Barring a last-second miracle, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon will lose his reelection bid and be knocked out by former federal prosecutor Nate Hochman next month. Hochman is leading Gascon by 30 points in the latest polls.
Perhaps it is too early to celebrate Gascon’s loss, but the incumbent’s deep unpopularity and the widespread rejection of his soft-on-crime policies should serve as a warning not to trust the leading lights of the Democratic Party on crime, most importantly not Vice President Kamala Harris.
Months before George Floyd’s death prompted a general lurch left on law enforcement in 2020, Harris glowingly endorsed Gascon’s 2020 campaign. “George Gascon is a proven leader of national significance when it comes to reforming our criminal justice system,” Harris said in a February 2020 statement. “As DA of San Francisco, George led fights to reform the Three Strikes Law, decrease the state prison population and get people convicted of nonviolent offenses greater opportunities to get their lives back on track.”
Gascon has lived down to Harris’s promise that he would decrease the state’s prison population. Consider the case of Denmonne Lee, who planned the robbery and provided the gun for the murder of former Marine John Ruh. Lee was 16 when he helped murder Ruh, however, so Gascon tried him as a juvenile, and he was sent to a youth treatment facility after his conviction.
Within a year, he was released on probation to a halfway house in Malibu. Less than a year after that, he was arrested again, this time for helping murder a 28-year-old Compton man.
Hochman said of Gascon’s soft-on-crime policies, “If you’re a juvenile and you want to steal merchandise worth less than $950, which is a misdemeanor, Gascon has said he won’t charge juveniles with misdemeanors. When you know there will be no punishment, there is nothing to stop criminals from committing crime. That’s why we see so many juveniles participating in these flash-mob robberies and why shoplifting is up over 81% in the last year alone.”
Since Gascon became district attorney with Harris’s endorsement, violent crimes are up 12%, robberies are up 16%, property crimes are up 20%, auto theft is up 23%, and shoplifting is up 133%, according to data from the California Department of Justice.
No wonder a recent poll found that two-thirds of Los Angeles County residents feel less safe today than before Gascon took office.
There is no reason that residents throughout the United States should be subject to the same awful criminal justice policies Harris endorsed for Los Angeles County. Gascon is exactly the type of George Soros-endorsed prosecutor Harris would install not just as attorney general but in hundreds of U.S. attorney positions across the country.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
These Harris-Gascon prosecutors would spend all their time persecuting Christians for exercising their First Amendment rights at healthcare facilities and investigating local law enforcement for alleged civil rights violations, all while letting thieves go unprosecuted and letting murderers out of prison.
The Harris-Gascon approach to crime has a track record. It is about to be rejected by the voters of Los Angeles County, and voters nationwide would be wise not to make the same mistake Los Angeles did.