The Rise and Fall of the "Progressive" Prosecutor

Does George Gascón's loss to challenger Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who ran as an independent, signal the end of the progressive prosecutor era?

“it's important to remember the progressive prosecutor movement is just one part of a much broader, diverse criminal justice reform movement.”

- [Chesa] Boudin [former SF prosecutor ousted in a recall in 2022]

Frank Stoltze, LAist

Well its official guys, the peacock otherwise known as George Gascón is no longer the head boss at the LA County District Attorney’s office, which is a system within itself plagued by turmoil, lack of proper care, corruption, and a subservient to a terrible level-of-quality rating. As a pragmatic and progressive ex-prosecutor myself, what I found worrying was the LA media’s inherent ability to be a viewership supported publication which they… blame the viewership?

Haven’t any of you jackasses ever heard of the cliché¹:

“Rome was not built in a day -

and you cannot release everyone in a day - ” ?²

“You can’t just burn the system down,” said Anne Marie Schubert, former Sacramento County District Attorney, who battled former Gov. Jerry Brown over his criminal justice policies. “They get elected and then all of a sudden, they implement policies that are so far removed from being a real prosecutor who is seeking balance and accountability.”

- Cayla Mihalovich, CalMatters

Yeah this is an interesting point where the word order of “progressive prosecutor” is misleading, and the phrase itself a misnomer. A double whammy of linguistic and syntaxical error. In what I learned while in my short time as one of those guys, you have to prosecute first and hope to change it very slowly - incrementally almost. DAs are basically cops, but with law degrees.³ Change is hard, as the Fraternal Order of Police knows. In California, you can get recalled, which was surprising that this did not befall G.G., given Gascon’s⁴ “this is great in theory but in practice I now see the problem-type policies.”

Let’s peruse.

Gassed

Two dozen deputy district attorneys are pursuing civil lawsuits alleging they faced retaliation when they defied the progressive Gascón and his lofty reform policies. One suit already has been settled for $800,000 and another led to a jury verdict of $1.5 million.

- Scott Schwebke, Los Angeles Daily News

I was about to say that a settlement likely means nothing about the allegations, but that a jury verdict seems quite a bit more damning. We’ve seen this stuff before with former Colorado elected DA Alonzo Payne a few weeks back. He was disbarred though because his main victims were already victims of crime, and a part of CJS matrix.⁵ Gascon, however, did one better and cost LA County all sorts of cash in his wake. One of the three deadly prosecutorial sins that led to his demise was Poor Administrator especially in implementing Gascon’s own policies. He halted all charging decisions and prosecutorial discretion, which resulted in a tight backlog of cases, which is tiredly expected. Prosecutors have A LOT of paperwork to go through, which means you can’t change something so significant like that so quickly.

Then there are twenty-four lawsuits against the LA County DA. Mostly because Gascon demoted or passed over employees for promotions because they wouldn’t get with his agenda. And man, does he seem like the guy that has to have you get with his agenda. In reading an interview he did prior to the election, he states that you can’t blame the elected DA for crime trends.⁶ But when the interviewer points out Gascon blamed the former DA for the exact same thing when he ran in 2020, he starts to go…nowhere.

GG: The one crime that continues to remain a constant, that is up, and by the way it's a national problem, is auto theft. Violent crime has come down, auto theft continues to go up nationally. And there are many different hypotheses as to why that is happening. But the other part of all this … which is really often unspoken: Crimes do not go up or down because of who the district attorney is. If that were the case, then we would blame district attorneys around other counties, or, quite frankly, even my predecessor, who actually, during her eight years, saw an increase in crime.

But didn’t you blame [Jackie Lacey] when you were running for office?

GG: If you recall, it was a process where people were blaming me for crime in San Francisco, and some of the policies that I was espousing would cause a crime increase. And we very quickly pointed out if that were the case, her policies clearly were not working.⁷

Here's what it is clear, by the way: We have been doing business for decades the same way, and we have seen incarceration going to levels that [are] unparallel[ed]. And while we have some initial decreases, and then things became stable, we continue to incarcerate at rates that do not correspond to the level of crime. And then our recidivism rate has continued to go up. And those are things that there's a direct correlation between that and so many of the high levels of incarceration.

…

People have to hold somebody accountable, and you campaign on the issue of reducing crime for the greater County of Los Angeles. If you’re saying the DA doesn’t really have responsibility over crime, then what are you doing?

GG: What I'm saying is crime has been decreasing, right? The City of LA is … on a downward trend for the last two years. What I'm telling you is I'm not taking credit for the decreases that LAPD has brought up. I am a partner in that. I contribute to that. It just is a process, and we play a role in this puzzle.

And absolutely, the people have to be responsible. But again, let's go back to a basic premise. Even if you subscribe to this, unless there is an arrest, a prosecutor cannot prosecute. We don't patrol communities. We don't make arrests. We react [to] the work of the police, and we have had very high-level filing rates on the things that are being brought to us because we're responding to the environment as it evolves.

…

One final question. You’re not too popular in your own office. You’ve been sued by more than two dozen members of your office. The union of the Association of Deputy DAs — they held a vote of no confidence that was nearly unanimous. Why do your own employees not like you?

GG: First of all, I think you're making a very broad statement. The vote of no confidence, this is the association that put a lot of money against me on independent expenditures in 2020. Then they again supported two different recalls. The reality is that I've hired now about 150 new lawyers. We have promoted over 100 lawyers. It's a much more nuanced environment.

There's a lot of people that support the work that I'm doing, including people, not only new people that are coming in, but people that are in the office. It is true that there are lawsuits, and there was about 20 of them, and they again come from the very same people that have been supporting recalls and were supporting my opponent in 2020. So to just simply say that I'm very unpopular, I think it overlooks that there is a much deeper story here to be told.

When you preach accountability of others as a member of the CJS, you yourself need to be transparent too.⁸ The answers are defensive and sort of aimless. G.G. didn’t lose the LADA-ship by his policies, he lost because of his inability to articulate those policies. At the beginning and through his election, he seemed to have been able to make up for the vague comments and lack of idea where he was going, but no more. People are pissed, and whether Gascon wants to believe it or not, popularity is part of politics.

It’s the Perception, Becky

Right right. This comes to the point where an author usually gives you a “why it matters” part, and I am here to oblige: politics is perception. And without the FBI or any real place to get our statistics now, perception becomes reality.⁹ Although the FBI¹⁰ stated crime decreased from 2022-2023 by about 3%, the Census Bureau found unreported and reported crime trended differently.¹¹ Then there is actual perception data, like the Gallup poll recently done in October. From 2019-2023 the amount of people polled who ‘felt like more crime was more prevalent than a year ago’ hung over 60%, topping at 78% in 2022. The amount of Americans describing ‘crime in the U.S. as serious or extremely serious’ has hovered around 50%-60% for those years too.

But that poll also is wrong in how we look at data. For example, you can believe that crime is not serious but also believe more crime is happening. It is a difference in degree vs difference in quantity. Which is why the FBI UCR statistics are a little bit misleading, as pointed out by this other guy¹² with a sleek blog. The percentage is misleading because there are just more criminals:

In 1998 there were 119,724 violent criminal offenses reported. Compare that to 2022, when there were 951,270 such offenses reported. That is a staggering 695 percent increase in violent criminal offenses over that 25-year period. There were approximately 894,000 violent criminal offenses reported in 2023.

Prior to 1998, passage of the massive 1994 crime bill was the chosen answer to the violent crime spree of 1960 to 1980, soaring 270 percent. It continued to increase, peaking at 758 violent offenses per 100,000 people in 1991. Fear of crime became palpable. A 1992 poll indicated that 44 percent of Americans were afraid to walk alone at night within a mile of their homes and that 54 percent of Americans felt there was more crime in their area than there was a year ago.

Crime and those who commit crime does not stay static, some of which we can attribute this modern-day jump to population increase (the U.S. added nearly 100 million people between 1990-2020) but not all of it. These stats also do not tell us how many people are violent criminals, just the propensity for violent actions among the populace. So, for example, one person could commit five violent actions against one person without them ever reporting the crime(s), i.e. Domestic violence, and it could inflate the stats too. We also can’t lump these CJS issues together and blame a single administration.

But what we can summarise here is that either: (1) there are just more violent criminals; or (2) the “violence” is a product of our own institutions, creating a class of “professional” criminal, or those who live most of their life not obeying the law. Violence perpetuates violence, and some people because of their socioeconomic class will continue to see it as the only way forward. That, I think, is at the heart of this. Through the decades of sublimation of young men and women via the American CJS, those who encounter it daily have created it as their identity.

For Gascon, he made enemies and bad political decisions at the LA County DA office. I hate to say that I am advocating this, but Gascon, be more of a politician. Had you and your team thought about the next four years and rolling out your policies, you could have made some real lasting change. Now your name is synonymous with LA’s collective bad taste in their mouth. It’s a shame that the person supposedly marked as “progressive” is so short-sighted themselves.

I used to want to see the penitentiary, way after elementary

Thought it was cool to look the judge in the face when he sentenced me

Since my uncles was institutionalized
My intuition had said I was suited for family ties

My momma is stressing my daddy tired
I need me a weapon, these niggas ride

Every minute, hour, and second
Ministers tried to save me
How I'm gon' listen when I don't even hear God?

Kendrick Lamar, Poe Man’s Dream (His Vice) - Section 80

1. I am now addicted to ačcenting things now.

2. Unintended rhyme there.

3. If you can imagine the kind of asshole I was…

4. I’m not accenting anything, too much work.

5. Remember the CJS does not look prospectively but rather only backwardly at crimes already committed. Prospectiveness would be more like a “progressive prosecutor” model or could be a complete police state i.e., Minority Report.

6. This is true actually, and if you go back to the Pros Prob pt 2, you’ll see this distinction between actual crime and perception of crime. Gascon is a smart guy, he knows this and which is why he is flip flopping here.

7. This isn’t a cogent answer to a question and he contradicts what he said a few paragraphs up. He says he acknowledged his policies would cause crime to increase, really stating that a DA controls crime. Dummy.

8. As Jesus said: If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at the sinner - and he knows a thing or two about crime and punishment

9. You can’t ever be sure anyone is telling the truth on the internet, but it strikes me suspicious when the only person who knows the truth is the only one who was there.

10. To all those who say the FBI is now a partisan agency: it is a fed agency and thus its created by the acting president. If Donald Trump wanted to dissolve the FBI, i’d venture to guess he could. But why would he? It’s a far better asset to have control over now.

11. This is similar to 2019 numbers, which saw over 20 people per 1,000 be victims of violent crime as reported.

12. Dude who I cite is also biased, as you can see reading a little further down.