Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón faces a difficult reelection battle against challenger Nathan Hochman, who has a far more traditional view of the DA’s role.
Many see the the outcome of this race as a bellwether for the national criminal justice reform movement, which sent numerous progressive district attorneys into office following the George Floyd murder and BLM protests in 2020.
Gascón was one of them. Since being sworn in as the head of the largest prosecutor’s office in the country, his reforms have fundamentally changed how L.A. prosecutors operate.
The Nov. 5 election will be a referendum on those reforms. LAist's Imperfect Paradise podcast's current season is focused on understanding his policies, their impact, and the challenges he has faced.
The outcome will tell us a lot about what we, as a society, believe justice should look like in 2024. In the fourth and final episode of District Attorney Gascón., you'll get a better sense of where Gascón and Hochman stand on the issues and what that might mean going forward.
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You can learn more about each candidate's positions through LAist's Voter Game Plan:
Nathan Hochman says he'll reverse Gascón's policies
Hochman is a former federal prosecutor. For the past 24 years, he has mostly worked as a white collar criminal defense attorney. Unlike Gascón, Hochman is not interested in trying to bring about systemic change when it comes to how prosecutors function. He has promised to reverse all of the DA’s policies in favor of an approach he calls “the hard middle.”
And he rejects what he calls Gascón’s “extreme pro-criminal, decarceration policies,” while adding, “I also reject the extreme mass incarceration policies.”
Gascón stands by his changes
The DA defends his policies as important to reducing mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. For his part, Gascón warns that Hochman would take the office back to an era when it sought the toughest penalties possible for criminal defendants. He says that approach is ineffective.
“The reality is that the best knowledge that we have today, the most concrete knowledge, is that over-criminalization creates more crime,” Gascón told us.
Reality check on the crime rate
UC Irvine Criminologist Emily Owens told us it’s unfair to blame the crime rate on Gascón, including the spike in retail theft.
“My read of the data is that it's hard to attribute the change in retail theft to Gascón," she said, "because Gascón is not in charge of prosecutorial policy everywhere else in the country and we're seeing very similar trends in crime everywhere.”
Listen now to Episode 4
You can ask for Imperfect Paradise: District Attorney Gascón wherever you get your podcasts. Or listen here:
