By Sikivu Hutchinson
“I’m Black and I grew up in Los Angeles.” Without a hint of
irony, embattled two term District Attorney Jackie Lacey uttered these defiant,
fighting words midway through last week’s D.A. debate. Moderated by KPCC and the L.A. Times, Lacey
squared off against challengers former San Francisco D.A. George Gascon and former
public defender Rachel Rossi. In the runup to the March 3rd race, Lacey
has faced a firestorm of community pressure and criticism about her authoritarian
law and order reign. The litany of misconduct allegations against Lacey
are long, deep, and well-documented: During her tenure, she has sent twenty two individuals to
death row, all of whom were people of color. She has failed
to prosecute killer cops while cowering behind the code of legal authority and
ducking the community’s calls for accountability. She refused to support the
realignment Proposition 47 on the grounds that African
American and Latinx folks in L.A. County were more likely to be victims of violent
crime. She has refused to prosecute big name sexual predators (Ed Buck, Harvey Weinstein, Bikram Choudhury) and opposed cash
bail and marijuana sentencing reforms. Faced with two strong challengers, she has
scrambled to paint herself as a criminal justice reformer while presiding over a
ballooning police state bureaucracy and the mass incarceration of the mentally ill.
Lacey’s attempt to play the Black authenticity card is
significant because Black folks have been her staunchest critics. Black Lives
Matter L.A. has denounced Lacey’s refusal to bring charges against
police guilty of using deadly force, confronting Lacey with the families of victims
slain by the LAPD and LASD. Over the past eight years, community groups such as the Youth Justice Coalition, ACLU, Community Coalition and the L.A. Urban Policy Roundtable have blasted Lacey's inaction and called for her removal. Lacey has also been challenged
by deputy D.A.s in her own office who charge that she has further
institutionalized Black and Latinx criminalization.
Last Wednesday, Lacey attempted to silence her many critics
by smacking down her opponents’ records on crime, mass incarceration, mental
health diversion, and police shootings. Lacey assailed Gascon for being
hypocritical in his failure to charge killer cops. She dismissed Rossi as an
out of her depth neophyte. Her lies, smears, and deflections were met with deafening
pushback from BLM and other audience members. Yet, Lacey also had her own amen
corner of sycophants who fawned over her Robo Cop tough-on-crime posturing.
Neither Gascon nor Rachel Rossi support the death penalty, and
both oppose the use of gang enhancements to increase the sentences of Black and
Latinx defendants ensnared in the CalGang
database. They support removing police misconduct investigations and
oversight from the D.A.’s office through the creation of an independent
prosecutor’s office or “Civil
Rights Division”. In 2014, Gascon co-authored Proposition 47, which was
designed to reduce the number of individuals who were sent to prison for
non-violent offenses and mitigate the odious impact of Three Strikes mandatory
minimum sentencing. Lacey vehemently opposed Prop 47.
Thus, while progressive reform prosecutors are rising
in D.A. offices across the nation, Lacey remains steadfast in her support of killer
cops and serial abusers in law enforcement. In a boost to her election bid, the
corrupt Police Protective League has poured
over a million dollars into an anti-Gascon PAC. Other establishment Lacey endorsers
include most of the L.A. County supervisors and a good chunk of L.A. City Council,
State Assembly, and U.S. Congress members.
During the evening, Lacey touted the advances she’s
allegedly made in diverting mentally ill individuals into treatment facilities
and away from prison. However, according to a recent report from the Rand
Corporation, the Office of Diversion and Reentry (created in 2015) has only transitioned
4,305 “diversion-eligible
people” to community mental health programs and facilities. The report
recommended that approximately sixty eight percent of current county inmates
should qualify for mental health diversion. In response to Lacey’s reform claim, Gascon
blasted Lacey’s mental health division as a “joke”, citing an 86% increase in
the incarceration of the mentally ill during Lacey’s tenure.
Indeed, while the D.A.’s office claims to be leading reform
on mental health, a third of LAPD shooting victims have been mentally ill. Moreover,
police criminalization of unhoused mentally ill folks has been a major point of
contention with activist groups pushing back against city and county-initiated sweeps
of homeless encampments. At the debate, Rossi was critical of the high rates of
street criminalization, emphatically stating that she would not prosecute the
unhoused simply for being unhoused and vulnerable. She also stressed that she
would not criminalize sex workers, noting that the majority of those who are
prosecuted, convicted, and jailed for sex work are women of color. Rossi’s
attention to this issue is important, because of the systemic pipelining of Black
sexual abuse victims into juvenile facilities and adult prisons.
According to The
Appeal, Lacey’s surrogates have been busy vilifying Gascon for
his record on street crime in San Francisco. They allege that he presided over
a surge in property crimes and petty theft, bucking the statewide trend of declining
crime rates. San Francisco Mayor London Breed and City Attorney Dennis Herrera have
criticized Gascon for dropping the ball on street crime, citing it as one of
the ostensible
reasons they’re backing Lacey. Gascon has pinned the blame for the spike on
the SFPD’s refusal to arrest offenders.
Gascon’s record
in San Francisco has not been perfect, and Lacey made repeated reference to his
failure
to prosecute the SFPD officers who shot and killed residents Mario Woods
and Luis Gongora Pat in 2015 and 2016. In both cases, Gascon cited his inability
to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the officers’ use of deadly force wasn’t
justified as his rationale for not prosecuting. If he defeats Lacey, his complicity
with the status quo in San Francisco bears scrutiny. On the flip side, his pursuit
of decriminalization, reduced sentencing rates, ending cash bail, and support
for the original version of last year’s AB392
bill ( which revised the standards for police use of deadly force), demonstrate
that he would be an antidote to Lacey’s destructive police state tenure. Ultimately,
the election of either Gascon or Rossi will put an end to Lacey’s reign of
terror. On March 3rd, voters will
have the rare opportunity to right historic wrongs and send turncoat Lacey
packing.
