Ahead of the election for Los Angeles district attorney, I sat down with both candidates to learn more about where they stand on the issues and how they see the role of the DA. In this conversation, I spoke with Jackie Lacey, the current district attorney for Los Angeles County. Read more about the race here, and read my interview with candidate George Gascon here.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Patrisse Cullors: Thank you for taking the time to have this conversation with me, DA Lacey. I am very excited to be able to talk to you and know your thoughts on the race and your role as a DA as we are just weeks away from this election.
Jackie Lacey: I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'm looking forward to your questions.
Cullors: So the first question is super generic, but I would love your candid thoughts. What does a district attorney do and what is their role in advancing justice and equity? Why has this race, in your opinion, been called the second most important race in the country next to the presidency?
Lacey: Most people don't realize what we do. That's the biggest problem in educating voters. Most people won't come in contact with the criminal justice system and in some respects, that's a good thing, but in some respects, it's a bad thing because the only thing they hear about is maybe after a case is filed or is not filed. So as a DA, I see our role as seeking justice, more so than anything. Cases come into us, police reports come into us, and it's our job as experts in the law to determine whether a crime was committed and whether this is the right person who committed the crime, and is filing the case the right thing to do. All of those things are sort of a checklist in your mind; you have to look at all of those things and make a determination.
In terms of the district attorney of LA County, I really see myself and anyone who has this job as a trendsetter, as a leader, and that goes into why this is the second most important race [in the country]. People come from all over the United States and all over the world to study what we do, how we do it, and why we do what we do. In turn, we send people throughout the world to train them on areas that might be foreign. So for instance, I sent a team of people to Uganda in 2019 because we were asked to come and teach prosecutors how to plea bargain. There, you stay in jail or prison for long periods of time. And so we're to be the leaders. As the head of that office, you're supposed to influence the criminal justice system, and you're supposed to do it in a careful way where you can never forget the victims, right, because our role is to think about the victims and their rights.
Cullors: Thank you for that. The second question I have for you is, what are your top three policy priorities or reforms you would implement as soon as you're reelected here in one of the largest counties in the U.S.? The more specific for readers, the better.
Lacey: Okay, so the first thing I know that's going to happen is the voters will decide whether to repeal SB 10, bail reform. So I'm already thinking ahead. What will that look like? Should we just go ahead and do bail reform, the way we've been doing it the last few months, if Prop. 25 ends up repealing SB 10? If not, then we've got to really get in gear and figure out what risk assessment tool we're going to use from here on out. So that's the first thing I'll be thinking about if reelected.
The second thing is, they're closing down what used to be called DJJ, the state juvenile justice system, and they're going to shift the incoming juveniles who would have gone to the state facility to the county. So I'll be thinking about how can we pivot because we've been doing juvenile justice a certain way for the last eight years, but we'll need to pivot and think about how to get more services because the juveniles we’re talking about at the state level are going to be people who are charged with more serious crimes and will be in need of more serious services. I know the county is hurting. They don't have a lot of money, probation has been criticized, and probation will have the responsibility for that. So I really want to focus in on what can we do differently for the juvenile population that we're going to suddenly have in this county for a very short period of time. Up until now, I've paid more attention to adults and mental health, but as you know, the onset of mental health can come way before the age of 18, so I'll be thinking about starting a new committee to study juvenile justice and mental health with the goal being: How do we prevent people from even getting involved in the justice system? How do we prevent them from getting involved in the first place, but also how do we prepare these juveniles that we have so that they can safely reenter society and not go back to whatever lead them to come into the juvenile justice system?
I hope to publish an update on the blueprint for change. A lot still needs to be done, but I want to see if we need to adjust those goals. What I've learned from this campaign, Patrisse, is that campaigning is actually very healthy for you because in the DAs office, you tend to listen to people who are on staff. But when you're out campaigning, you get advice and opinions from people outside of the office. And so I really want to form a very thoughtful blue ribbon commission to look at how we've been doing things in the DAs office and provide some advice and suggestions for what we could do differently, how we could do better in terms of the recidivism rates, what can we do about the police shootings, [examine] why are these cases so problematic, is there a different model [for addressing them]?
Those would be the top three things, then also dealing with having less people to work with because of the budget. We were already down about 200 people in terms of staff, and we really don't see our hiring freeze being lifted anytime soon.
Cullors: Got it. That’s super helpful. The next question is one that really comes out of the current movement at both the local and national level around the prosecution of law enforcement. As you know, police killings aren’t specific to Los Angeles, but it's an issue that has been lifted up pretty profoundly by not just BLM LA, but lots of organizers and lots of concerned people about why law enforcement is seemingly unable to be prosecuted for acts of violence in the community.
For me, this question is absolutely pointed at you, but it’s not a question to make you feel defensive. I really want to hear you be reflective, because I think it's going to be helpful for voters. There's been 622 documented killings at the hands of law enforcement and there has been only one filed case, one charge, in your years as DA. How do you think that that can be shifted? Is that a place of importance for you? How do we justify that many killings and not as many prosecutions? I am curious from a journalist’s perspective, but also from a human being perspective, what limits you from being able to prosecute law enforcement who kills, and if you’re reelected, is there room to have a different shape around prosecution of law enforcement?
Lacey: This too, obviously, is extremely important to me on many different levels. I live with this issue, day in and day out. From the minute I got in, though I have never had any experience trying [these cases], I knew from sitting in on meetings, how—and I'm not sure if this is the right term—how emotionally invested you must be in looking at these cases, because you know that not only is the public looking at you, but the people you lead are putting on the case. And they're telling you what happened and they're going through the law and they're telling you what the legal analysis is and the emotional analysis in your heart is, “These people didn't have to die. If I had been there, this is what I would have done. Couldn't they have just let the person go? How could you make a mistake and think that that was a weapon?”
Those kinds of things all go through your mind, and as an elected prosecutor your life flashes before you because you realize that no matter what call you make, your job is in jeopardy in each and every case. On top of that, you're very much aware that there are people in the room who are prosecutors who are looking up to you and wondering, what are you going to do? Will you make the political call and save yourself, or will you follow the law? And will you follow the law automatically, or are you pissed off about what you're seeing? And so our numbers, I had them counted up. There were 341 people who have died by officer-involved shootings, and then we have another 20 to 30 who have died either of drug overdose, or asphyxiation, or suicide, and those are contested.
I'm going to meet with a family this week and it's probably the toughest meeting I'm going to have because they don't believe their daughter committed suicide in police custody, and yet my evidence shows that she did. And rather than convince them, I'm just gonna listen to their pain because if something happened to my daughter, I think I'd want to die. So the issue, as I see it is right in the code. It allows police officers to use deadly force and nowhere in the code does it say that unless it says you need to defend yourself as a civilian. So there's a different law for police officers, and then the way our system is set up, they do their own internal affairs investigation and that most of the time the interviews are taped. I would say 99% of the time you listen to them [and] some of them are good. Some are not so good because they're leading and suggestive, but you're stuck with their investigation of their own.
Early on when we started hearing these interviews, I suggested to law enforcement, “Hey, why don’t you have the sheriff do the LAPD, and the LAPD do the sheriff this year?” because the sheriff does do some investigations of independent agencies. They were very resistant to that, and what I got from the chief and from the sheriff at the time were, “Well, we do things our own way. We handle our investigations our own way. Ours are different.” And it's true. They are different. So I think if there was a standardized independent investigation, with [a] set out protocol [and] best practices—do you show the officer the body camera video first, or do you get the statement first?—things along those lines, I think would really help.
The other thing is in certain cases where the community has a lot of interest in a case because the person is unarmed or appeared not to be armed, the AG ought to be able to step in and take some of those cases. Not that I'm saying I can't be biased, but perceptions become my reality. So there are those things. Those two things. And then I also think, training. Every, every police officer in every department should be trained on de-escalating a situation—and we've done that. We've trained about 2,000 first responders and we have seen the officer-involved shootings go down when they receive this training because the training is so different from the training they're getting right now, Patrisse. Right now they're being trained command and control, and clearly, when you have someone in an altered state [due to] either mental health or substance abuse, sometimes just backing off a little bit, giving a little bit more time, the person will start to cycle through and calm down as opposed to trying to control someone. So those are the simple changes I think should be made: one, an independent investigative force [where the] AG takes over some of the more problematic cases, and mandatory de-escalation training for everybody who carries a gun.
Cullors: Thank you so much for that. I want to ask two more questions for you and would love to hear about what policies and our laws are you most proud of helping to pass or help get signed into law, either at the state legislature at the local level, to improve the lives of children and working families and LA County.
Lacey: I'm cycling through all the stuff in my mind that we've been involved in. I think I'm most proud of the laws that we have passed in order to make it easy for people to get conservatorships, because most of the time I hear from family members and it's heartbreaking. They have adults who don't necessarily want to accept that they have a mental health issue. So they've been really small, almost barely noticeable, but important laws, like for instance, conservatorships used to stop if you got arrested—the process would just stop. And so we changed the law—because it didn't make sense—so that it would continue on. Also, if you were on parole or probation, you couldn't get mental health services money for treatment. So we got that changed. I think those things help. I think the toughest one that we were involved in is changing registration laws. I still take heat from [that] because it's misunderstood. It used to be if you were convicted of statutory rape you had to register for the rest of your life and first of all, that hurt the person who who may not have been what we call a true child predator, but also it flooded law enforcement with a lot of registrations that were unnecessary. If we really want to keep track of those who are the true predators, [it’s difficult] if you're flooding that database. That was hard because I had a lot of legislators abandon me. They were afraid of sponsoring that law or voting for that law. I'm proud of it because it was a risk. I feel like if you're going to be courageous, you need to take a risk. That's the right thing that you can end up losing your job over.
Cullors: That's right, and thank you for going through that. My last question is about the role of police associations. We know that police associations have been under heavy scrutiny in the last several months from the George Floyd protests and uprisings, and people are really looking at what police associations are doing or what they're about. Some people are even calling for police associations to be moved out of unions. We know that your campaign is very much backed by police associations with lots of dollars, and I want to know how can you hold law enforcement accountable if they're also very much supporting and backing you? Do you see a conflict there, or do you not? What's your opinion, what are your thoughts on this?
Lacey: I think the way to best explain it is to use a case that was very unpopular. We actually charged the LAPD officer, Mary O’Callaghan, with abuse of a woman by the name of Alesia Thomas. In my mind, I am an independent thinker. I'm an African American woman from the Crenshaw district. I present professional, but if I need to bring out the angry Black woman, I can do that. I can set people straight and I can tell people this is my decision. And I remember when we charged her and we didn't charge her with a death, but we charged her with abuse because the coroner's report said Miss Thomas died from an overdose, but I took a lot of flack the first time I went to the police and I was shocked. I thought, I'm just doing my job. I'm making the call and I did. Some of the union representatives did confront me and during the meeting, and I told them [to] look at the tape. The evidence is there. We did the right thing and it was tough, no question about it. The police, the PPL members were unhappy with me. They told me that, but they did not change my decision.
I wish there could be a documentary showing what goes into these cases, because the rule [is that] we don't have police and police unions in the room. It's my prosecutors, my investigators, and we are methodically going through this evidence. There are times we think we want to prosecute, but the evidence is just not there. I agree with police officers all the time on cases and it's hard to tell you this, but I am an independent person. And trust me, I know. I know how to make up my own mind. I'm the lawyer in the room and I don't have any problems saying look, I went to law school and I'm looking at this, and it's just not fair.
There have been cases where I may not have had the union upset, but I've had a police chief who wanted me to do something and I tell them no. It's not going to happen.
Right now in terms of money, the only thing people can give me now is $1,500. And $1,500 is a lot, believe me. I do a lot of phone calling and asking people for money, but I maintain my own independence. I remember in the Gabriel Fernandez case when we had to charge those social workers, and we ultimately ended up losing that case. I was going to lose the SEIU. Largest union in the country, very powerful, a lot of money. But I had a dead kid and I had some social workers who changed the scores [and] that eight-year-old in there to die. And you know what? My attitude is, okay, because I'm going to do what's right, even if it means I pay for it later. And I am paying for it. I often say the minute you get this job, as a DA you're making people unhappy. You’re angering people. People either want you to file a case or they're mad at you because you didn't file, and you just have to have that independent streak where you say this is what I'm going to do.
Cullors: That case still haunts me. I think about the Gabriel Fernandez [case] and I think about that child every day. Literally, that's it. So as a mom of a four-year-old, I could not wrap my head around it. And so, those complicated moments for someone in your position to try to figure out: Who do you protect? He's gone, so who gets held accountable? I know that there's a documentary, I think you were in it. I wanted to watch it, but it was too infuriating, but super helpful to hear.
Lacey: No, I was gonna say I made myself watch it because I figure if that child suffered then I can suffer [through watching it] because we need to learn whatever we need to learn. We need to figure it out so that eight-year-olds, six-year-olds, ten-year-olds aren’t dying like that.
Cullors: Are there any last things that you want to say before we close out?
Lacey: Normally during campaign season, you know, you throw in barbs and digs at your opponent, [but] this doesn't seem like the right forum for it. I just want people to understand that the woman you see is the woman you get. I believe in reform, but I also believe in safety. I grew up in a neighborhood where we just didn't think the police cared about our community because they just didn't show up on time or just didn't seem to work the cases. I believe that my experience and my background have uniquely prepared me to continue to keep some stability in that DA’s office because I would hate for it to be taken over by someone who puts themselves before the needs of the community. That's my closing argument.
Patrisse Cullors is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and a senior fellow at Prism. Follow her on Twitter @OsopePatrisse.
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