In a development that could impact two different elections for district attorney at opposite ends of California, George Gascón resigned late last week as San Francisco’s top prosecutor and announced that he would move back to Los Angeles to “explore a run for district attorney” there.
Gascón had already planned to retire from his current post, and voters will go to the polls this November to elect his replacement; in L.A., meanwhile, they might soon have the chance to install Gascón in place of incumbent Jackie Lacey, who is up for re-election next year.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed was already supporting former city prosecutor Suzy Loftus, and she announced on Friday that she’d appoint Loftus to fill the district attorney’s post once Gascón’s resignation takes effect on Oct. 18. This move will give Loftus, who is also a former president of the San Francisco Police Commission, just a few weeks of incumbency before the Nov. 5 election.
Loftus faces three opponents next month, but her most prominent foe is public defender Chesa Boudin. Both of Boudin’s parents were members of the militant Weather Underground and went to prison when he was just 14 months old for their role as getaway drivers in the notorious Brink’s armored car robbery that ended in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard north of New York City in 1981. Boudin has said that his time visiting his parents in jail played the biggest part in forming his political views, including his support for ending cash bail.
Both Loftus and Boudin have called for overhauling the local justice system, but they have two very different bases of support. In addition to Breed, Loftus has the backing of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, who are all former San Francisco elected officials (Harris in fact served as D.A. in the 2000s). Boudin, by contrast, has the support of a number of prominent national criminal justice reformers, including Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.
Deputy state attorney general Leif Dautch and former San Francisco prosecutor Nancy Tung, who would be the city’s first Chinese American district attorney, are also on the ballot, but neither has attracted the type of money or attention that Loftus and Boudin have. All the candidates will compete in a ranked-choice election next month, though, so the second-choice preferences of the lesser-known contenders could still have an impact.
The state of play is quite different 350 miles to the south in Los Angeles County. The incumbent there, Jackie Lacey, made history in 2012 when she was elected the first black district attorney for America’s largest county, and she’s also the first woman to hold this post. Lacey, though, has antagonized many criminal justice reformers, including Black Lives Matter activists, by opposing measures to reduce California’s prison population and by continuing to pursue death penalty cases despite Newson’s moratorium on executions. Lacey has also been criticized for her reluctance to prosecute police shootings, and in June, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report that revealed that all 22 people sentenced to death during Lacey’s tenure were people of color.
Lacey has responded to her detractors by pointing to her own tough upbringing where she witnessed “gang violence, poverty, and difficult relations between the police and community.” She’s also argued that she’s working to create an environment “where children in disadvantaged communities have the opportunity to thrive and not live in fear.” Lacey’s re-election bid has the support of much of the local establishment, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and four of the county’s five members of its powerful Board of Supervisors.
Gascón, who would be Lacey’s most prominent potential opponent, is an immigrant from Cuba who grew up in L.A. and went on to become an assistant chief of police in the city. Gascón made his way to San Francisco a decade ago, where he first served as chief of police for two years before Newsom (then the city’s mayor) appointed him to succeed Harris in 2011 after she was elected state attorney general.
Gascón has made a name for himself in San Francisco by refusing to prosecute death penalty cases and for supporting measures to imprison fewer people. Among other reforms, he’s implemented a system to automatically expunge previous marijuana convictions, as well as an experimental program called “blind charging” that prevents prosecutors from learning a suspect’s demographics, such as race, before deciding whether to issue charges. There had been talk for months of Gascón returning him to run against Lacey, and he didn’t rule out the idea back in June.
Two other candidates, prosecutors Joseph Iniguez and Richard Ceballos, are already running, and either would be the county’s first gay district attorney. Iniguez, Ceballos, and Gascón would also be the first Latino to serve as L.A.’s top prosecutor.
While the ideological battle lines might be similar, races in Los Angeles operate under a different set of rules than in San Francisco. Here, all the candidates will run in a nonpartisan primary in March, on the same day as California’s presidential primary. If no one takes a majority of the vote, the top-two vote-getters would compete in a November general election.
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