Factually! with Adam Conover - How DAs are Changing Criminal Justice with DA George Gascón

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

We’ve talked a lot about criminal justice reform, but this week, we’re discovering how it’s actually put into practice. Adam is joined by Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón to talk about the DA’s path to becoming a reformer, the nationwide backlash against criminal justice reform, and how to balance the needs of the people most affected by over-policing with the demands of those fearful of crime. -- Promo Code: FACTUALLY Listener Discount: 10% Vanity URL: hover.com/FACTUALLY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible person about all the amazing shit that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are likely going to get blown together if you stick through this interview,

so I hope you do. Now before we get going, I want to remind everybody this is another YouTube episode of the show, so if you're listening on your favorite podcast player, go check it out on YouTube if you want to see the video. If you're watching on YouTube, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Search for Factually every single week. We got another amazing interview for you, and we'd love to see you there. Also, if you want to support the show, please hit me up on Patreon, patreon.com slash adamconover. Just five bucks gets you every episode ad-free.

You can join our community Discord discord our community book club we'd love to see you there patreon.com slash adam conover now we have talked on this show before about mass incarceration the u.s has the largest prison population on earth and the largest rate of incarceration for our citizens we incarcerate more of our fellow americans than any other nation does. And this is one of the great stains on this country. Mass incarceration destroys lives, it destroys families, it destroys entire communities, especially black and brown ones. And as we talked about on my Netflix show, The G Word, district attorneys are the most important way that we can make a dent in mass incarceration.

Wherever you live, your local district attorney is the person who decides who gets charged for what crimes. They can decide whether someone who's caught with a little bit of drugs in their pocket, whether they go to prison, or if they go to a drug diversion and rehab program. And also, around 95% of criminal cases in America never even go to trial. They're decided by plea bargains. And DAs are the ones who set the terms of those plea bargains. So they are, in a very real way, the judge, jury, and executioner of our criminal justice system. They're the ones who have the most control over how many people get locked up and for how long. And let me tell you something.

Over the last couple decades, our district attorneys have not used their power for good. Over the last couple decades, our district attorneys have not used their power for good. Instead, they have pursued tough-on-crime policies that are designed not to figure out who did which crime and charge them appropriately, but to charge as many people as possible with as much prison time as possible. The consequences be damned. And the consequences of that have been disastrous for our country and our society. So if we want to end or even just make a dent in mass incarceration, the most important thing that we can do is elect reform-minded prosecutors who share those values. And the good news is we've actually been doing that across the country. In the last few years, we have seen reformist prosecutors elected in cities like

Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, where I live. And those prosecutors have started putting into place much-needed reforms, but not without controversy. You know, I think most people agree that we shouldn't be throwing people in prison for doing sex work or for having a little bit of drugs in their pocket, but not everybody feels that way. Some people really loved the status quo, and the backlash has been furious. Even though violent crime is at historic lows right now, there was a small uptick in crime during the pandemic, and reformist district attorneys were blamed for that uptick,

even though there is no evidence that their policies had anything to do with it. There was a high-profile attempt to kick out Larry Krasner, the DA of Philadelphia. That attempt failed, but the district attorney of San Francisco, a man named Chesa Boudin, was successfully recalled. And here in Los Angeles, where I live, there was a high-profile recall attempt against George Gascon, which also failed, but it goes to show you how deep this backlash is. It's just a fact about human society and humanity in general that we have a huge status quo bias. Even though the status quo in criminal justice is terrible, it's one that generations in the future will ask, how the hell could we run the country this way? But despite that, there are still

legions of people ready to fight back against any change, and that makes change very, very difficult. So what is it like being one of those DAs, being at the top of an institution trying to make change in the face of sometimes overwhelming opposition? Well, today on the show, we have an incredible guest to answer that question. My guest today is Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon. D.A. Gascon heads the largest prosecutorial office in the country, and his experience in office over the last two years reveals so much about why it is so difficult to make change in such an enormous system, but also what can happen if we really do try. So without further ado, let's get to the interview. Please welcome L.A. District Attorney

George Gascon. George, thank you so much for being on the show. It's my pleasure the interview. Please welcome LA District Attorney George Gascon. George, thank you so much for being on the show. It's my pleasure, Adam. Thank you for having me here. So we've talked extensively on this show about criminal justice reform and about the role that DAs play in mass incarceration and all the many ills of our criminal justice system. But I would love for you to tell me, like, what is the role of the district attorney in the criminal justice system and how does it contribute to all the problems that we have? Well, I'm going to start with the second part of your question. It has contributed to the problems. The role is complex, right? It covers many areas. You know, I think most people

think that the district attorney is, you know, this TV hero in front of the cameras trying a case, you know, and putting, you know, the bad guy, quote-unquote, in jail. But the reality is that that is very far from the truth. The reality is actually, especially in larger offices, the actual elected prosecutor is not going to be anywhere near a courtroom. The work is more, you know, creating policies, determining how the office is going to proceed, you know, what kind of cases we're going to file on, what kind of penalties we're going to seek, what type of laws are we going to support, what are we going to push legislatively. You know, how do you work with the police, you know, whether you hold the police accountable when they do wrong or you don't. You know, how do you work in issues of social justice. You know, how do you work in issues of social justice?

So it's a very complex role, but at the core of it, the elected prosecutor in the American system is really the driver, the one that really determines, you know, who's going to be incarcerated or who is not or what are the resolutions. And I think people often don't realize just how powerful the role is because it has so much discretion. And that discretion can be used towards a good end or it can be used towards ends that are questionable. And I would argue personally that the mass incarceration in this country has been driven by and large by the behavior of prosecutors and especially elected prosecutors. And so what kind of discretion are you talking about what the choices that prosecutors have made throughout you know the last couple decades that resulted in i mean everyone agrees we have millions more people behind bars than we should

have that is a incredibly expensive the cost in human life the amount of suffering uh... that happens the the economic impact humanitarian impact that you know it's one of America's greatest sins, in my view. How has prosecutor discretion caused that to happen? Well, I mean, so, you know, prosecutors, the elected prosecutor, by the policies that they follow, they can determine, you know, how cases are going to be resolved. You know, they can determine, are we going to prosecute, you know, simple possession

of drugs? Are we going to be seeking sentencing enhancements that will send people to prison or jail for larger periods of time? Are we going to seek the death penalty? In a state like California, where you have, you know, really dozens of different types of enhancements and, you know, three strikes. You can really multiply the period of time that somebody is going to go to prison just simply by the way that you, you know, the policies that you put into place.

Yeah. Also, you know, legislatively, you know, prosecutors have a strong voice in, you know, when it comes to the development of new legislation. In most state capitals, elected prosecutors have an outside voice, often in Congress. So what you will see is if you look at L.A. as an example, before I was the elected D.A., L.A. was sending somewhere between, I would say, well, let's put it this way. In the last eight years, we sent 22, 23 people to death row. Wow.

Right? Most of them people of color, many with mental health problems or learning disabilities. I came in with a policy that we will not send any adults. We will not send anybody to death row. That is a huge impact and it's purely based on the discretion of the elected DA. I, you know, said... So in the past, 22 people were being sent...

23 actually in the last eight years. To get to the death penalty and you're no longer doing that. That's correct. So we stopped two years ago and not only that, but we're removing people from death row and, you know, turning those sentences into life without the possibility of parole, which has a huge economic impact. Also, you know, people on death row are much more costlier to the prison system than people that are in the prison. Really? Because you would think that after someone's dead, they don't cost anything. So why would that be? But just the housing, right? So the housing of somebody on death row is roughly about half a million dollars as opposed to about $100,000 for the housing on the general population. When you add the fact that people on death row may be there for decades, you know, pending appeals and the process, right, you're talking about millions of dollars on just a single individual. And then many of those folks are people that have been determined to be mentally disabled, learning disabilities, so they require other treatments and other care.

So it can really, you know, the amounts start really adding up, and then they get old and they have all kinds of elderly ailments. So, you know, it really multiplies many times. Or, for instance, let's take juveniles, right, underage kids or kids under 18. The prosecutors have the capacity to decide whether some one under 18 is going to be prosecuted as an adult or as a juvenile. And the consequences are huge, right? When you take a 16, 17 year old, you send them to adult prison, you are almost always guaranteeing a life of criminality. You know, they're going to go in there. You know,

the saying in prison is you're either, you're either, you know, you're either prey or you're, or you're a predator, right? So. You're taking a kid out of school and you're putting them into one of the roughest situations imaginable. Exactly. You're going to put them in a place where they're going to be extremely vulnerable, and, you know, they're going to develop into a way that when they come out, they generally are going to have all kinds of issues, and they're less likely to be able to correct whatever behavior took them there into the first place. Whereas if you put them into a juvenile system, you know,

thankfully the systems today are increasingly more therapeutic. You know, they're really taking into consideration, you know, thankfully the systems today are increasingly more therapeutic. You know, they're really taking into consideration, you know, brain development and the stages of brain development for human beings. So the possibility of taking somebody that has maybe committed a really horrible act, but if you put them into a juvenile system, that they will be rehabilitated and they're going to come back into society and be somebody productive and actually not be, you not be committing other crimes and hurting other people is much greater than if we put them into adult prison. So let me ask if in the past or many prosecutors currently, a 16-year-old will commit a crime and they'll try them as an adult and they'll send them to an adult prison. Why

is that? Because to me, it seems like a pretty basic fundamental thing. It's like, hey, if someone's 16 years old, they're a child. They should be treated – they're legally a child. They can't – they maybe can't drive a car depending on how old they are, what state they're in. They can't be drafted into the army. They're required legally to be in school. They can't vote. They can't vote.

Exactly. They're a minor. Right. But there's one area of society we have a tendency, we've slid into this world where we are trying those people as adults. We're throwing them into prison for, you know, sometimes many decades or even if it's even a couple of years. Right. They can have devastating impacts on a kid. So why, what causes DAs to say, no, my policy is if a 15-year-old robs a liquor store or shoots somebody,

that person is going to be tried as an adult. Yeah, I think the origins of a lot of this had to do with a lack of understanding of human brain development. So I remember when I first came on the job, the saying was, you're committing adult crime, you pay adult consequences. And we were not sophisticated enough to understand that, yeah, you know, a 16-year-old may commit a very horrendous act, but they are working with a brain that is completely different than the brain of a 30 or 40 or 50-year-old. Yeah. And that taking that into account is different. And by the way, that you can take that young

mind and with the right level of intervention, you can reprogram it fairly effectively where it's very hard to reprogram a 30- or 40-year-old brain. Yeah. Right? So the dynamics are very different. Number one, they're operating in a different space mentally. And number two, unlike a fully developed brain, they actually are more susceptible to being reprogrammed so they can behave differently. But we did not understand that. The problem is that we started down this path years ago when we had no understanding of this, but we're continuing to insist on this path

now that we do. And that's where the problem really comes. Yeah. I mean, when I was 15 years old, I would steal shit. You know what I mean? Like kids, kids, when their kids will do things that they would not consider doing as adults. And we can look at that and say, well, children have certain predilections or certain, you know, certain things seem possible. They don't understand the consequences of their actions. They don't understand, you know, they don't quite have as many social bonds placed on them. Those are things that they learn through being taught properly. And by the way, I had a very fortunate upbringing.

A lot of people don't. A lot of people have disabilities, things like that. So to me, this stuff seems very natural. But we've really taken in criminal justice in this country an incredibly harsh approach over the last 30 or 40 years, and that's expressed itself in the DAs, right? The DAs around the country have been following these incredibly harsh policies that have resulted in so many people being locked up who don't need to be or who shouldn't be because they did nothing wrong.

In fact, they were innocent. Yeah, no. And then that's the whole another component, right? You know, people that are wrongfully convicted, right? People that are either convicted of something that they didn't quite do the way it was alleged or they didn't commit the crime at all, right? So one of the things that we're doing in my office, for instance, is we're looking at wrongful convictions. Just in the last year and a half, we have two cases, one of a gentleman that did almost 38 years in prison for a rape murder that he didn't commit. And in fact, he tried to get his DNA tested 20 years, you know, about 18 years ago, 20 years into his prison term, and the sitting DA refused. And at one point even said that the DNA had been destroyed, and we found out that it wasn't. And once we tested the DNA, the DNA actually came back to the real killer slash rapist.

And interestingly enough, this guy had been a serial rapist and he died in prison. The actual culprit died in prison. Yeah, but this other individual was in prison for 38 years. We had another case of a young man that at age 16 went to prison for murder, 20 years in prison, again, factually innocent. You know, his mother actually said multiple times, hey, my son was having dinner with me when the crime occurred. And everybody in the system figured out, well, the mother has a motive for not being truthful, you know, to protect her child. There were things about the story that never square off. Yeah.

And, you know, 20 years later, we took a look and said, you know, this guy was wrongfully convicted. But, you know, we took 20 years away. We took somebody at age 16 and put him in prison for 20 years and that there's no way to recover from that. So, you know, the harm that prosecutors can do in the pursuit of this, you know, this highly punitive approach to the work can have multiple facets, you know, all the way from the extreme or wrongful conviction as the ones that I said to, you know, cases where the discretion is being used in ways that is more harmful, like taking a 16 year old, send them to adult prison or sending somebody to death road that may have mental disabilities. Or, or frankly, as we realize, you know, sometimes people are wrongfully convicted, right? If you, we haven't figured out a way to, to, to have somebody come back to life once you take a life away. right? Yeah, and that's the biggest argument against the death penalty is that the criminal justice system makes those mistakes quite often, and that in that case, when someone's dead, you've

committed the ultimate crime of the state against them, that you've killed an innocent person. Absolutely. This is also very racially, it's been determined to be very racially biased, right? Even in L.A. County, if you look at those last 23 people that I mentioned that went to death row, you know, eight years prior to my coming into office, 22 of the 23 were people of color. They were men, right? Most of them were African-American and Latino men.

So when you look at the proportionality of – and we're talking about people that are similarly situated. A white person committing a similar crime is less likely to face death row than a black person is or a Latino. So these are all components to the system that cry for a different way of looking at the work. Yeah. So I want to get into how you got into this, but I have to talk about this quickly. So you said that you've gone back and looked at these old cases that you realized were wrongfully concluded, that the person did not actually commit the crime. And you've released these people. You've given them their lives back.

That's remarkable to me because I've had on this show Chris Fabricant, who – do you know who he is? He's one of the head lawyers for the Innocence Project. He flies around the country getting people off a death row or freeing them from prison using DNA evidence. But this is a nonprofit. This is privately funded, you know, people putting money in into a 501C3. And I asked him, I was like, well, why doesn't the criminal justice system want to correct these mistakes? You know, you would think that someone in your position, a DA, who finds out, hey, there's a chance that we wrongfully imprisoned this person. Let's do a DNA test.

You would think they would say, my God, I don't want to get it wrong. I don't want to falsely imprison people and send them to prison or to death row for crimes they didn't commit. So you would, I would imagine if it were me, I would have a whole department devoted to making sure that we don't, you know, wrongfully decide cases that were, and, you know, that if new evidence comes to light, we get those people out. And yet almost no DA does that. I asked him why that is. He said, the incentives aren't there for that. That's not the incentive for DAs or for the criminal justice system. Why, why is it that you find yourself able to do that? And I want to, and I want to make sure that we're very clear, by the way, this case is, we have worked with the Innocence Project, right? It's a partnership, right? Because often

you have this very experienced lawyers like Chris, right? It's a partnership, right? Because often you have this very experienced lawyers like Chris, right, that are being called by people that say, hey, I was wrongfully convicted. And they look into the case and they bring the cases to the prosecutor's attention. The problem then becomes when they do bring the case to you, right? Like in the case that I mentioned earlier, where we had this man that was in prison for 38 years, you know, at about 20 years of his prison term, as the DNA technology got better, right, he had people working on his behalf, lawyers working with the innocent, and the prosecutor probably said, hey, let's test this DNA. This man continues to say I was not guilty.

And the prosecutor refused to do that. And that's where the incentives that we're talking about come in is where there is this culture sometimes in prosecutor's office that you're going to protect the conviction at any cost. You develop this ownership to the process. You feel like you did everything right and you're not going to question this. And that goes to the process. You feel like you did everything right, and you're not going to question this, right? And that goes to the issue of incentives. Also, I think the other part of it is it's often the case in traditional prosecuting offices that people are rewarded by the number of trials and by, you know, the most punitive that they can be in their approach to the work. I mean, by the number of trials and by the most punitive that they can be in their approach to the work. In my office, for instance, it used to be that during training there would be competitions to see,

there would be given a hypothetical case and there would be a competition to see who could extract the biggest, the harshest sentencing approach. And because the sentencing schemes are very complicated, you can inject different types of enhancements depending on different circumstances, you know, there may be a slight difference. So those that actually were able to strike the most were sort of like the top of that class or they got the... Right. Right. If you got the biggest numbers, then you got the most promotions or if you're a DA, you get reelected. You get more recognition. Yeah, to the elected DA, you know, the DAs have been elected traditionally by being tough on crime.

You know, I'm going to lock people up. I'm going to lock people up, lock people up, right? The conversations are shifting around the country, not only in L.A., but we've seen other major, you know, especially urban areas. But even we're seeing it in some suburban and rural areas where we're seeing, you know, new DAs coming in that are coming in and saying, you know, we are going to fight hard for the safety of our community, but that safety has to be done in a way that actually we reduce the likelihood of causing harm in our pursuit of that safety. And that actually, by the way, over-incarcerating doesn't make us safer. In fact, it increases insecurity in the community.

One of the things that is often never discussed is our system has one of the highest recidivism rates of any industrialized modern legal system. I didn't know that. We fail somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the time. Right. 50 to 70 percent. Meaning that the people that we prosecute and convict, they're going to reoffend when they get released. Right. And about 95 percent of the people that we send to jail and prison are coming out. So it's a statistical certainty that the people that you send in, they're going to come out, and the likelihood that they're going to reoffend, which means that there will be other victims, is very high.

You take other systems like in Western Europe, and you see systems that have a 10%, 15% recidivism rate. Now, by the way, we know how to reduce recidivism, right? We got pilot programs that we have been doing for years where we uh you know work on rehabilitation inside the institution and then we facilitate re-entry into a measure way where people are giving housing and employment training and and drug treatment and those people generally do not re-offend yeah right so we know how to do it right but we don't if you don't do those things if someone is in prison for 20 years and they get out of prison with, what, 20 bucks and maybe a bus ticket or whatever in the cliche, then what are they going to do other than sell drugs or whatever it is they were doing? They get out with a couple hundred bucks, right? They have a criminal record, so most employers won't hire them. Yeah.

Most landlords won't rent them. They don't have employment. They don't have housing. So they become, almost immediately, they become houseless. Yeah. They are hungry. Yeah. They don't have housing. So they become almost immediately they become houseless. Yeah. They are hungry. Yeah. They got to eat.

Right. Just think about it. And by the way, they come out often with severe mental health problems. Right. Because if you were not. They were just in the cell for God knows how long. Yeah. And they're very violent and very stressful environment.

Yeah. And often you self-medicate while you're there. So you come out, by the way, drugs are readily available in our prisons and jails at sometimes a higher rates that they are on the streets. So how do people deal with their pain? They self-medicate, right? So they come out, they have mental health issues. They may be, you know, they have substance dependence. They have no employment, no housing, no prospects that have an employment or housing, they could drop on the street and say, go figure it out, right?

Why would we think that this would work as a society? Well, it's insane, right? It's insane. And you tell people, you know, we have done this before. We've seen the failures, right? And the old saying of, you know, what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Well, when it comes to our criminal legal system, we do that. I mean, look, I see it right now with fentanyl, right? Fentanyl

is a horrible drug, right? By the way, I'm very proud, actually, in LA County, we were able to put a work group together. We just, in fact, we just had a press conference, and we had public health. We had our school districts. We had nonprofits and community groups, and we had law enforcement and ourselves coming together and saying, you know, we recognize this is a horrible problem. It's causing death and destruction in our community. our community. But we also recognize that the only way that we're going to be successful is by taking a holistic approach that is health care center in law enforcement will play the role that we have to play. But it's a peripheral role for us. And I am so proud of the fact that our county chiefs of police stepped up and in a very intelligent way and said,

you know, we want to be part of the solution. We don't want to make the same mistakes of the past. You know, our public health, they have always been there, right? They've been telling us this stuff. So they're doing their job and our schools. So I'm very hopeful and very proud of the way L.A LA County is responding to this problem. But you can see the tendency immediately comes up to how do we go back to locking people up as if, you know, if you've got a drug addiction, being locked up is not going to solve the problem for you.

And if you're selling, you know, penny and nickel stuff on the street in order to pay for your addiction, you know, number one, when you go to jail, you're going to go for a short period of time, if at all. Your addiction doesn't go away. It only gets worse, right? And you're going to be replaced by this addict that will come in right before, right after you. And we've seen this. You know, it's like we've seen this picture before, right? Yeah.

So it's not like we're – it doesn't take a rocket scientist to say, okay, wait a minute. Is this shit going to work? No, it's not going to work, right doesn't take a rocket scientist to say, OK, wait a minute. Is this shit going to work? It's not going to work, right? It won't. Yeah, if we just try the same shit again. But there's an incredible resistance to reform of any kind, and I want to get into that. But we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more George Gascon.

OK, we're back with district attorney of L.A. County, George Gascon. So I just want to talk quickly about how you became the district attorney of Los Angeles. You came you were elected soon after the protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020. What caused you to run and to what do you credit your victory? Because it was an upset victory. You unseated an incumbent who was the old fashioned kind of DA, the law and order lock them all up, never prosecute the cops kind of DA. Yeah. And we did it by a large margin, over a quarter of a million people and with a very clear agenda. By the way, there were no hidden, you know, we put it all out there and then day one, we went ahead and did the work. You know, my journey was a little different than most. I,

you know, I started, you know, I was high school dropout, you know, immigrant kid, you know, grew up here in LA, went to the army. The army kind of sort of fixed me if there was a fixing to be had. Then I became a police officer, you know, spent a career in the LAPD going through the ranks to become number two. And then I was the chief of police in Mesa, Arizona and in San Francisco before I became the DA there. Really out of the blue, our governor was then the mayor of San Francisco. And I went to talk to him about, you know, people that I recommend should be the next DA. And in that conversation, he offered me the job, and I had to take it right away. And it was really quite a stressful decision for me and my family.

But by that time, I had been working on criminal justice reform for years. I had been doing a lot of work with the Kennedy School of Public Policy at Harvard University. What made you a reformer? Because, you know, you said you're in the Army, you're a beat cop, you're a chief of police. This is not the job, you know, the job resume of someone who is generally going to try to shake up the criminal justice system. I would think, you know, public defender, that kind of thing. So what made you become a reformer? It was actually my own personal journey.

You know, looking at my work, I work most of my time that I work in the streets, I work in East and South L.A., you know, Watts. And, you know, I began to see the evolution of one generation after the other of people that were being incarcerated, and the community was not necessarily getting any better. And people ask, well, do you have like one parting of the waters moment? And I said, you know, there was not one, but there were multiples, right? You know, the insurrection in 1992, right, which I used to call a riot, by the way.

Now I call it an insurrection. People say, well, what are you talking about? I say, well, you know, when I was a cop, it was a riot, right? This is in the wake of Rodney King's death. Rodney King, right. But then as I started to mature and to look at these things more deeply, I recognized that there was this level of anger and frustration within a community. This particular incident, you know, the Rodney King incident and the outcome of the trial in Simi Valley was sort of a flashpoint, right, where people just, you know, unleashed their anger. But it was anger that was a result of years of exploitation and racism and all that stuff. So were there some people that were rioting?

Absolutely. But was that really the fair description of what happened there? And, you know, and today I would say no. So, but that was one of those moments for me. And I remember, you know, having, you know, listening to Daryl Gates when he initially after the Rodney King incident saying, oh, this is the chief of police. He was the chief of police at the time and said, oh, this is an aberration. And, you know, we're on the streets at the time time I was working in Central, South Central LA Newton Division,

which is kind of right on the border of Central and South. And we're looking at each other and say, well, that's not an aberration, right? I mean, you run from us. Those are the consequences, right? So it was those periods of disconnect. It was looking, for instance, at the enforcement of drug laws, right, and understanding that we had undercover, very youthful-looking cops in schools in South L.A. making arrests when kids would have marijuana or were dealing in drugs or using drugs.

But I knew that kids were using drugs in white neighborhoods at the same rate, sometimes even more. Right. But there were no legal consequences to that. There's no undercover cops at Beverly Hills High. Or frankly, most other sort of middle class communities, right? So kids get to use drugs, they get to experiment, and then they grow up to be comedians and doctors and lawyers, right? This is the conversation I have with people so often,

with my neighbors about all the unhoused people, oh, they're all using drugs or, you know, the criminals, it's all fentanyl. And I would say, hey man, do you use drugs? And the person I'm talking to I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. No, exactly, exactly, right. But the consequences... We all use drugs.

But the consequences are generally different, right? First of all, you don't get a criminal record, so you get to go to school or whatever you do, you start a business, you know, and you may actually stop using drugs or you may continue to use drugs the rest of your life. I said some people do. I mean, we have a lot of professionals that never stop using drugs, but they're never arrested. They never face those consequences. But the kids in the poor schools, they got arrested at age 15, 16, sometimes at 13, 14.

They start building up a criminal record. And by the time they're an adult, they already have this long tail of arrest. And the opportunities for them start to close and close and close. So I saw that playing up. And I was an actor in that play, right? I was right there in the middle of that theater that was playing those consequences. And as I became more educated in the subject, I started, you know, doing work with, like I said, the Kennedy School of Public Policy or the Council of State Governments where I became a board member looking at justice reinvestment. And, you know, I became more and more interested in learning what were the failures, what were the successes, and also how other places

in the world were doing this. And, you know, I remember when Portugal decriminalized drug use, you know, 23, 24 years ago. And at first I thought, my God, they're crazy. Yeah. But you know what? I went to visit Portugal about four or five years ago, right? And guess what? You know, drug addiction in Portugal is significantly lower than it is in this country. Wow. Overdose deaths are almost non-existent. People don't go to prison for using drugs.

People that are addicted are treated through the health system. Their soccer team is better than ours. Sorry, it's World Cup season. I think ours will get better, by the way. Listen, we've got a great squad. They're young kids. Let's just change the topic of the podcast and talk about the World Cup. I love American soccer, and I think our teams are going to be butt-kicking another four years.

In 2026, that's our year. They will be. But I just saw Spain losing a horrible game this morning. It was horrible. It just thought of my phone. I know. It almost made me late to this. I was watching the penalty kicks.

Oh, my God, yeah. So anyway, yeah. But, you know, the point is that I think that, you know, it was the exposure to both having real life experiences on the street, you know, getting more academic involvement and looking at policy solutions and looking at what other countries were doing that just really took me to where I am today. that I became the district attorney in San Francisco, I was really very focused on showing that you can actually do public safety and that you can do so and be much more humane and that you need to be a lot smarter. And by the way, data and science supports all of this, right? We know for instance that lengthy incarceration periods do not make a community any safer. What they do is they increase recidivism. We know that drug addiction doesn't get cured by being incarcerated.

We know that kids do not do better when they get put into the adult system. We know that people that are houseless because of their social and economic conditions are not going to stop being hous households because you put them in jail for a couple of days or because you push them from one corner to the next, right? So this is all stuff that, you know, it may seem really obvious when you think about it. But unfortunately, when it comes to policy development and our procedures, we sort of ignore that because we want the quick fixes, right? I don't want to see the quick fixes, right? Yeah. I don't want to see the tent in front of my business. I don't want to see the half-naked lady walking around talking to a light pole, right? It's disturbing. But those things are not crimes that you just described.

They're not crimes, and they don't go away by simply just sweeping them out of the way, right? So, but all the policy changes that you're talking about are very common sense. When you lay them out to people, they understand, you know, and so much of the country understands that, you know, mass incarceration is, is bad, that it's wasteful, all the things that we're talking about. Um, but when you were elected by this large margin in Los Angeles County to do the thing that you said you were going to do, you ran on all of these things and you ran again in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the protests. But you ran a very public campaign against these things, won by a large margin. You put them into practice. You made a lot of policy changes on your first day.

And there was an enormous backlash, both in the press, in the public and in the in the department itself. And I'd love to talk about to what do you credit that backlash? I mean, I heard there's been, I've read plenty of op-eds, read plenty of people saying, oh, he did too much on the first day. He didn't run it, run it off it, run it by enough people, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Like basically saying it was a political issue could have been handled better. I'm curious whether you feel that's the case or is there some element of this backlash that is just so built into the system that it's going to happen no matter how nice you play? Even if you were to take five years to put all those reforms and go real slow, would you maybe have seen the same backlash?

Do you have a view on that? Yeah, and you know what? I'm going to, again, take this backwards. I'm going to start at the end. I think the system is baked the way it is, and the backlash would have been there no matter what. And I have to tell you, actually, up to the night before I was sworn in, I basically was playing with, I had kind of two acceptance speeches, right? One was sort of the gradual, we're going to do this on a step-by-step basis. And the other one was,

we're going to put it all out there and then we're going to start working through it. And at the end, and I really struggle with this because, you know, I have run large organizations before and, you know, I know that, you know, generally you want to gain consensus. Yeah. Right. And in the world, consensus is important, by the way. I try to govern, and certainly I work in the political environment seeking consensus. But I recognize that the elections have been so intense and that what I was trying to do was such a departure. And there were so many economic and social and political interests here that I felt that if I tried to go incrementally, I was going to die by a thousand cuts, right? And nothing was going to move. The needle was going to move either

very slowly or not at all because I was going to get sued at each step of the way. So I figured that I put it all out there and then we'll work with it and we'll refine it and we'll continue the process of improvement, which I truly believe by the way. I don't think, you know, learning and improving is a journey. It's not a destination, right? As a human being, we're better when we're always seeking new knowledge and evolution. And I believe in that personally. In fact, I tell people I try to make mistakes every day because if I'm making a mistake,

you know, assuming it's not a stupid mistake or intentional, but, you know, just mistakes for trying, you're evolving, you're learning, and you're getting better at your trace. So I decided to go that route, understanding that I was going to face the backlash immediately. And I did. You know, it was immediately a recall effort. I mean, the day that I was sworn in two failed recall efforts they spent about $2 million the first time and then they spent about $8 million the second time

and couldn't collect enough signatures to actually they couldn't and they lied to people by the way, they lied, I remember actually being stopped at a Costco you were stopped to sign? oh yeah, so this individual you know, it was really funny because young man, you know, he comes out to me and says, hey, would you like to get rid of rapists in your neighborhood? And that, you know, and I said, well, who wouldn't?

You know, and so I said, so what do I need to do? And he said, oh, you just got to sign here. So I I grab it. And of course, I'm playing along. I know what's going on. I can see it. I said, oh, this is about recalling the D.A. And I said, I asked him, I said, do you know who the da is he said no i don't and i said where are you from because he sounded

like he was a little off for the area yeah i don't mean off in terms of his physical appearance but just he didn't seem to know yeah what he was doing and he said well i'm from florida yeah and i said what are you doing here so i do this for a living we do this you know i get paid really well i make over a hundred thousand dollars a year and you know we get paid to come here and all this stuff. And get signatures from people to try to recall a district attorney. So, so basically, uh, you know, his whole pitch was get rapists out of your neighborhood, right? I think we all, I don't think any of us want rapists in our neighborhood, right? I have two daughters, I have a wife, you know, I got neighbors that I, you know, I got a lot of women in my life that I'm very, you know,

they're very important to me, right? So, but they lie. And even with all that lying, they collect the signatures out of the county. I had a person come to me and say, you know, I live right on the border between LA and San Marino County. And I told the guy, I live in San Marino County. He said, well guy, I live in San Marino County. He said, oh, don't worry about it. Just sign here. I mean, it was, and we saw that. We saw about 40,000 signatures from other counties, right? So it was that insanity that really shows you that, you know, there's this level of desperation because people feel like they're losing their currency. They're losing their political power. There is absolutely a financial

incentive to this, right? These are industries, right? So what is the financial incentive for someone is paying this man and many other people to go collect signatures to try to recall you as a district attorney. So someone, if they're spending money, they therefore must be either very ideologically committed or they are making money somehow from the current system. So what is the profit motive there? Yeah, so you have – you have some people that are very ideologically committed, right? And there are some who are very wealthy and they view this as a political issue, which shouldn't be by the way.

You know, healthcare, public safety, I know that we politicize these issues all the time. But they really should be apolitical. Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, whether you're right, left, whatever, we all want to live in a safe community. We don't want our family to be victimized. We definitely don't want to be victimized by a system. I think

these are basic human needs and desires, but we have turned it into political issues. And then what you have is you have industries that revolve around here, right? So if you're in the prison system, you may be supplying medical assistance or food or care, whatever you're supplying, right? You may be building prisons. We have towns in the state of California where the entire town's

economy is dependent on a prison, right? In fact, we just saw recently a particular town where, you know, because we're reducing our incarceration rate, the prison is being shut down and you have the town go up in arms because, you know, this is... You can't shut down our prison. This is how little Bobby's

dad puts food on the table, which is true. Which is true, right? And, you know, and by the way, I'm way, I'm sensitive to that. And one of the things I believe that we should be doing as we're shouting dispersants, we should actually be spending money in those communities to train people and provide people other work opportunities. I believe the same thing with fossil fuels. We can't just simply say we're going to shut down all the oil fields and leave all those families. We need to teach people, you know, whether you're working in the coal industry or, you know, there should be economic incentives for people to actually get out of those harmful industries and be able to continue to live a respectful life, an honorable life where they're earning money for their families. So I, you know, I totally believe that just simply shutting down the prison is not, it's not.

But this is the way the system is entrenched because there are, there are so many people just talking about the state of California, really any state in the country that are making a living off of criminal justice, off of the current horrible system. And then you have political currency to this, right? Because you have, like, for instance, you have police unions or you have, you know, prison guards unions, right? They grow because the more members you have, the more money you take. The more money you take, the more powerful

the union is because you can buy your way into, you know, you can entertain legislators and you can, you know, you can pay DAs for their campaigns. You can do all kinds of stuff, right? So it becomes symbiotic right the more you have the more you get the more you have the more you get right so so all of a sudden when you're going after the core of that entire ecosystem yeah you're taking away power you're

taking away money and and you know systems you know and i tell people look this is no different than the cigarette tobacco industry fossil fuels, right? You go to the core of an industry, people are going to fight back. You also have had to really, I don't quite know the right phrase, but you've had folks in your own department go to war with you. Where, you know, the folks who work underneath you, who you were elected to lead, but, you know, people who have been there their entire careers and have gotten used to working a certain way, you come in, you institute these reforms, and they are up in arms, and their union is up in arms. I say this as a member of two unions who believes in unions greatly, but that must be very difficult for you as a reformist at the head of an organization where you're up here, but all the people below

haven't gotten on board yet. You know, how do you handle that? Yeah, and look, I mean, first of all, I'm a 100% union person, right? I was making, as a 16-year-old, being a union employee at a supermarket, I was making more money than my parents who were working in a factory for minimum wage. So I believe in the value of unions. I think this is not about labor, right? This is a, again, this is about structure. You got people that have been doing business in

a certain way for decades and somebody's coming in and saying, you know what, we need to try something different because what you have done has been harmful. And it's very hard for people to, yeah, to adopt to that. And then, you know, because they want to believe, hey, when I try to increase my convictions every year, I'm doing a good deed. I'm not hurting people. How dare you? A hundred percent.

Anyone would feel that way. I don't think that people come into this job saying, I'm going to do bad things. You come in because you want to help. The question is that the definition of help was created in a way that shaped your way of looking at the world, and that definition now is being questioned. And I think that people have a hard time with that. And by the way, it's not all the people in the office. There are key people, right?

And some of them are also, you know, just simply because of politics, right? I mean we live unfortunately in a very polarized world today, right? where politics and the emotion behind politics shut down truth and facts and reason, even with very smart people. You know, we see extremely smart people that believe that Joe Biden was an elected president, rightfully, right? And you have to question yourself, well, how can that happen with a very smart person? And, you know, you have to dig a little deeper and say, well, where do they consume information from? And then you pretty soon you see that the places that they get information from is telling them that this election was stolen, right? And it's repeated over and over. And, you know, so we are products of our own environment in many ways, right? And within our larger community, we have ecosystems that we become products of our own, you know, subset of that community. I think it's very interesting because to hear you talk

about those folks, you're talking about them with the same empathy that you have for, you know, a juvenile offender who's committed a crime at the age of 16 because of the environment that they were raised in. You're saying, oh, well, for these folks, hey, if you're watching Fox News every day, this is what you're going to believe about the world. I do. Listen, I tell people, you know, and I say this without any hesitation. You know, I grew up in a Republican household. Yeah.

Right? My parents were very conservative. It was a different kind of Republican Party, by the way, but it's not necessarily. I look back, I don't even agree with what they believed back then, but it was certainly different. I mean, my father believed in the Constitution. They believed that, you know, you lost an election, you got to figure out how to win it the next time around, right? So it was a very different approach, but nevertheless, socially and economically, I look back and I disagree with the whole process, but I tell people that, you know, politics are like religion, right? You know, I was born in a

Catholic household, right? I mean, that's what like religion, right? You know, I was born in a Catholic household, right? I mean, that's what you become, right? You know, you're not thinking about being Jewish if you're Catholic, right? It's just no—or vice versa. Politics are the same way. But so I do. I have a great deal of empathy because I believe that most people want to do the right things. Most people want to be good to their community. They want to live in

a place that they can flourish and others can flourish around them. And I think that you pick up extremists, obviously, that have, you know, other views, but I don't think that's the core of the disagreement in this country today. I don't think that there are 70 million Americans that somehow are all racist and, you know, driven by and driven by, or they believe everything that Donald Trump says. I think that there are legitimate places for disagreement there, and I think that we are a product of that environment, whatever we are. And by the way, I tell the same thing to my friends on the left.

If you watch MSNBC every day, you're going to start thinking of the world also in a certain way. So it's good to kind of try to straddle and look back and forth. But I think that the problem is, and I've told this, tell that to some relatives of mine that are very conservative. I said, well, what can you come more to the center? I said, the problem is he has gone so far to the right that the center keeps shifting to a place that is unacceptable for some.

But in terms of criminal justice, well, I have to ask you this question, but we have to take another quick break or the advertisers are going to kill me. So let's take another break. We'll be right back with more George Gascon. Okay, we're back with L.A. District Attorney George Gascon. So you were saying that, you know,

we've become very politically divided, but on criminal justice issues, sometimes they really do seem to transcend party politics that, you know, you've got, you have Democrats who are really, really hard on, you know, crime and punishment, law and order, you know, folks like that. You've got Republicans who have a more libertarian slant and they know that we're wasting too much money on prisons and that, you know, this is a bad approach. So it does cut across some of those divisions sometimes. And sometimes to me, it feels that the desire for punishment and punishment specifically of people who are not like you is something that like lurks within the human heart to an extent. And it comes out in

weird ways. You know, I'm often struck by the dichotomy that we see in the press and in the culture around this issue. You know, you'll see if I open the L.A. Times or the New York Times, I'll see an editorial that says mass incarceration is horrible. We're wasting so much money. We're hurting so many people. It's clearly unjust. We must end it. And then you'll see it right next to an article saying, is George Gascon going too far? Are these reforms, like people are up in arms

and are people going to recall him? Or you'll see that about Larry Krasner in Philadelphia or in San Francisco or around the country. Right next to each other. Like the things that they were writing about Larry Krasner before he was re-elected in Philadelphia made it look like he was doomed and then he won by a huge margin.

And this is because folks like him, folks like you, have put into place the exact policies that the editorial page is calling for. The exact policies everybody agrees we need to do. Need to stop trying kids as adults. Need to stop, you know, throwing people in prison for 20 years for having, you know, an eighth of weed in their pocket or whatever. You know, we know that the war on drugs failed. Everyone agrees on this intellectually, but then once it actually happens, there's this

groundswell of pushback that comes from seemingly all quarters, even from the places that intellectually know it. And I'm curious why you feel that is. Is it something that is just lurking within our culture that comes out as soon as there's any pushback against it?

Yeah, look, I think there are many components. Number one, I think that there is no question that there is a racial bias in the implicit – and I'm going to exclude the clearly racist sort of tendencies in some of the extremes. But I think that there is – I don't know if we need to exclude it because it's a real thing. People are racist. It's a real thing. But even in the subconscious area, there is a whole thing about people that do not look like me. I look at them with less forgiveness and less tolerance for sort of missteps, if you will. So that's one component. The other component is, I think, to the point, you know, sort of missteps, if you will. So that's one component.

The other component is, I think, to the point that you raised, editorial pages in the news, right? The editorial pages are appealing to our intellectual higher being, if you will. They get the time to think about, you know, these issues. They talk to people, and they come out with very thoughtful, you know, conversations around these issues. And they do it for health thoughtful conversations around these issues. And they do it for health care, criminal justice, housing. But then you get into the daily grind of the news, right, and the urge to be able to capture readership or to capture ratings. You know, my wife was a TV anchor, a news anchor, right? And the desire to be salacious in order to capture, you know, more eyes on the screen.

And now you add to that the complexity of today's social media, which is a free-for-all, like the Wild West, right? I mean, journalists years ago, you had to—you were taught in journalism school that you need to check multiple sources to confirm a story. And there was this sort of concept of balance presenting. That's all gone out the door because you've got a guy now with an iPhone that can start a blog and say the world is crumbling and show you a couple of pictures from whatever. And next thing you know, the world is crumbling and show you a couple of pictures from whatever and next thing you know the war is crumbling right so so I think you have all those forces that are playing a role where yeah you have you know really smart thoughtful conversations going on here but this is not what drives the daily stuff right the daily stuff is it's a local news channel showing a ring camera showing some

guy robbing somebody or breaking a store store And by the way, they repeat it over and over and over again. Yeah, one anecdote repeated over and over. And they do it, you know, very intentionally, right, because they understand how the dynamics of the stuff work. I mean, I see it in my own case where they'll cover a story with complete falsehoods. You know, like they have one that said, you know, I let go of this juvenile that got involved in an accident and he ran over this baby. And you could see the tire marks on the baby's head.

Well, let's think about it for a moment logically. If you can see the marks of a tire over a baby's head, the baby is dead. Baby, by the way, was completely uninjured, right? And not to take any responsibility away from the young man that did the crime. But then what you see is they had, because it was a video of this when the car hits and the mother is sort of flying. Yeah. And horrendous, right? Horrendous video.

And they got this thing in repeat. And they're having this story. And they got a guy talking about tire marks. And they're showing this over and over and over. And then they would show a picture of me. And, you know, the most, you know, unkind picture of me that you can find. Right. I mean, we all, and you can see this thing sort of playing over and over and over in the background.

If you happen to be a consumer of information from that particular news channel, you see that play out for about three or four minutes multiple times in a day. And this, by the way, this isn't Fox News. This is just the local news. This is just, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not the Fox News channel on cable. No, no. This is local news, right? That everybody watches every night. And, you know, you come out of there and you're all fired up.

And you say, well, this guy, you know, and then you get somebody that has some mental health issues that all circumcised that he's going to cure the world. And this is a guy who goes to a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. looking for pedophiles and wants to kill people, right? Which is the other – which I think is the constant irresponsibility of many people in the traditional media today. And then, of course, the people that could care less that are in social media, right? But so we get these cases that you say like one or two salacious cases that are repeated over and over again.

One thing that I find is that the stories of the harms that are not done because of the policies that you're putting in place, the people who are not being falsely convicted, the people who are – who you find that were wrongfully convicted, who you're able to release. Those stories are not told to nearly the same extent. And that is, it's strange because that is literally, you know, why you were elected, right? Because you pledged to do these things. So when it comes to, you know, one of the things that's really consumed me is how we fight back against the backlash to criminal justice reform, because it's clearly national. It happens everywhere that a reformer comes in. And the track record of being able to beat the backlash is mixed so far. There's been some victories and there's been some losses.

So many of us agree that we need to end mass incarceration in America, reform our criminal legal system. And the only way we can do it is by having reformers in positions of power and fighting the backlash. And so how do we do that? You know, you have an approach. Well, I do. I mean, look, I think that one of the things that I came to realize is that, you know, the people that want to provide misinformation have very simple messaging, right? But it's sticky, right? And sometimes we try to get very complicated in the way that we approach our work. And I've sort of, you know, and this has been kind of a team approach to this, but we've sort of come up to the conclusion. And it's actually three pillars that are very, very solid.

You know, the way that we have to do this work is, number one, we have to educate. And that means whatever, whether we're talking about fentanyl and how to avoid fentanyl use and understanding the consequences that we're talking about, violence in the streets, we have to educate our community. Number two, we have to prevent. We have to be thoughtful in the way that we intervene in these issues and come up and use database, science-based information in order to be as effective as we can in these issues and come up and use database, you know, science-based information in order to be as effective as we can in our interventions. And then finally, we have enforcement, right?

We have, like, the guy that is selling fentanyl by the large quantities, that individual needs to face, you know, harsh consequences from the criminal legal system or the person that commits murder needs to certainly be held accountable for that or the person that runs over a pedestrian needs to be held accountable for that so that enforcement component has to be there so we're basically trying to increasingly you know put everything on the framework of education prevention and enforcement and every one of those pillars has a role and one is not more important than the other because they all are necessary in order to do our work the problem is that on the other side you got people that are just talking enforcement enforcement punishment punishment punishment so you have to kind of sort of retract some of that

and it's true as in law enforcement as in public health that prevention is hard to get people excited about when if you tell someone i prevented something bad from happening that you never heard about it sounds like a hypothetical rather than something that you know look at me your best cardiologists right are the ones that are talking to you about you know diet and exercising and all the things that you need to do before you develop a heart problem right but when do we normally go to a cardiologist after the problem right so is how do we normally go to a cardiologist? After the problem. After the problem, right? So it's how do we start injecting that?

I believe that the medical profession has gone through a revolution in the last 20 years, really focusing on prevention and quality of life approach to health, right? Because it's a recognition that by the time that you have to come up and do surgery, right, now you're looking at the most harshful, harmful interventions that you have. Right. So it's how do you, you know, whether it's prenatal care or whether it's, you know, afterbirth care. Right. And so. How do we do that in law enforcement?

We need to do that in our public safety as well. But something that I feel like we've really lost from this conversation that you said that the tough-on-crime people have a simple message, they have simple clips they can repeat over and over again. That makes me realize that, again, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, we had that simple message, right? We had people around the country saying, in every state, saying the criminal legal system, the policing system, is hurting and killing people like me. You know, that people saw themselves in George Floyd. They said that happened to me,

or that happened to someone that I know, or someone that I know is in prison who shouldn't be. And this is causing actual harm to us, right? And the entire country sort of snapped to attention and saw that for maybe about six months. Everyone was talking about, hold on a second. We have a system in place that is killing and hurting our fellow citizens and people who are not citizens and haven't just lived here. And that is something that we want to stop. Oh no. Right. I knew these things, but I had extra attention to them myself. You know, I like, oh my God, this is one of the worst things that we do as a country. We are hurting and killing our fellow citizens. And then it seemed that culturally all that just ebbed away and we forgot to have that awareness, you know. And now when you turn on the news, it's no longer that kind of story. It's, you know, the kind of salacious, you know, nice white lady

attacked by horrible criminal story that we used to get back in the 80s. And that has been such a stunning reversal to me. And it has really seemed to interfere with our ability to address these problems, right? It's still the case that people are being hurt and killed by policing and by criminal, the criminal legal system around the country. So how do we bring more attention to that reality? I mean, maybe I'm the guy in the media, so maybe you should be asking me, but this to me is the issue. Well, listen, I think that we need to continue to be out there. I think that we need to engage. I think that we need to talk about these issues, right, in multiple mediums and approach it from

different ways. I think that we have to have different messengers. The effect of a messenger in one community may be different than another. But you're absolutely right. There was a simplicity, although it's obviously a horrendous act, but it was simplicity to what occurred to George Floyd. The whole concept of I can't breathe, which you start seeing in t-shirts, and that happened obviously. There were other similar killings, right? It embodied a whole world of messaging, right? Everybody could sort of visualize what this meant, right?

And we need to continue to look for these things to engage and have these conversations. We need to continue to look for these things to engage and have these conversations. I think that what occurs, we've gone through two years of, well, more than two years now, unprecedented pandemic. There was isolation for almost two years. That pandemic exacerbated almost every social problem in the country, homelessness. I think it did all of that. I think it created a huge gap. Well, I should say it created a gap. I think it showed the gap of our mental health system and how problematic it is.

And I think that we're paying the consequence of that. And all certain, you know, we have some, you know, some increases in crime and violence. And we immediately had the fear mongers come in and they grab on the same old message. By the way, some of the stuff, you look at the 1980s, 1970s, you know, where there was a war on drugs, you know, all this stuff, right? So it's the same recycled message, but when people are fearful, right, and they're being bombarded with information over and over again, right?

You know, I had a lady from Beverly Hills that, you know, reached to me, reached out about a year and a half ago, and she was very upset because crime was just completely out of control in Beverly Hills. And she was talking about a particular crime, and I wanted to get to the bottom of this. And we're going back and forth in emails because she's using all caps in her emails initially. You know what that means, right? And so I'm trying to get to the case so I can go back and try to figure out the status of the case. And then she gets offended and she says, well, you got to look at Instagram and what's up. And you can see the crime problems in my city. And I said, OK.

So then actually it was Tiffany Blacknell who became the person that went to talk to this lady. And after she spent a lot of time, first of all, you know, clearly crime is not out of control in Beverly Hills. It hasn't been. You know, it's one of the most safe communities. It has some, you know, some things that happen that are really bad. Is that some bad individual incidents? Absolutely. Overall.

And by the end of the conversation, this lady basically tells Tiffany that I probably need better PR. Right. That you need better PR. I do, yeah. Because, you know, and I think she was being earnest and I understand that. But the bottom line to this is, you know, this lady was being bombarded with images through Instagram and other things that are, you know, their ring cameras and all that stuff that are being played over and over again. You know, the ring cameras and all that stuff that are being played over and over again.

And we start developing a sort of a warp sense of reality, right? A reality becomes, you know, sort of engulfed in that information overload of a very negative stuff. And we're not getting the side anymore of the harms that are prevented, right? Like, why can't you go out there and say, hey, because of these reforms, this is how many years people did not spend in prison. This is how many lives were not wasted in prison. This is how many other victims you prevented from recidivism. And this is how many dollars you... And by the way...

How many millions and millions of dollars, billions are spent on criminal justice. Yeah, that can go into other places. And, you know, because, again, I got to go back to recidivism. You know, those people that we over-criminalize, they go back and they harm other people. They harm themselves, but they keep harming others, right? If you take that out of the equation, you're actually creating more safety.

And, you know, the real interesting thing is that when you sort of extract that sort of the pandemic period, you start looking at crime over like the last 10 years or so. You know, our crime rates have been very stable overall. There have been some, you know, it's been a hike in some, you know, homicides in some parts of the country. By the way, not connected to politics, you know, we have seen very conservative jurisdictions actually per capita have higher hikes of homicides. People are not accusing those DAs. I tell people all the time, I haven having heard anyone accuse a Kern County DA of

causing and increasing homicides in Kern County. By the way, homicides in Kern County per capita are much higher than they are in L.A. County. That's the strange thing. Crime has gone up a certain amount nationally. Nowhere near where it was in the 80s. It's gone up some places 5%, 10%. Or even in the early 2000s. Yeah. It's still, if you look at the long-term trend, it's still extremely down. It's also been a national trend up, and it's only

in places where a little bit of reform has happened that people are saying, oh, well, that's because of the reformers. But they don't say that about the places where crime has gone up. They don't say that about Georgia or Miami or places like that. They only say it about places where reformers have been elected. And again, no focus is put on

what has been done and the money that has been saved, the lives that have been saved. But the thing that really concerns me the most is how much over the last few years, the voices of those most impacted by the criminal legal system and by over-policing have been lost in the political conversation. The thing about the post-George Floyd moment was that, you know, here in L.A., you know, the black population is not the majority population in the city or the county. But there was a moment, but those are the folks who are extremely impacted by and large. And you heard those voices elevated during 2020, the year that you came to power. In the years since, the voices that we've been hearing the most are the lady from Beverly Hills,

who has seen too much, you know, horrible stuff on the news or on Instagram. And, you know, you literally heard one of our candidates for mayor saying, crime's out of control. People are leaving their pearls at home when they go out to dinner. That's how bad things have gotten it. I'm like, is that really, is that really bad? That to me doesn't sound that bad, first of all. But second of all, that's whose voice is being prioritized in the election. No one is talking anymore about the George Floyds of Los Angeles or the George Floyds of anyone else in the country who are being injured or killed every day because they are still the minority voices and the people who don't have control over the media ecosystem, even though those are the people who we need to be concerned about when we're talking about reform. So how do we elevate those voices politically and remind everybody that that's who we're fucking talking about here, you know?

Yeah, well, and, you know, I mean, as you well know, right, Don, you're talking about race, you're talking about economics, right? You know, you're talking about communities that are extremely vulnerable and they're generally voiceless. Yeah. And they don't have always the best representation. I'd like to kind of talk about the glass being half full, though. Yeah, please. I'd like to kind of talk about the glass being half full though because the elections in LA County And actually nationally, but especially in LA County this elections were

completely Contrary to what the narrative was and there this year 2020 this year, you know I mean the media was playing this up, you know that this is oh my oh, my God, you know, it's going to be a huge backlash. Yeah. You know, we got the first African-American woman elected mayor of L.A. and a progressive. Someone who worked in those communities on that kind of reform. We've had we have multiple young progressives being elected to city councils against incumbents. We had a very, you know, nightmare of a sheriff that got voted out of office

by a large margin. Yep. So I see... And reformist DAs are being elected nationally in other cities and counties around the... I don't want to make this all about LA, but literally other places it's happening tonight. I can tell you this, okay? When I first became elected in 2011 in San Francisco, I remember having a meeting with some friends.

I would say, where are the progressive district attorneys around the country? We couldn't find one in the big city. I mean, there were some people that were doing some interesting stuff in some places. But there was not like a, you know, I belong to an organization now that we have about 60 people there. Mostly are women of color, by the way. And it's growing every year. Every time that we get together for a meeting. Of progressive DAs? Progressive DA, by the way, and it's growing every year. Every time that we get together for a meeting. Progressive DAs? Progressive DAs around the country, right? So, and if you look

at most of your large counties, okay, so, you know, New York, you have your barrels, right? You have out of the barrels there, you have, you know, the Brooklyn, you have Manhattan, you have, I forget. Staten Island, Queens. Yeah, right. But you have Manhattan and Brooklyn, you know, with very progressive DAs. Yeah. You have Cook County, which is all the Chicago area. You have Philadelphia. You have L.A. You have just recently Alameda County, which is one of the largest counties here in California.

You have Contra Costa County. So we're seeing this in Texas. We've seen it in Dallas. We see it in Austin. So even in those places, right, because to the point that you made earlier that actually I wanted to grab on for a second, there is a segment within the Republican Party to the more libertarian, the more true to the Republican values. Yeah. That recognizes that, you know, over incarceration is wasteful, right? It's economically wasteful. It's socially wasteful. You know, years ago, I went to Austin.

I was invited to go speak to a group by a group called Right on Crime. And, you know, it was all very, very conservative Republicans. And I was blown away by their approach to crime. And actually, people often don't realize, you know, like Prop 47 here, for instance, was supported by very conservative, you know, libertarian Republicans. You know, we got funding for Prop 47 by Republicans as well as we did by Democrats. The Prop 47? Prop 47 was a reform of drug policy in the state that basically said if you're in possession

of drugs for personal use, it's a misdemeanor no matter what the drugs are. And if you commit a low-level theft and we define low-level theft as anything under $950, theft by the way, not robbery, not burglaries, that would be considered a misdemeanor. And some of the biggest donors to this were very you know, very conservative, kind of the right-on-crime folks. So, you know, sometimes it doesn't really matter what on-ramp you get onto the freeway, right? If we're all marching in the same way, whether you're doing it for economic reasons, you're doing it for social or for both, I think that when we get to the editorial pages thinking, whether you're on the right or the left, we come up to the same conclusion, that we have to reduce incarceration and that safety needs to be achieved in different ways. Well, I'd love to end this by just talking about what are you proudest of that you have accomplished?

How have your reforms been improving things in your view and what are you most excited about for the future? Look, I'm very proud of the fact that it, you know, while it's been really bumpy, you know, we just had a press conference a few days ago and we had LA County chiefs of police. We had the head of the public health department. We had school district superintendents We had community groups including dark policy alliance and we had the prosecutor and we're all Standing together to talk about how we're gonna deal with fentanyl that would never have happened before To me is is the glass is more than half full. We're seeing you know, progressive chiefs of police

We're seeing people coming around to understanding, yes, some people will be incarcerated. Yes, some people need to be, you know, need to be prosecuted. But guess what? That cannot be the only solution. And that press conference to me was the most inspiring moment that I've had in the last two years. I'm so glad to hear that. And it's been a real pleasure having you. And thank you so much for sharing your thoughts so candidly. I really do appreciate it, George. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Well, thank you once again to George Gascon for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed and got as much out of that interview as I did. And I want to thank you for listening. I

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Mastodon people will get it. You can also find me at adamconover.net. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next week on Factually. much for listening and we'll see you next week on factually a podcast network that was a hate gun