With Los Angeles experiencing a surge in crime, won’t somebody think of poor District Attorney George Gascon? He keeps letting them right back out onto the streets to victimize more Angelenos, but according to the Los Angeles Times editorial board, Gascon is the real victim.
The board offers two defenses of Gascon as it denounces the recall election petition against him as part of a “destructive, distracting recall mania” that took down San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
The first defense is that voters elected Gascon in the first place and have “repeatedly expressed their desire for a crime-and-punishment system that is more just, more equitable, more efficient and more constructive.” In that case, Gascon need not worry — after all, a recall is just another election, right? If voters are so happy with Gascon’s “equitable” system, they will simply retain him in office.
But oh gee, the board doesn’t seem very confident that voters, having experienced the consequences of his pro-criminal, soft-on-crime stance, will reaffirm Gascon in a new vote. They have a good reason for that. Boudin was recalled by roughly 36,000 more votes than he was elected with in 2019 under San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting. Once San Franciscan voters saw how destructive Boudin’s policies really were, they turned out in larger numbers than they had in the actual election. Gascon may be courting the same result.
The Los Angeles Times editors also claim that Gascon doesn’t control crime. “The notion that a DA can make crime rise or fall over a period of months is absurd,” the board wrote. That may be true, but this isn’t about the passage of time. It is foolish to assert that letting violent repeat criminals back out on the street doesn’t cause an increase in crime — especially when there are concrete examples of Gascon’s graduates leaving jail after pleading down from serious charges and then reoffending.
Is it not enough for voters to be upset that hardened, violent career criminals are being given lenient sentences? Gascon shrank the city’s “hardcore gang” unit at a time when homicides were surging due mostly to gang shootings. Gascon opposes sentencing enhancements for criminals who belong to gangs or use guns in their crimes. He bends over backward to give them lighter sentences. He wants to keep victims and their family members out of the loop about parole hearings. He strives to make it easier for violent criminals to be paroled, even refusing to pursue life sentences without parole for those convicted of murder.
Sources tell me the woman yelling is the mother of Joshua Rodriguez, who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in 2015. Special circumstances were recently filed on the accused killers, which will be dropped under Gascon’s new policy, which takes life w/out parole off. @FOXLA
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) December 19, 2020
If “equity” means giving violent criminals the lightest sentence possible, no matter what their crime or how long their list of convictions is, then perhaps “equity” is the problem.
Should Los Angeles voters be condemned for not wanting to see the people who have preyed upon them walk away with a slap on the wrist? The editors of the Los Angeles Times think so. Thankfully, they will not decide Gascon’s fate. The voters they scold, who mostly have the good sense not to read the Los Angeles Times’s editorials, will decide Gascon’s fate.
