If Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon isn’t worried about being recalled, he should be, prosecutors say.
The reverberation of a successful recall campaign against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is being felt in Los Angeles as jubilant prosecutors and law enforcement officials increase their efforts to make lightning strike twice.
BOUDIN’S RECALL SEEN AS A VICTORY FOR BUSINESSES LIVING IN FEAR
Gascon recall organizers need 67,000 more signatures to place a similar measure on the ballot to remove him. It’s no small feat with a county of 5.6 million registered voters. So far, the Recall DA George Gascon campaign has 500,000 signatures.
“It’s obviously going to be a trend. Gascon is as bad or worse than Boudin, except he is located in a more ‘law and order’ county,” said former Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley. “Across the board, people are very confident that history will repeat itself except on a grander scale. We are 14 times larger than San Francisco.”
The bipartisan campaign has raised more than $6 million, enough to hire armies of signature gatherers and mail out petitions to reach every segment of the vast 88-city area. The campaign office is a sea of pallets containing thousands of yet-to-be-opened responses, Cooley said.
Both Boudin and Gascon were elected in 2019 on a wave of progressive politics seeking to defund the police in the wake of George Floyd’s death and focus on rehabilitation over incarceration.
But the movement backfired when crime surged in both counties while victims with heinous tales emerged in the headlines on a seemingly daily basis. Crime had suddenly come to wealthier suburbs, no longer contained in the inner cities. For example, Beverly Hills, where famous philanthropist Jacqueline Avant was gunned down in her bedroom, were no longer safe, and those residents had buyer’s remorse over their choices for DA.
“He’s had so many opportunities to fix bad policies — he painted himself into a corner,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, a high-profile critic. “Boudin went down to a glorious defeat and never accepted that he was out of sync with what the community wanted. Gascon is next.”
Villanueva, who is up for reelection, held a watch party for the state primary Tuesday and said his 250 guests gave a standing ovation when news of Boudin’s defeat was announced. The group included many law enforcement officials and victim’s rights advocates.
Likewise, members of the Los Angeles County DA’s Office saw the Boudin recall as a sign that they could finally get back on track prosecuting crime to the fullest extent of the law were Gascon to be ousted, said Eric Siddall, vice president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys.
“His job is to make sure you are safe and to represent the public,” Siddall said of Gascon. “The Boudin-Gascon approach is that the DA acts as a defense lawyer, not as a prosecutor. I think that is what was rejected by voters.”
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Siddall said Gascon has seen the increased support of the recall effort and has made tweaks to his soft-on-crime charging decisions in order to appear more mainstream.
“It’s all window dressing. None of that is real. It’s all fake,” Siddall said. “His idea of becoming more of a public safety figure is the equivalent of creating a Hollywood movie set. It’s there for the public to see, but [there’s] no substance behind it.”
