The experience shaped his views on mass incarceration and the devastation it inflicted on black communities, and guided him as he shifted from police officer to prosecutor and led reform initiatives to keep people out of jail as the district attorney of San Francisco.
For Jackie Lacey, who is black, growing up in South Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s showed her how gangs and drugs could ravage neighborhoods. Bars went up over windows, and doors were fortified with iron gates.
As a prosecutor and as the current district attorney of Los Angeles, Lacey has taken a tough line on crime, sending people to prison at a rate far higher than in San Francisco.
Now, those two views on criminal justice that were nurtured in the tumult of South Los Angeles — locking up criminals versus finding ways to keep people out of prison — are likely to be at the center of one of the most widely watched local elections next year.
Gascón said on Thursday that he was resigning as district attorney of San Francisco to prepare to challenge Lacey in the race for district attorney of Los Angeles.
In a note to his staff, Gascón, 66, said he would leave office on Oct. 18. He wrote that he and his wife, Fabiola, “are returning to Los Angeles to rejoin our family and explore a run for district attorney. Making our communities safer and more equitable remains my life’s work, and I’m simply not ready to slow down and put public service behind me.”
Gascón has told associates and activists who have been urging him to run that he was likely to officially enter the contest soon, possibly within a few weeks, once he moves to Los Angeles, where his mother and two daughters live.
A race between Gascón and Lacey would be another important test for the criminal justice reform movement, which has swept progressive prosecutors into office in cities from Philadelphia to Chicago to Boston, as well as in Brooklyn. National activists have long eyed the seat in Los Angeles County, calling it the most important campaign in the country, both because Los Angeles has the nation’s largest criminal justice system — it has the largest jail and the biggest prosecutor’s office — and because its incarceration rates are still relatively high.
For Californians, such a campaign would display competing approaches to criminal justice from its urban poles, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are both defined by their liberal politics. While violent crime has fallen considerably in both places since the 1990s — last year Los Angeles had its fewest murders in more than a half-century — Los Angeles sends people to state prison at four times the rate of San Francisco. (In 2017, Los Angeles sent 608 people per 100,000 to state prison, compared with 126 per 100,000 for San Francisco, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.)
Gascón has supported several statewide measures to reduce prison populations, some of which Lacey has opposed. She is also among the prosecutors who have pursued new death penalty cases after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on executions in March. Gascón’s office has never prosecuted a capital case.
Lacey, 62, was first elected to the office in 2012, becoming the first woman and first African American to hold the job. Liberals once viewed her as an ally, but in office Lacey has been an aggressive crime fighter, resisting efforts to more drastically reduce prison populations. The approach alienated liberals who once supported her, as well as Black Lives Matter activists who protested when she refused to prosecute police officers for shooting civilians. But it was popular enough to help her win two elections.
In the 2020 race, she already faces two opponents from the left, both prosecutors from her office: Joseph Iniguez, 33, a prosecutor in Alhambra; and Richard Ceballos, 57, who prosecutes organized crime cases and would be the county’s first Latino and first openly gay district attorney. But Lacey has much of the city’s political establishment behind her, with endorsements from Mayor Eric M. Garcetti, four of the five county supervisors, state officials and local congressional representatives.
“Time and time again, Jackie Lacey has demonstrated her ability to protect the public, fight crime and ensure justice for all the people of Los Angeles County,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat from Los Angeles who is leading the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, said in a statement.
Lacey has pushed back against her critics by emphasizing her duty to protect citizens, pointing to her upbringing in crime-ridden South Los Angeles.
“It felt like a dangerous time,” she said in an interview this year, referring to her youth. “I can remember my parents’ home getting burglarized and everything getting wiped out while they were at work. And it seems like after that they put bars on the windows and had the iron-gate door. And I really thought everybody in LA was doing it because all of the neighbors were doing it.”
It was not until she went away to college at the University of California, Irvine, in suburban Orange County, she said, “that I realized, wait, people don’t even lock their dorm rooms and they have valuable stuff in it. And you could drive down the street and you don’t see bars.”
Lacey joined the district attorney’s office in 1986, at a time of soaring crime rates. “There was no shortage of homicides, homicide cases available for young lawyers to cut their teeth on,” she said. “It just seemed like a very violent time, gangs were full blown.”
For months, Gascón has been weighing a challenge to Lacey, visiting Los Angeles and meeting with local activist groups that have opposed her. In those meetings, Gascón has touted his record in San Francisco, where he has reduced prison and jail populations and taken measures to reduce racial bias, such as scrubbing demographic information from documents prosecutors use to make decisions about filing charges. He instituted a system to automatically expunge past marijuana convictions, which served as a model for other districts, and established a young-adult court to divert more people away from prison.
This week, a coalition of activists started an advertising campaign in Los Angeles called “Run George Run.” It features a billboard alongside a freeway near downtown Los Angeles, where Lacey works, that associates her with mass incarceration, locking up young people and supporting a “racist death penalty.”
Shaun King, founder of the influential Real Justice PAC and a prominent critic of mass incarceration, said his organization would support Gascón financially and with grassroots organizing, the kind of work it has done in other district attorney races around the country.
“In spite of it being a relatively progressive city it just hasn’t had a progressive legal system, and this is a chance to move it in that direction,” he said. “If there is any system I would classify as a failed system it’s the system there in Los Angeles.”
Gascón, a Cuban émigré who was a teenager when he moved to Los Angeles with his family to escape Fidel Castro’s government in 1967, rose from beat cop to assistant police chief in the Los Angeles Police Department. He later served as police chief in Mesa, Arizona, and San Francisco before being appointed district attorney in San Francisco in 2011 by Newsom, who was then the city’s mayor. He took over the district attorney’s post from Kamala Harris, who had been elected California’s attorney general and is now a senator running for president. Gascón was then elected twice to the position.
Like Lacey, Gascón spent his formative years in South Los Angeles when tough state and federal laws were sending large numbers of people to prison, but the two law enforcement officers came away with vastly different perspectives on criminal justice.
“One of the things that became very obvious to me was that we were now arresting the second or third generations from the same families,” Gascón said of his days as an officer.
He said that he saw how incarceration broke “the family nucleus and communities” and that the observation “started to lead me to believe that the system really needed to be redesigned.”
Referring to Los Angeles and its relatively high rate of incarceration, Gascón said: “It really breaks my heart. I think there are a lot of good professionals in LA doing some really hard work.
“Unfortunately I still see a lot of the 1980s and ’90s type of enforcement efforts and attitudes,” he added. “Especially with the district attorney, the practices are still very much along the lines of the 1990s.”
This article originally appeared in
.