When Did Principles and Integrity Become a Bad Thing?

According to the Los Angeles Police Department’s COMPSTATS, homicides are down 24%, rapes are down 17%, robberies are down 12%, and aggravated assaults are down by nearly 5% in Los Angeles.

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council, by a vote of 12-3, approved a contract with the Los Angeles Police Protective League that handed out higher starting salaries, bigger pay raises, and heftier retention bonuses to the LAPD officers represented by the union.

In all, the four-year contract will push total police spending to $3.6 billion by 2027, up from the current $3.2 billion.

This, despite the falling numbers in violent crime telling us we should be feeling safer. Data and feelings don’t go together. Not even a little bit. There are those in our community who would have you believe that Los Angeles and the state of California are on the path of a failed state awash with runaway inflation and crime led by a do-nothing city government… I’ve heard this version of reality get repeated at coffee houses, bars and chamber meetings often while others fret over questions of what to do with the unhoused choosing to be unhoused on their store steps. 

Los Angeles Times columnist Erika Smith described the new contract aptly; It’s an expensive security blanket that has little impact on actual statistics. 

Last week, we received a letter-to-the-editor regarding my story on the video interview with Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón. Just shift your eyes to the right to read it in its entirety.

The letter cherry-picks the most incendiary headlines over the past year involving District Attorney Gascón’s office, in a cultural shorthand to say the system is warped and dysfunctional. The problem of course is that while there are a lot of problems with the system, it isn’t what that guy says it is. 

“Who in their right mind thinks it’s OK to try violent juvenile offenders as mere juveniles?” 

My response: Hopefully, citizens who believe children who have committed crimes, violent or otherwise, can be redeemed. Repeat criminal offenders aren’t just caught and released. 

The deputy DA who said he believes juvenile detention facilities are more like YMCA camps than any sort of jail facility apparently has never visited a detention facility in LA County. There’s a reason the state has shut down two of LA County’s juvenile detention centers. Spoiler alert! It’s not because they were being operated like a camp for the Cub Scouts. 

Missing from the hyperventilating discourse over the victims and their anger that the perpetrator didn’t get harsher penalties, is the fact that the victims survived without physical life-long injuries. Not only did the mother and infant survive, but they escaped major bodily injury. Nothing Gascón is doing should be a surprise. Everything he is doing is what he said he would do if elected. It seems that to some, being principled and with integrity in an elected office is a bad thing.  

During our interview with District Attorney George Gascón last month, he referenced a story I wrote regarding his first 100 days in office based on my interviews with sources in his office and sitting judges at the time. I’m not sure he remembered my story correctly but I’m sure he had read a number of accounts about the divisions in his office that he has been countering during his own internal dialog. 

He said one of my sources suggested that if the DA’s office stopped prosecuting juveniles as adults, gangs were going to use juveniles to shoot people up.

“Listen, I was supervising a gang unit in South LA,” Gascón began. “That is not generally what happens every day. Kids don’t go around shooting people because they’re being told by the adults to go shoot because there aren’t any consequences… 

“It is true that when I came into office, we were in the middle of the pandemic and crime was going up everywhere in the country, certainly in our county. 

“Interestingly enough, proportionally, our crime was not going up as highly as neighboring counties that have the prosecutors that think like that judicial officer, obviously those. But now we have this precipitous drop in homicides and violence. 

“Actually, we’re getting back to the pre-pandemic years. We’re still doing business that way. We have been doing business this way since I came into office over two years now and you have to wonder if my policies would have caused the increase in crime, then you would think the crime will continue to go up. But it’s not. It’s not because the work of the prosecutor is not going to impact large patterns or micro areas of crime. It does hold people accountable for their individual behavior and it provides safety in certain instances. But we don’t cause crimes to go up or down,” Gascon said.

During the 45-minute-long interview, the district attorney noted that crime in most major metropolitan areas in this country is going down, while in some of the more conservative jurisdictions, crime is still going up. 

Gascón recalled being invited to speak in front of a group in Texas called Right on Crime. This very conservative Republican group was advocating for the reduction in prison sentences and doing it primarily because of the economic costs of prisons.

“Look, the reality is that reduction and incarceration is a highway with multiple lanes and it doesn’t matter what lane you take. I have chosen to take the social justice lane because I think it’s the right thing to do. But for some, it’s purely economics. Putting somebody in prison costs a lot of money… that’s a very conservative value.”

Go to our website, www.randomlengthsnews.com to check out the interview on our YouTube channel.