Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to meet the candidates. My name's Carrie Steele.
I'm host of the midday show on iHeartRadio's Coast one
O three point five in Los Angeles, and my pleasure
to introduce you to our guest today, the current Los
Angeles County District Attorney running for reelection, George Gascon. Welcome
to meet the candidates. Ok So, nice to meet you.
(00:26):
Pleasure to have you here. So this is an opportunity
for our listeners to get to know a little bit
about you, maybe some things they don't know about you.
You have a very impressive resume, quite a career in
public service. You served in the United States Army, spent
many years with the Police Department LAPD Arizona. I've done
(00:46):
my homework San Francisco, all right, and then you decided
to do something really dangerous and get into politics, right,
I'm saying, So maybe let's start there, okay, because that
would be my number one question. What inspired you to
seek public office?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Yeah, you know it, Actually it was very unexpected, as
you indicated. I you know, I dropped out of high school,
so I was really having all kinds of issues as
a young man, and the Army actually helped me put
my life together, and I'm very proud of that opportunity.
I was a volunteer when people were getting drafted, and
(01:27):
you know, I became a sergeant. I was you know,
so I did well in the army, and then when
I got out, I went to college. I went to
cal SA Long.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Beach, Go Beach.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yes, I'm an alum. Are you very cool? Very cool?
Forty And you know, from there I went into the
police department. I was a LAPD officer for about twenty
seven years, starting from the ground patrol officer for many year,
sergeant lieutenant, and then went all the way to be
assistants chief of police running operations, and then in two
(01:59):
thousand and six, I was recruited by the Mesa, Arizona
City to run their police department. And it was in
two thousand and nine that I was offered. You know,
our governor now at the time, he was a mayor
of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, offered me the job to
be the chief of police. And so I went to
(02:21):
San Francisco and that's where I met our Vice president,
Kamala Harris. She was the district attorney at the time,
and she was running for a g and when she
got elected to be the state Attorney General, quite unexpectedly,
I was offered the job of district attorney. And now
(02:41):
I have been involved in criminal justice for many years,
not only as a police officer, but in the policy
side of it. So, you know, I have been involved
in not only on the enforcement side and you know,
working you know, to get people arrested and prosecutor and
dealing with community safety issues, but I was also involved
a great deal in criminal justice. More importantly, to the
(03:01):
croux of your question, why go into politics for me
really was about the job, not the politics.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Ruck You made it sound like as a natural transition, but.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yeah, it was for me. I'm gonna tell you why, right.
So I've never run for any other political office. I
had no interest in running for political office. As a
matter of fact, when I when Camela became the Attorney
general estate, I was really advocating for somebody else to
take a role. But when the offer came up, it
(03:30):
seemed like a very natural transition for the work that
I was doing at the time. I had been involved
in in you know, trying to strike a balance between
the safety of our community and dealing with a lot
of the problems that we had, you know, the high
levels of recidivism, the high levels of discrimination, disproportionality, And
(03:51):
because I've done ready a lot of work nationally and
internationally in the area, I knew that there are other
ways of doing business. People that said, you know the
district attorneys have really they control the process in terms
of what happens after an arrest, right, I mean, police
makes investigations arrest, Prosecutors decide how the case is going
(04:12):
to be prosecutor and obviously juris and judges determine a
guilt or innocence and then sentencing. But as to the
prosecution of the case, you know, district attorneys play play
that role. At the same time recognizing that, you know,
as a police chief, I had a lot of ability
to impact crime rates and it's a district attorney I
have very little, Right, which is the other part. Right,
(04:32):
Most people think, well, you know, crime up or down,
and you know, the attorneys sometimes we like take credit
for when it goes out, we like to blame others
when it goes up. The reality is the prosecutor has
almost no impact at all on crime rates. So that
was a little different because I was used to being
able to deploy officers to a problem and deal with,
(04:53):
you know, community concerns immediately were As a prosecutor, you're
always depending on what the police is going to bring you,
and then your role is very limited to the prosecution
of the case.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Okay, okay. So in twenty twenty you won the election
and now you're seeking re election and you were pledging
to reform the criminal justice system. I checked your website
and now you are saying that you want to modernize
LA's criminal justice system. So what does that look like
and is there a difference?
Speaker 2 (05:23):
And yeah, I mean it's really a continuation of this.
You know what we and when I said we am
talking about a lot of people have been in the
space for many years. Is that so many of the
things that we have done for many years haven't necessarily
worked well, right, and we seem to continue to do
the same thing over and over again aspect a different result.
You know, often when you compare for instance, our incarceration rates,
(05:46):
we have the highest incarceration rates of any comparable democracy,
industrialized democracy. You look at our reservicem rate, which is,
you know, how often people realrain and we are off
the chart. We have a higher resilvice rate that anybody
also that is comparable. And so much of that is,
I think is because we have taken an approach that
(06:07):
has proven not to work. Right. We've heavily got involved
in the War on drugs. We heavily got involved in uh,
you know, punishment without really a thought about rehabilitation and releasing,
even though the ninety five percent of the people that
we sent to prisons and jails are coming back out right,
and the goal of that process should be that the
(06:28):
persons that come back and be safely integrated into our community,
which is what other other parts of the world that
again I'm talking about places that are comparable to us,
you know, democracies that are industrialized and where they have
a very low rate of recidivism because they spend a
lot of efforts in holding people accountable, but then rehabilitating
and facilitating the re entry. So my goal was to
(06:50):
be able to exactly begin to look at the process differently,
both how we prosecuted our case, but also influencing re
entry process, which I don't control at all. Right, there's
a process of influencing the process. Working with nonprofits do
the work.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Well, what are you suggesting as what are those tools?
What do we need? What's the modernization look like?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Who are we partnering with to make sure?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, so there are a couple of components. So you
know as to the office, right is you know, improving
the quality of our technology? Is improving the quality or
actually we had no no analytical capacity when I first
begin the DA. So actually bringing crime analysts, it begins
to look at work from different police departments and try
(07:36):
to connect the dots. Right, we have forty four agencies
eighty eight cities. We may have an individual that is
committing crimes in one part of the county and then
in another part of the county, and police are very
good generally at trying to connect the dots. But sometimes,
you know, everybody's in a rush, and we sometimes have
visibility to things that they don't, right because cases are
coming in through eventually if their felonies are coming through
(07:59):
one file, you know, So bringing those things together and
now we're dealing in the missing in our world is
a very different world. Right. About half of the country's
population have city attorneys that prosecute misemeanors. Right, so we're
about ten million people, about five million of those, right
have a city prosecutor the handles at those low level offenses.
(08:19):
So often we don't have a cibility to that, but
in the places that we do, trying to bring that
together again. So one component is sort of the use
the use of technology to improve our responses, for instance,
having centralized, actually centralizing our workload in order to also
assess the scope of the work understanding. Uh, you know
when we when we're having cases that are languishing, that
(08:44):
are not being file. We did not know that when
I first became the DNA because everybody was keeping individual
information and sometimes literally uh spreadsheets and you know written
in the back of the paper.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
I'm a sitting or shaken my head. I'm really shocked.
I mean, it's twenty percent entry And it doesn't sound
like these are really ambitious, lofty goals, it seems.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
But for La County, and unfortunately they are, right I understand. Look,
we're the largest county in the country, right. If who
were a state, we would be the would be the
eighth largest state. Right, So you know what you can
do in a small county, how you can move from
I mean, like what I did in San Francisco. Right,
you just cannot do it immediately in La County because
(09:24):
just the scope of the work, the sheer size, the
economic impact to doing so much to this. But you know,
moving us in that direction is important. And then also
looking at you know, trying to understand where there is
signs available to tell us what are the things that
have worked in the past, and where the things are
actually less likely to work. Right, you know, not all
(09:45):
saying the definition of insanity is doing the same expecting
a different result. Think about it for a moment. If you,
you know, got forbid that you had cancer, right, you
had to go to an oncollegist, and the on colleges
say say, you know, I've been in colleges since the
sixties and I continue to do business the way I
did her in the sixties. Would you allow that person
to do surgery? I would say that you probably wouldn't, right,
(10:08):
But yeah, in our system we do this very often.
So that's part of that modernizations bring in the twenty
first century is bringing balance reform to the place that
we understand that some people need to go to prison
because they're dangerous. Some people should go to prison because
they need to be held accountable, and then the question
becomes how is how long is enough? And is that
(10:31):
the right outcome? And again looking multiple layers down the road,
because our goal is not to have to touch somebody
over and over again.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Got it? Okay? And you were saying you can't bring
maybe something you do in San Francisco to LA and
it sounds like you can't. Your work is not going
to be done in one term, and that's why you're
seeking reelection. There's still work to be done. And I'm
just thinking, so you came in in twenty twenty thinking
(10:59):
this is what we're going to do, and what have
you learned that? Okay, that's not the path anymore. Now
we're going to take this path.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Look, first of all, you know, I came in in
the middle of a pandemic, completely unprecedent. You have to
go to nineteen eighteen to look at anything similar, right,
So I walk in into a place where people were scared,
that were working from home, The courts were partially shut down,
police departments were decimated by COVID as well as we did.
(11:26):
We had over five hundred people in my office that
got COVID at different times, sometimes multiple times. We have
family members that died during this process. Police departuments were
getting slammed, so so much of what we were trying
to do in the early stages was all certing this
street edging and dealing with this thing that nobody had
prepared for. You Nobody knew how to deal with this,
(11:47):
and we had to weather that for over two years.
And then, you know, at the same time trying to
implement the things that I was elected for, you know,
I mean, I think that often some folks forget that.
You know, I got elected a old majority, over a
quarter a million people more than my opponent, and we
were very transparent. I said, this is if you elect me,
(12:07):
those are the things that I would try to do,
and then you know, we will. Obviously, as I was
always down in my life, I continue to evolve. You know.
I used to be a proponent of the death penalty
at one point in my life, and now I'm against
the death penalty right because I've learned that the death
penalty doesn't work. Right. So, even when I came in
in twenty twenty, we implemented a series of protocols and procedures,
(12:32):
fully knowingly that some of those things would evolve with time.
Also building a management team at the same time, which
is very difficult, especially because we work in an environment
that has very strict civil service rules. So it's not
like I can walk in and bring a team in right.
It takes time to do that. So you're trying to,
(12:54):
you know, to navigate the complexities of a pandemic. You're
navigating the complexity we lost a lot of a lot
of positions that were taken away from us because of Kurtailman.
And then you know the reality. You know, I often
tell people just think about it for a moment. Joe
Biden gets elected precedent and the day that he takes
off is a congratulations as a president. By the way,
(13:15):
you got to keep Donald Trump's cabinet. Now, not that
Donald trump cabinet was weird or bad, it doesn't matter,
but this is what you're gonna get. You get to
bring your team right. So those are also things that
you know, often when I talk to people, especially in industry,
they shake their heads, say how do you do that? Right?
And I said, well, that's how we have to do it.
And you know, I don't complain about it. It just
(13:37):
simply is it is. But it's a reality that I.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Have to work and I'm getting the wrap up signals,
So I just before we say goodbye, I just want
to give you an opportunity against meet the candidates. What
would you like our listeners to know that maybe they
don't know, or what do you think has been the
biggest mischaracterization about you that you would just kind of
like to set it straight?
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, one of the things
I like to get across isnumber one, I've spent a
lifetime of public service, right from age eighteen being a
you know, the military and the Army volunteer, becoming a sergeant,
two years on policing, two years now as a prosecutor,
as Salad prosecutor. And you know, I'm one of those
(14:19):
individuals that for many years, not just yesterday, I did
not wake up and say I'm going to run for
attorney general and then I'm gonna run for the eight
And I don't know what the third thing is. I
you know, I wake up in the morning thinking about
not only the safety of our community, but how to
make it better. And I go to bed thinking about
the same thing. When I see you know, victims of
(14:41):
violent crime. You know that takes a toll on me. Right,
I'm very passionate about this work. What I also know
is that you know, I'm both the father and the
grandfather and a husband. I don't want my grandkids to
grow up in the world that my kids grew up in, right,
I'm one of the different world for them. I want
the world where you know, people are are judged by
(15:06):
the contents of their character. I know this may sound
a little click, but not the way they look and
when you look at our criminal legal system, that hasn't
been the case. And at the same time, I want
to make sure that people that are causing harm, regardless
who they are, they're being held accountable. And we're doing both.
You know, we're we prosecute over one hundred thousand violent
crimes and serious crimes that have been in office. That's
(15:29):
on part with the last ten years with the office.
When we have things like organized retail theft that has
come up, we have gone aggressively filing cases and getting
convictions and sending people, you know, many times sending people
to prison, but we did so thoughtfully. We work with
the police departments, with a sheriff's department, with a CHP.
We participated in a variety of task forces. At the
(15:50):
same time, I recognize that we had holes on the law.
So I work with the legislators and the governor to
make sure that we pass the package of laws to
deal with the problems that we have on the fifth
part of this. So I mean, just to wrap it up. Look,
I'm a public servants, but the public servant had been
working on public safety all his life. I was honored
(16:11):
in twenty twenty. In fact, I was honored twice before
by voters in San Francisco. And if I'm honored again
in twenty four I would continue to work as hard
as I ever have, continue to evolve and learn, and
I'm very excited about the opportunity for.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
The future La County DA. George Gascoon, appreciate your time
and thank you so much for sharing with our audience
a little bit about you underneath the candidates.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
My pleasure, Kerrie, thank you