safer L.A. County Supporting Hochman for District Attorney 2024 sponsored by Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs
  • Local Residents, Small Businesses and Public Safety Professionals for Safer and Cleaner Neighborhoods Opposing Nithya Raman for City Council 2024, Sponsored by the Los Angeles Police Protective League 
• Two independent committees spent more than $1.8 million combined to support Hochman — Los Angeles County Deserves Better, Primarily Formed to Support Nathan Hochman for District Attorney 2024 spent more than $846,000, and the Working Families, First Responders and Small Businesses committee spent more than $970,000.
• So far, no independent money has been spent to support Gascón in this election cycle (although one group had raised $200,000 to support him as of last week).  

Will this spending influence voters?

What this tells you: The data we’ve been looking at so far tell us how much financial power these campaigns have and who’s fueling it. You can also think of campaign contributions as quiet endorsements for candidates. Someone may not be putting up a lawn sign, for example, but they are writing a check to support a candidate. If their opinion matters to you, it can help you decide your own vote.

What we found: 

• The L.A. Police Protective League and Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs sponsored committees that spent a combined $366,000 to oppose Gascón.
• Other big spenders supporting Hochman include Rick Caruso, a former L.A. mayoral candidate and billionaire developer (who contributed $250,000 to an independent committee supporting Hochman), businessman Alex Von Fürstenberg, son of fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg (he donated $9,000 to the campaign and $30,000 in independent spending), and Jerry Greenberg, Sushi Nozawa’s CEO (who donated a combined $125,000 across two independent committees). 
• Hochman’s supporters include people from real estate, corporate law and law enforcement groups, while Gascón’s backers include multiple labor unions. 
• Among Gascón’s recognizable supporters: actor Jane Fonda (who donated $1,000), musician John Legend (who donated $5,000) and Gil Garcetti, former L.A. district attorney (who donated $500). 

What’s the takeaway? 

It’s clear that Hochman’s campaign has a large advantage over Gascón’s so far when focusing on several different spending measures — the amount of money raised, the amount raised from within L.A. County, and independent spending.

Deep-pocketed business leaders and law enforcement unions are spending big to back Hochman (or to oppose Gascón). Gascón is trailing by a wide margin and isn’t receiving nearly the same amount of financial support he had back in 2020.

This may or may not affect how you vote. But it provides a few more dimensions to help you understand this race and others you see on your ballot.

If you want more on this race, check out these resources from LAist: This breakdown of the candidates' visions from Civics and Democracy Correspondent Frank Stoltze, our podcast series on Gascón and our Voter Game Plan guide.

LAist data journalist Maloy Moore contributed to this story. 

This series is supported by the American Press Institute.

A California Senate committee just gutted one of the state’s most substantial DUI reform bills in years, despite widespread support from other lawmakers and families of drunk driving victims.

The bill would have required in-car breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI, bringing California in line with most states. State law currently only requires the devices, called ignition interlock devices, after repeat offenses or injury crashes.

Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from the Inland Empire and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, provided a hint of changes last week when she said there were amendments to the bill that had been approved unanimously by the committee. This week, an updated version of the legislation emerged, and it effectively killed a key provision to start requiring the devices for thousands of first-time offenders. Such changes are commonly referred to as “hostile amendments” because they are made without the involvement or support of the bill’s author.

Cervantes was arrested for a DUI in a high-profile incident in Sacramento in May 2025. The District Attorney’s Office did not prosecute her after a blood test showed no drugs or alcohol in her system. Cervantes then sued the city of Sacramento and several of its police officers, alleging that that police fabricated evidence and falsely arrested her. Cervantes’s sister, state Assembly candidate Clarissa Cervantes, has herself been convicted of two DUIs in Southern California, according to media reports.

Sabrina Cervantes did not respond to our request for comment for this story. We will update it if she does.

As news of the bill’s gutting spread this week, Kellie Montalvo was left wondering if there’d been some sort of horrible mistake. Montalvo, whose 21-year-old son Benjamin was killed by an impaired driver in Cervantes’s district in 2020, said she was just in Sacramento two weeks ago lobbying lawmakers – including Cervantes – on a slate of dangerous driving bills. Many of those bills have already failed.

“It’s heartbreaking, and I try to tell myself not to lose hope,” Montalvo said. “I mean, California has got to do something. Our numbers are horrific.”

Alcohol-related roadway deaths in California spiked more than 50% in a decade — an increase more than twice as steep as the rest of the country, federal data shows. More than 1,300 people die each year statewide in drunken collisions.

Over the last two years, a CalMatters investigation has shown how state officials have allowed dangerous drivers to stay on the road and kill, and how elected leaders have looked away even as the death toll skyrocketed.

For years, lawmakers have tried and failed to require in-car breathalyzers for all DUI offenders. Progressive justice reform groups and the DMV have opposed similar bills in the past, citing fears about unfairly penalizing poor DUI offenders, high costs and the DMV’s aging technology.

Montalvo and other advocates thought this year might be different. The DMV has actively participated in state hearings and, she and others said, provided technical advice to make sure the bill was realistic. Gov. Gavin Newsom also instructed lawmakers last year to continue to work on the state’s breathalyzer laws and develop “a lasting program that strengthens public safety.”

It’s unclear why this year’s bill was gutted at the 11th hour. Public records show that Senate Appropriations committee staff recently expressed concern about costs.

The amendment process is opaque even to Sacramento insiders.

“Honestly it’s sometimes a bit of a black box even for us as legislators,” said the bill’s author, Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, an Orange County Democrat. “I am still trying myself to get to the bottom of it.”

Petrie-Norris, who has spent the past three years trying to pass a version of this bill, said she does not believe Cervantes’ personal experience played a role in the decision to amend the bill. She added that she is still working to re-amend the measure after “unintended consequences” that she says would make the policy unworkable for the DMV and hurt California’s eligibility for federal funding.

Asked for an interview to explain the changes to the bill, Senate President Pro Tem Monique Límon’s office referred questions to Cervantes. Diana Crofts-Pelayo, Newsom’s chief deputy director of communications, also declined to answer questions about the breathalyzer bill, saying the office does not typically comment on pending legislation.

While the bill heads into the final days of negotiations, Montalvo and other victims’ families are grappling with deja vu. It was just about a year ago that they were standing in the Capitol with photos of their loved ones and told the bill was doomed.

She stays busy checking in with the parole officer for the Riverside County driver who killed her son. Last she heard, the driver was trying to get her license back after being released early from prison.

Long Beach streets got deadlier last year than they’ve been in a decade. Now the city wants to build a whole new division bent on reversing that, powered by the $5 million it expects to get annually by ticketing people with new speed cameras.

As part of Long Beach’s budget, city leaders are proposing a new traffic safety division, which consolidates two Public Works teams and adds more than a dozen staff who will administer a state pilot program for 18 automated speed cameras around the city.

A proposed traffic safety division

It comes after the city saw a record number of fatal traffic collisions in 2025 — 53 last year, the most in more than 10 years — that includes 32 pedestrians, cyclists and e-scooter riders killed. That eclipsed the number of people murdered in the city that year.

High rates of traffic deaths and collisions coincide with a record number of public requests to overhaul dangerous arterial streets, calibrate traffic lights and add traffic calming measures to neighborhoods known for dangerous driving. Long Beach currently sits on a backlog of more than 1,400 open traffic requests.

Many delays are tied to the 4% completion rate of traffic investigations. Officials explained many of those unresolved cases involve arterial streets the city already knows need expensive, yearslong overhauls. Neighborhood traffic calming requests have also spiked, from about 35 in the second half of last fiscal year to 306 in the first half of this one.

Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie said the shift reflects years of pressure from residents.

She added that the old system wasn’t built for the volume of requests coming in now.

“I think we all recognize that the old ways of managing these requests simply just wasn’t working for the volume that we are seeing come into Public Works,” she said.

Public Works Director Josh Hickman put it more bluntly: “We’re barely keeping up,” citing data that requests have risen swiftly this year compared to late last year.

He explained the current model only adds unnecessary delays, even on simple fixes.

“In order to do street sweeping and in order to enforce parking control, you need to have signs,” he said as an example. “Those require our engineers to review and approve the signs, which are in a different bureau. Once it gets approved, well, then it requires another bureau to go and install those signs.”

The new division could streamline the city's traffic system

This division would alleviate that, he said, by folding the city’s existing traffic engineering and traffic operations divisions into one unit under the Transportation Services Bureau.

The new division will be powered by citation revenue generated from the city’s automated speed enforcement program, a state pilot that will bring 18 cameras to handpicked streets and intersections later this fall, with warnings starting in October and citations beginning in December.

Officials say the cameras will rake in about $5 million a year, half of which will go toward operating costs with the other half restricted to funding traffic-calming projects.

Hickman called that estimate “quite conservative,” in hopes that the cameras will discourage drivers afraid of paying for tickets — which start at $50 for those driving 11 mph over the limit.

New speed cameras

It’s a program that has seen success in other California cities.

In San Francisco, the program’s 56 cameras led to 163,906 citations and brought in $7.2 million in its first year, according to the city’s transit agency. About 65% of drivers who got a warning or ticket didn’t reoffend, and 82% were cited no more than once or twice over the year.

Madhu Unnikrishnan, a spokesman for SFMTA, said that has led to $3 million in street improvements across San Francisco, while the rate of drivers going 10 mph or more over the limit has fallen by 80% in the enforcement areas.

By state law, that money has to cover operating costs first, and anything left over must go toward traffic calming — such as crosswalk upgrades, no-turn-on-red signs, speed humps — within three years. It can’t be spent on anything else, even to help close a city’s budget gap.

Jonathon Bolin, a Public Works bureau manager, emphasized that the point of the cameras is to change driver behavior and discourage speeding, not “bankroll revenue.”

Long Beach’s 2027 budget would add seven new traffic and five new customer service positions to the division. Hickman said the department plans to fill the new positions “as quickly as possible.”

Seperately, the city is also proposing $37.3 million for roadway improvements, curb and sidewalk improvements and traffic safety projects funded by the Measure A sales tax.

An additional effort by state Sen. Lena Gonzalez is looking to place more speed cameras along Pacific Coast Highway.

Reading, writing, and drilling down on the craft — that’s the focus this weekend at the 2nd Annual Los Feliz Writers Festival. Various free workshops are happening at multiple venues across the neighborhood such as Barnsdall Art Park, Fred 62, and the Vermont Triangle.

A tradition of writers

Festival founder Sammy Ginsberg has a passion for small literary festivals. She fell in love with them while studying abroad in the United Kingdom, and once she moved back to Los Angeles, her love continued.

Sammy Ginsberg (right) poses for a picture at a Los Feliz Writers with L.A. Poet Laureate Brian-Sonia Wallace (left).

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Last year she set about hosting one in her own neighborhood, Los Feliz.

“There's a tradition of writers and artists being in Los Feliz. Joan Didion lived in Los Feliz for a bit. Charles Bukowski went to Jumbo's [Clown Room],” Ginsberg said.

Last year’s inaugural festival had six events and about 100 people. This year, there are 1,000 RSVPs for its 13 events.

Local Feliz

Writers living in Los Feliz are leading all of the workshops. Like William J. Meyer, who’s published his fantasy and sci-fi writing as podcasts. His workshop is at the diner Fred 62 this afternoon, focused on how to write with audio in mind.

Attendees at a Los Feliz Writers Festival event.

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“It's about taking that writing and making it fun for an audio recording. Tone, voice, and things like that,” said Ginsberg.

Willa Lane is a writer and tarot reader. She’ll perform tarot readings today at her workshop in Barnsdall Art Park, using the cards and their symbolism as writing prompts.

Willa Lane sits in front of a table with her tarot cards.

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“Sylvia Plath had a deck of tarot cards that she used. So a lot of artists and creatives have been using tarot to inform their work at some level,” Lane said.

Today’s events culminate in a live reading of a zine put together by Los Feliz Writers for the festival. The Barnsdall Art Park event will feature a mix of short stories, a screenplay, an audio play, and more.

“ I wanted to represent different voices in the neighborhood and different backgrounds and I really think that this does,” Ginsberg said.

A literary event for every neighborhood

The festival continues through tomorrow with an open mic at the Vermont Triangle, a panel and performances from writers of color, and a mixer for activists and writers.

Ginsberg wants to continue the literary tradition in Los Feliz — for all kinds of writers, emerging or established.

“Live, work, or play. It's L.A., that's the energy. Like, we want you to be part of this,” Ginsberg said.

She said the wider vision is to help and inspire other neighborhoods to build their own literary events.

"There’s 99 neighborhood councils in Los Angeles. That’s like 99 writers' festivals and 99 poet laureates," Ginsberg said. "That is magical."

Bellflower isn’t exactly known for its stand-up comedy culture. But that may be changing.

Since 2021, comedians like Tisha Campbell, Frankie Quiñones and Jo Koy have taken the stage at The Stand Up Comedy Club in downtown Bellflower.

“We knew that the Downeys, the Cerritos, the Lakewoods, the Long Beaches, the Norwalks, and Compton and Paramount would come,” said general manager and co-owner John Giries. “That was our bet, and it's been working.”

Jo Koy (left) and Finesse Mitchell (right) take the stage at The Stand Up Comedy Club in Bellflower.

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From a comedy magazine to a comedy club

Giries, a former stand-up comedian himself, grew up in Bellflower. He co-created and helped run The Stand Up Comedy Magazine in the mid-aughts, along with his late friend and fellow comedian Julian Vazquez. Names such as Maz Jobrani, Sebastian Maniscalco and Rachel Feinstein all graced its cover.

After Vazquez’s passing in 2020, Giries decided to put the magazine on hold indefinitely and launch a comedy club.

The Stand Up Comedy Club in Bellflower.

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Giries’ family was an investor in Hambone’s BBQ Smokehouse on Belmont Street, next door to the Bellflower Theatre, downtown. He recalled seeing that theater for the first time and how it felt like something out of a movie…

“It was one of those moments like "Field of Dreams" where Kevin Costner saw the baseball diamond being built in the cornfield,” Giries said. “And I kind of looked at it and said, ‘you know, I can see it.’”

Tisha Campbell takes the stage at The Stand Up Comedy Club in Bellflower.

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After doing gut renovations and waiting through the first year of the pandemic, Giries and his wife and co-owner, Scarlett, opened the club in June 2021.

The roughly 2,400-square-foot space space seats 140 and has a full bar with a steakhouse feel. Photos and memorabilia of Robin Williams, Richard Pryor and Phyllis Diller pay tribute to some of comedy’s legends.

Why Bellflower, not Hollywood

Giries had always planned to have famous comedians perform here. He chose Bellflower because it didn’t have the competition of legacy clubs such as the Improv, The Comedy Store or the Laugh Factory. It was also a closer alternative for locals who didn’t want to brave Hollywood traffic and pay for valet parking.

Interior of The Stand Up Comedy Club in Bellflower.

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Interior and stage of The Stand Up Comedy Club in Bellflower.

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“[Bellflower] fit the criteria of what we wanted to do. It's not in the desert. You're not by the beach and it's easy to get to if you live in a five to 10 mile radius,” Giries said.

“So never L.A. Never thought about it once.”

Landing the headliners

For the first three years of opening the club, Giries focused on getting big-name acts. He had already made connections with notable performers through his magazine, and was able to enlist help from talent bookers including Richard Barrett, who was the entertainment director for The Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach. Giries credits Barrett as “one of the best bookers in L.A.”

Since then, Deon Cole, Sheryl Underwood, Paul Reiser, Billy Gardell, Chaunté Wayans and others have taken the stage.

That list is growing.

Stormy Daniels visited the club in July on her "Unicorns in the Kitchen" storytelling and comedy tour. Last week, Jamie Foxx produced and hosted a comedy special featuring Donald Ray “Speedy” Caldwell. All four shows were sold out.

Giries recognizes that the club is still young, but is proud of what they’ve accomplished since opening five years ago.

“No one remembers, ‘Hey, they've been here for 30 years,'" Giries said. “They just remember, ‘Man, that club was kind of cool. They really took care of us. That was really funny stuff there.’”