LA's progressive DA is in a fight to keep his job — why that may turn into a national throwdown

When L.A. County voters went to the polls earlier this month, three out of four chose a candidate other than George Gascón, the sitting district attorney who came to office amid a wave of calls for criminal justice reform. Those primary results have forced the incumbent into a November runoff with former federal prosecutor, Nathan Hochman, who has promised to reverse Gascón's policies.

Gascón won 25% of the vote to Hochman’s 16%.

So why do advocates for reform say their candidate — and the movement — remains strong?

“A bigger margin of victory would have been more comforting,” said Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, co-executive director of Dignity and Power Now. “But I feel good about Gascón’s chances in November.”

Although the race for district attorney is a focus for many reformers, many told LAist they are also encouraged by results in other races, including the reelection of several elected leaders sympathetic to their cause.

Others were more reserved in their analysis, saying the movement to reduce mass incarceration has a long way to go — especially in diverting people with mental illness from jail to treatment, a concept often referred to as Care First, Jails Last.

The backstory: A national outcry following George Floyd's murder

Gascón was elected L.A. County district attorney in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and amid a national outcry over policing and how the justice system works. Gascón defeated incumbent Jackie Lacey by promising to reduce mass incarceration and racial disparities in the justice system.

On his first day in office, Gascón instituted a wide range of policy changes aimed at reducing criminal penalties and emphasizing rehabilitation at the nation’s largest local prosecutor’s office. Since then, the one-time Los Angeles Police Department assistant chief and San Francisco district attorney has become a national leader in the reform movement.

Clayton-Johnson of Dignity and Power Now, an L.A.-based grassroots organization that advocates on behalf of incarcerated people, their families, and communities, noted that Gascón faced withering attacks during his first term in office, including two recall attempts fueled in part by Fox News.

Still, Gascón finished first in March of this year in a crowded field of 11 challengers.

"The movement continues,” Gascón told LAist on election night. “The issues that got me and others elected around the country continue to be as important today as they were before.”

What to expect in the November vote

With the presidential race on the Nov. 8 ballot, history tells us many more people are expected to go to vote than in the primary. An experts say a larger voting pool means will likely means a younger and more progressive electorate.

That will probably favor Gascón against the more conservative Hochman, who was the Republican nominee for California Attorney General in 2022 but is running as an independent in the non-partisan race for district attorney.

“Gascón may see an opportunity to paint him as being unacceptably conservative to voters in a deep blue place like Los Angeles,” said Dan Schnur, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies who has worked on numerous gubernatorial and presidential campaigns.

“This is still going to be a steep uphill fight for Gascón,” he said.

How other progressives fared in the primary

Elsewhere on the L.A. County ballot, supporters of the criminal justice reform movement had reason to celebrate.

Deputy public defenders performed well in Superior Court judge races, with one beating an incumbent judge and three others winning spots in November runoffs. Three of the four were part of a progressive slate called The Defenders of Justice seeking to defeat opponents who were prosecutors.

Reform advocates have said they want to see more judges on the bench who come from defense backgrounds — either public or private — to provide diverse perspectives and balance out years of tough-on-crime thinking that has led to mass incarceration.

Additionally, L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell handily won reelection in District 2, which includes El Segundo, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Marina Del Rey and other communities.

“She has been a champion for alternatives to incarceration, a champion for mental health diversion,” Clayton-Johnson said.

L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman secured a second four-year term in office. She has been an advocate for allocating more funding for unarmed non-police responses to people experiencing mental health crises.

Her win came despite an independent expenditure campaign against Raman by the labor union that represents rank-and-file Los Angeles Police Department officers. In the days before the election, a mailer was sent to voters in the district that featured a picture of her alongside Gascón and the words: “Nithya Raman and George Gascón broke their promise to keep us safe.”

Why reformers say real change hasn't yet happened

Although those results are seen as positive by some, criminal justice advocates also warn that there’s still much to do at both the city and county levels to create real change.

“There’s been this false narrative that Los Angeles and California underwent some massive criminal justice reforms in the past few years,” said Ivette Alé-Ferlito, who is executive director of La Defensa, a femme-led abolitionist group.

“The type of structural reform that is needed, we’ve barely started to scratch the surface,” she said.

For example, five years have passed since the county Board of Supervisors promised to close the aging and dangerous Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles — a key demand of reformers — but the board has yet to approve a plan to do so.

A new five-year closure plan presented to the board in January calls for creating thousands of community-based beds for people with mental illness to be diverted from jail.

“We need the board to take really bold action and say — here’s how many beds we are going to fund every year, here’s what a service-based pre-trial system is going to look like,” Clayton-Johnson said.

Advocates say the city and county need to expand non-emergency unarmed crisis response teams to take police and sheriff’s personnel out of the business of responding to people in mental health crisis. When law enforcement police and sheriff’s deputies respond to such incidents, the situations are more likely to escalate, which can lead to deadly use of force.

In the city of L.A., the debate over an anti-camping ordinance and the role of police in enforcing it continues. The law allows police to forcibly remove encampments after outreach workers try to find shelter for the people in the camp, but a recent report found it failed to help the city reach in key goals to keep areas clear of encampments or get people housed.

“It's taken decades to build the system that we currently have so it's going to take decades for us to build an alternative,” said Tinisch Hollins of the reform group Californians for Safety and Justice.

And that work often begins with community members and organizations instead of elected officials.

“By no means do progressive DAs represent the heart of the movement to advance criminal justice reform,” Clayton-Johnson said. “Certainly that is coming from communities' pressuring leaders to act.”

Why the L.A. DA race may be a national throwdown

Even so, the question of who will be the county’s next district attorney is the main focus for many reformers now.

The D.A.’s race will likely be a national throw down over criminal justice reform, attracting large amounts of campaign cash from the left and the right, said Jon Gould, who studies prosecutor policies and is dean of the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology.

“Strap in," he said. "You’re going to see a lot of campaign advertisements between now and November.”

Police unions including the Los Angeles Police Protective League and the Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs are expected to be among the biggest spenders against Gascón.

A look at campaign spending in the primary

The race could be animated by a battle over Proposition 47, which Gascón co-authored. Police unions and Republican state legislators are collecting signatures to place an initiative on the November ballot that would roll back the landmark 2014 voter-approved measure that reduced certain non-violent drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.

“We are at an inflection point yet again in 2024,” said Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California. He explained that the conflict is between those who want to reimagine public safety in ways that have less reliance on law enforcement and those who want more police and longer prison sentences to satisfy “a retributive urge” in the American psyche.

“There is a pitched battle going on,” he said.

It’s complicated by the perception that crime is on the rise. Violent crime rose about 3% last year while property crime fell by about the same percent, according to LAPD data.

And it's not clear how much of that points to the incumbent D.A.

“There is no good data that suggests” the movement in either direction is tied to Gascón’s policies, Gould said. “It's too early to tell.”

Why critics say the movement is losing momentum

The year 2020, when Gascón was elected, was a banner year for criminal justice reform. Voters also approved Measure J, which required at least 10% of locally generated unrestricted revenue be invested into alternatives to incarceration.

Gascón's critics maintain that his poor showing in this year’s primary is proof the reform movement is losing momentum.

Deputy District Attorney Eric Siddall, a regular critic of Gascón who ran against him in the primary, said the results in March were a “vote of no confidence” in the incumbent.

Like Hochman, Siddall has argued for stiffer penalties than those advocated by Gascón.

But some political experts say Gascon’s showing in the primary doesn’t mean voters are rejecting reform outright.

“What we may be seeing now is just a slight adjustment rightward,” said Schnur, the Berkeley professor. “While they wanted to see criminal justice reform, they might not have wanted it as aggressively as Gascón has pursued it.”

In a a sign that criminal justice reform has become a part of the political conversation in L.A. County, nearly all of Gascón’s challengers gave a nod to the need for reform, including Hochman.

“I reject blanket policies on both ends of the pendulum swing, those of ‘mass incarceration’ and ‘Gascon’s de-incarceration’ and instead advocate the 'hard middle,” Hochman said in a statement posted on his campaign website.

Clayton-Johnson said the criminal justice reform movement has changed the conversation.

“I don’t know if there’s ever been a time folks running for the DA’s office explicitly had to talk about criminal justice reform" to be viable, he said.

“I don’t think criminal justice reform is at all moving backwards,” he continued.

“I think it's a fight.”