Four years ago, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón was swept into office amid a nationwide call for criminal justice reform. In L.A., thousands of people had taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd. The mass incarceration of mostly Black and brown men was a hot topic.
Gascón wasted no time.
On the day he was sworn in, he introduced a broad set of directives that would turn the district attorney's office upside down.
Prosecutors would no longer be allowed to seek the transfer of juveniles to adult court, no matter how serious the crime. They could no longer seek sentencing enhancements, which let prosecutors add many more years to someone’s potential sentence for things like carrying a gun or acting on behalf of a gang. Prosecutors could no longer file charges for certain low level misdemeanors. And they could no longer seek the death penalty.
“I felt a tremendous sense of urgency,” Gascón recently told LAist.
The backlash was immediate.
Three weeks after Gascón took office, the union representing L.A. County prosecutors filed a lawsuit seeking to block some of his directives.
Within months, a small group of victims rights activists launched the first of two recall campaigns against Gascón, arguing he didn’t care about victims. Fox News pilloried him.
Now, Gascón, a darling of the criminal justice reform movement, is seeking a second four-year term. But the political conversation has changed from a focus on reform to public safety.
He faces a strong challenge from Nathan Hochman, a well-polished former federal prosecutor turned criminal defense attorney who has promised to reverse all of Gascón's directives.
“George Gascón has introduced extreme pro-criminal, decarceration policies,” Hochman said in a recent interview for the LAist podcast “Imperfect Paradise: District Attorney Gascón.”
The election presents a clear choice between two very different visions of what role a DA should play.
LAist's voter guide: LA County District Attorney: Who's running in the Nov. 5 election and why it matters
Hochman: From Beverly Hills to the Ivy League
Hochman, 60, was born and raised in Beverly Hills.
“I was kind of the good kid,” he said. “I was 12th grade student body president. I was a varsity tennis player. I was on the debate team.”
Hochman attended Brown University and Stanford Law School before becoming a federal prosecutor in L.A. One of his biggest cases involved prosecuting corrupt sheriff’s deputies.
He entered private practice in 1997, and has mostly worked as a white collar defense attorney. In 2008, President George W. Bush appointed Hochman to oversee the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He served for a year.
In one of his most high-profile cases, Hochman defended former L.A. Sheriff Lee Baca, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in 2017 for covering up the abuse of inmates at Men’s Central Jail.
In 2020, when some people were calling for reduced funding for law enforcement, Hochman and his brother created the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Foundation, an independent group that raises money for the department.
From 2011 to 2016, Hochman was president of the L.A. City Ethics Commission, a volunteer position. The panel enforces city campaign finance and lobbying rules.
In 2022, he was the Republican nominee for California Attorney General, losing to Democrat Rob Bonta.
In 2023, Hochman changed his party affiliation to “no party preference.”
“I truly believe that the people need an independent DA,” Hochman explained, adding that he has never voted for former President Donald Trump and has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Gascón, a Democrat, has also endorsed Harris. In 2020, during his first run for district attorney, Harris endorsed Gascón, saying he “will provide real justice for every Angeleno.” This time around, Harris has remained silent so far as she runs for president.
The DA’s office is non-partisan, but party affiliation still matters to many voters.
Gascón: From high school dropout to top prosecutor
Gascón, 70, is a Cuban immigrant whose family fled Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1967, settling in Cudahy in Southeast L.A. He struggled in school, largely because English was his second language, and dropped out of high school.
“School was just not fun,” he said. “I felt like I was going to make it some other way.”
Gascón entered the Army, joining the military police, earning a GED and later getting a B.A. in history from Cal State Long Beach and a law degree from Western State College of Law.
He joined the LAPD in 1978.
“As soon as I became a police officer, I sort of got engulfed in the culture and I became very much part of the culture for many years, until I started to sort of mature from it,” said Gascón.
He rose to assistant chief before leaving to become chief of police in Mesa, Arizona. In 2010, he became chief in San Francisco, where Harris was DA at the time.
When Harris was elected attorney general, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom asked Gascón to replace her in 2011.
He spent eight years there before being elected district attorney in L.A. in 2020, by then a leader in the national progressive prosecutors movement.
While Gascón has a wide array of experience in the criminal justice system, he has never tried a case in court.
A court loss on ‘three strikes’
The nationally watched race is a referendum on Gascón's progressive policies, which are aimed at reducing criminal penalties in most cases in an effort to reduce mass incarceration and racial disparities in the system.
Gascón has continued to file felonies at the same rate as his predecessor, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times. But he has filed far fewer sentencing enhancements, which can add years to a prison sentence.
For example, during the first six months of his first year in office, prosecutors filed 731 gun enhancements — that was a 63% drop compared with the average of 1,973 in the first half of the previous nine years, according to data obtained by LAist.
The DA’s office has refused to provide more recent data despite repeated requests to do so.
The filing of sentencing enhancements against people who commit a crime for the benefit of a gang fell 99% during the same time period. A gang enhancement can add 10 years to a person’s prison sentence.
Gascón said the gang and other enhancements have been big contributors to mass incarceration.
Hochman has accused Gascón of ignoring the law.
You do not have the right to basically unilaterally insert your personal political agenda and get rid of certain laws because you don't personally like them,
“You do not have the right to basically unilaterally insert your personal political agenda and get rid of certain laws because you don't personally like them,” Hochman said.
Since he was elected, Gascón has been forced to moderate some of his policies.
The lawsuit filed by the union representing his deputy DA’s argued that by telling prosecutors they could no longer file certain sentencing enhancements, Gascón was ordering them to ignore California law.
The union argued that this applied in particular to California’s Three Strikes Law. Under that law, someone who is convicted of a third serious or violent felony faces a sentence of 25 years to life.
“What we were essentially being asked to do was to choose between following our obligations and keeping our bar card, and following the directives of our boss, and potentially losing our jobs if we defied his directives,” said Ryan Erlich, a deputy DA and vice president of the prosecutors union.
The judge largely agreed. In early 2021, he found Gascón had exceeded his authority when he told prosecutors not to file three strikes enhancements.
Gascón has since appealed the three strikes part of the ruling, which was upheld a second time. His most recent appeal is set to go before the State Supreme Court sometime later this year.
His prohibition on the prosecution of three strikes cases was deemed illegal by a court. Gascón has appealed the case to the California Supreme Court.
A juvenile case that changed Gascón's persepective
There are other ways Gascón has moderated his policies, sometimes in response to public pressure.
A high-profile case in 2021 led to Gascón altering his policy on juveniles. Hannah Tubbs had sexually assaulted a 10-year-old. She was 17 at the time of her crime, a juvenile. She was 26 when she was finally prosecuted.
By that time, Tubbs had a lengthy adult criminal record. But in keeping with his policy of never transferring juveniles to adult court, Gascón prosecuted Tubbs as a minor. Tubbs was sentenced to two years in juvenile hall and avoided registering as a sex offender.
Critics harshly condemned Gascón for his decision. And then Fox News 11 obtained audio of a jail phone call between Tubbs and her father, in which Tubbs disparaged her victim and mocked the sentence as “nothing.”
Afterwards, Gascón came out and said he’d made a mistake.
“Had I known the contents of this conversation when we were making the decision whether to proceed through the juvenile system or adult, this case would have been prosecuted as an adult,” he said.
After the Tubbs case, Gascón set up a special committee to consider prosecuting juveniles as adults in extraordinary cases. He’s done the same when it comes to seeking a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. Previously, Gascón said everybody should have a chance to get out of prison.
We have evolved. We have created exceptions... I have matured.
“We have evolved,” Gascón said. “We have created exceptions,” adding, “I have matured.”
At the same time, he has stuck to his policy on misdemeanors, refusing to prosecute 13 low level crimes, including driving on a suspended license, drug and paraphernalia possession, and public intoxication.
Gascón said many people accused of low-level misdemeanors like trespassing are experiencing homelessness, substance use disorder and/or mental illness, and that prosecuting them has a minimal effect on public safety.
Hochman said he would prosecute all misdemeanors.
Not prosecuting them “creates a culture of lawlessness,” he said. “Once criminals believe that you can get away with stuff, it is not a far stretch of the imagination to ratchet up the levels of seriousness.”
Gascón has faced two attempts to recall him from office. The first started just 90 days after he took office, but failed to get enough signatures.
The second effort, in 2022, was better funded and more organized, hiring signature gatherers and taking out ads.
Gascón's own staff voted overwhelmingly in favor of endorsing the second recall campaign. In the end, the DA survived, but just barely. Organizers gathered about 5000,000 signatures — falling just 46,000 short of what they needed to trigger a recall vote.
Gascón told LAist that he has taken undue blame for things that weren’t his fault. Asked if he feels he has done a good job of explaining his policies to the public, he said, “I don’t think so.”
What Hochman means by ‘the hard middle’
When it comes to criminal justice, Hochman is less interested in systemic change than Gascón. Instead, he advocates for the “hard middle.”
“I reject extreme policies on both ends of the pendulum swing,” Hochman said. “I also reject the extreme mass incarceration policies.”
He favors empowering frontline prosecutors to make charging decisions.
Gascón argues Hochman is a traditional prosecutor who would take the DA’s office back to tough-on-crime sentences.
“I walked into an office where we prosecuted people to the maximum that we could over and over again,” Gascón said.
“What I want to do really is kind of go back to the ideal of our system,” he added. “It's about fairness in the process that we were not seeing.”
The DA repeatedly has pointed to racial disparities in the system. For example, 45% of people serving life sentences under the Three Strikes Law in California are Black. It's one reason Gascón wants to end the use of that law.
Hochman supports the use of three strikes.
“We take the criminals as they come into the system. We don't prejudge which criminals a DA's office will prosecute,” he said. “Criminals decide what type of offenses they want to engage in.”
Another big difference between the candidates: Their views on Proposition 47.
Gascón co-authored the voter-approved 2014 measure that rolled back criminal penalties for drug possession and petty theft. Hochman favors a measure on the November ballot, Proposition 36, that would reverse parts of Prop. 47.
A closer look at the crime rate
Hochman has accused Gascón of creating a “spiral of lawlessness” in Los Angeles because of his more lenient policies.
He points to statistics that show crime has gone up in Los Angeles since Gascón took office in 2020.
Images of smash-and-grab robberies and home burglaries fuel Hochman’s argument. Homelessness adds to a sense of disorder.
But it's unfair to blame Gascón for the crime rate, said UC Irvine criminologist Emily Owens.
“It's really hard to figure out what impact Gascón has had,” Owens told LAist, adding that there are too many other factors to consider, including the pandemic and reduced staffing levels at the LAPD.
She also notes other cities have seen similar crime trends. “We're seeing very similar trends in crime everywhere,” she said.
But Hochman argues there have been individual cases in which Gascón's policies have resulted in more violence.
He cited the case of Denmonne Lee, a juvenile accused of attempted murder who was set to be tried as an adult in 2020. When Gascón took office, he transferred Lee back to juvenile court under his policy of never prosecuting juveniles as adults.
After being released to a half-way house last June, Lee was accused of participating in another murder. Hochman said Lee would have still been locked up if he had been tried in adult court.
Gascón said there will always be cases where somebody gets out and commits another serious crime — no matter who is DA.
“We are an office that prosecutes over 100,000 cases a year,” he said. “It's very easy to pick one case now because it fits the narrative for an election.”
Where endorsements stand
Hochman enjoys support from a wide array of police unions. A political action committee controlled by the union that represents rank and file deputy sheriffs has raised more than $1.3 million to defeat Gascón. Long Beach cops, CHP officers, and the L.A. County Professional Peace Officers Association have all contributed to the fund.
Police unions have denounced Gascón's policies as favoring criminals. It's also true Gascón has prosecuted more police officers in shootings and in-custody deaths than any other previous DA.
Former district attorney Jackie Lacey and billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who ran for L.A. mayor, also back Hochman.
In addition, the union that represents frontline prosecutors has endorsed Hochman. While many of his prosecutors oppose Gascón's policies, others say he’s been a bad manager, pointing to lawsuits filed by 20 deputy DA’s claiming he retaliated against them for opposing his policies. The one case that has reached a jury ended in a verdict against Gascón that awarded prosecutor Shawn Randolph $1.5 million.
Gascón has the support of the L.A. County Democratic Party, L.A. County Federation of Labor, and Planned Parenthood. The Los Angeles Times has also endorsed him.
National funders of criminal justice reform have yet to throw their weight behind Gascón as they did in 2020. That could change with the election still two months away.
Individually, Hochman raised $1.6 million during the latest reporting period — 10 times what Gascón raised.
The stakes are high for the criminal justice reform movement. The outcome of the election will determine the legacy of the 2020 street protests that garnered so much energy and excitement for reform, said USC Law Professor Jody Armour.
“If George Gascón is reelected, you can say that there really was a movement afoot in 2020, and this is confirmation of it,” Armour said. “Was it a movement or a moment?”
Chesa Boudin sees it differently. He’s the former San Francisco DA who was ousted in a recall in 2023. Boudin is a fellow progressive prosecutor who supports Gascón.
“I think the future of the progressive prosecutor movement is strong and vibrant,” he said. “I also think it's important to remember the progressive prosecutor movement is just one part of a much broader, diverse criminal justice reform movement.”
Listen to the first episode
