Pod Save America - “Protest works.”

Episode Date: June 8, 2020

The mass demonstrations against police violence and racism have ignited a debate about transformational change, Republican and military leaders start to abandon Trump, and the President celebrates double-digit unemployment. Then Los Angeles District Attorney candidate George Gascón talks to Tommy about progressive criminal justice reform.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's pod, Tommy talks with LA District Attorney candidate George Gascon about what progressive criminal justice reform looks like. Before that, we'll talk about what kind of progress on police reform might come from these protests, the establishment Republicans and military leaders who are abandoning Donald Trump, and how Friday's surprising jobs report might affect the 2020 campaign.

But first, Lovett, how was the show this weekend? We had a very good Lovett or Leave It. I talked to Osita Wanevu from the New Republic, talked to DeRay. We talked about everything from defunding the police and the goals of defunding the police all the way to what police reforms can help right now. We listened to some protesters, made fun of Lea Michele one time. That's it. That's the show. Okay, we That's it. That's the show. Okay.

We'll take it. Also, if you haven't yet adopted a swing state through votesaveamerica.com, it's not too late. We are still in awe that more than 16,000 of you joined us live for the first training session last week. Tommy, you were one of the special guests. You want to

say a word about that? I was. I have to say, you guys know me quite well. I'm not a person who tends to emote. It was like one of the most overwhelming things to see 16,000 people spend an hour on a Thursday night to get trained to be a digital organizer because they care this much about the country in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of the protests, with all that's going on. It was incredible. Please come be a part of it. You will feel good if you are involved in this election and you will feel good if you're trained and participating. And there is a community of people who will be there with you in a time when we're also isolated. So check it out. It was incredible. I can't wait

to do it again. I'll be the special guest at the training that we're having this Thursday, I'll be the special guest at the training that we're having this Thursday, which is all about storytelling for organizers. So check it out. Hope to see you there. All right, let's get to the news. For the second weekend in a row, protesters took to the streets of big cities and small towns across America and around the world in a massive demonstration against police brutality and systemic racism. There are over 10,000 people in cities like Washington and Los Angeles. This weekend's protests were met with a much smaller and less militarized law enforcement presence. Curfews were lifted and wouldn't you know, there was less violence and chaos.

Trump spent the weekend angrily tweeting from inside the giant wall he had built around the White House, downplaying the size of the protests and lobbying insults at Joe Biden, Barack Obama, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Bob Mueller, Colin Powell and George Floyd. Sharing a tweet which said the fact that he's been held up as a martyr is, quote, sickening. The next day, the White House said that the president may soon deliver a speech on race and unity. So tune in for that. So let's put Trump aside for a second, because I do want to start by focusing on the protesters and activists who've led this movement. In what ways do you guys think they've already succeeded? Tommy, why don't we start with you? Okay. So I think these protests have been overwhelmingly successful. And there's a bunch of different parts of that.

So, I mean, a lot of people have woken up to the fact that police violence and brutality is rampant. It's not just a few bad cops. It's not just a few bad police forces. I mean, you're seeing these videos of abuse from L.A. to New York to Buffalo, and it shocks the conscience. And I think that's woken a lot of folks up. You're also seeing protests everywhere. I mean, in 2014, it was focused on Ferguson. You're not just seeing protests in majority African-American cities. You're seeing people protesting in tiny towns all across the country. They are literally ubiquitous.

And public sentiment is on the right side. The Wall Street Journal found that by two to one margin, voters are more troubled by police actions and killing George Floyd than they are about protest violence. And I think that's good because it's helping people dismiss bad faith arguments that pop up at these times, right? Like Colin Kaepernick's protest was pretty lonely. It was from him and made about the anthem and disrespecting the flag or the U.S. military, despite the fact that the guy who told Kaepernick to kneel and not sit on the bench was a former Green Beret. It was like guidance from a service member. So this time it feels more focused. And then, you know, lastly, it's like I think the movement is broadening. It is a multiracial, multigenerational protest movement. We're seeing Republicans like Mitt Romney was out there this weekend. The Republican district attorney in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, put out a statement saying Black Lives Matter. And he also said that he was specifically wrong to once reject that term and say all lives matter. So lawmakers moving. Mayor Garcetti here in L.A. announced a bunch of reforms. So it's been a it's been a dramatic shift in a short period of time. Love it. I don't think I've seen a shift this dramatic and quick in public opinion and public sentiment on any issue, maybe since sort of the gay marriage debate. I mean, just in the span of a couple of weeks, seeing vast majority of Americans siding with protesters supporting of supporting Black Lives Matter, the Black Lives Matter movement,

believing systemic racism and police brutality are serious major problems, supporting major reforms to police departments. What other successes have you seen? What are your thoughts been watching this over the weekend? Yeah, it is remarkable how quickly I think this is clarified. The debate around police brutality, police accountability and larger questions about systemic racism. It is true that there's been this sea change over the course of two weeks. But I do think it's worth saying that like this is a culmination of a movement that was slowly gaining attention of Americans after each of these police killings that that sort of slowly over time began first with Black Lives Matter and now with this incredible outpouring grow in part because at each step we've realized, you know, something that, you know, we've talked about on the show that killings haven't decreased, that even some of these reforms haven't had the effect that they wanted them to, that sort of bigger systemic changes were needed. And I'll just say for me, like just watching it unfold, I think that there are things that you know, but in a lot of ways,

you don't internalize or they don't become central to how you think about politics. And what I found striking in just the past two weeks is how central the police are to conversations about a host of other issues, whether the police are the cause of or a symptom of these deeper problems, systemic racism, also our failure to take care of people with mental health and addiction issues, our failure to invest in schools and public parks and social welfare and social workers. And that what really is to me happening is we're having a very overdue conversation led by protesters who are sort of fed up because police violence and police brutality are the tip of the spear. Yeah, it's interesting. Listening to Pazay the People last week, DeRay was saying that, you know, when he first started caring about this issue and working on this issue, a lot of people said to him, why are you picking sort of police brutality? Isn't that sort of a niche issue in the stuck in the criminal justice system, how do you think they get there? Encounter with the police is almost always how someone enters the criminal justice system. And

like so many movements, as you point out, Lovett, this was one that was started by a lot of activists and organizers who felt very lonely for a long time. And then there is a spark that makes it grow almost exponentially overnight. And now you see, you know, some of the big protests on Friday were about this, it would have been Breonna Taylor's 27th birthday. And that was a case that when it happened, there were activists and organizers protesting, but it didn't sort of spark what we saw over the last couple of weeks. So these things build and build and build, and then suddenly something changes. There was also a lot of, I think, progress on the ground, tangible progress that we've seen over the last couple of weeks, you know, from I'll go from sort of small to bigger. You know,

there's officers who've been caught using excessive force are getting suspended, fired, investigated and charged faster than they've been in the past. Cities have banned police from using chokeholds, tear gas and other types of excessive force. L.A. and New York have announced they'll be redirecting some funding from police departments to job programs, health care and other social services. Long running movements to remove Confederate statues have finally forced action in places like Richmond, Virginia. And then on Sunday, and we'll talk about this in a second, the Minneapolis City Council announced that they'll be disbanding their current police force and basically rebuilding it from scratch over the next year. We should also add, too, that I do think it's worth pointing out that it's because of protests that charges were filed in the George Floyd case, that the Breonna Taylor case has been reopened. So there are clear signs that in really acute, directed ways,

the protests are working while also starting this larger conversation around policy. So let's talk about what comes next. In Congress, Democrats today introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which would require law enforcement agencies to report data on the use of force, create a national registry to track police misconduct, ban chokeholds and mandate bias training. These reforms mirror much of what Joe Biden laid out over the weekend in an LA Times op-ed. He also called for a police oversight commission in his first 100 days, ending the transfer of weapons of war to local police and a national use of force standard. Many activists have long believed that to truly end police violence, cities should consider defunding or disbanding their police forces altogether and replacing them with a new system of public safety, which, as we just

mentioned, is exactly what a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to do on Sunday. Trump has already tweeted several times about how Joe Biden and the radical left Democrats want to defund the police. And even though that Biden hasn't proposed defunding, and in fact, he came out against defunding the police in a statement through his spokesman today, the Trump campaign and Republicans now want to use this as a wedge issue in the election. I kind of want to take this in two different parts. Let's get to the politics in a second. Let's just talk about sort of the substance of the argument around defunding or disbanding police forces.

Tommy, you want to talk about that argument a little bit? Yeah, I mean, look, I think the conversation about defunding the police exists on a continuum and there's different versions from different folks. But like at its essence, I think we are talking about dramatically rethinking how we approach public safety and emergency response. So that means evaluating the jobs you ask police to do, whether that work is effective, whether it's not, and then reallocating funds accordingly. So some data points that are relevant, like the Washington Post over the weekend reported

a study that shows that there's no significant correlation between changes in state and local police spending and overall or violent crime rates. So given that, it does seem to make a lot of sense to rethink spending. And then part of this conversation is that departments have proven to just be ineffective, right? I mean, you just mentioned Minneapolis. In 2019, Minneapolis police only cleared 56% of cases where a person was killed. In 2018, their clearance rate for rape was just 22%. So this is a taxpayer funded department that is not serving the community in any way. So should we talk about dramatically changing it? The other thing I think people are talking a lot about is the role of mental illness or disability and how those cases are responded to. Half of people killed by police have a disability or a mental health issue. Those calls should be answered by highly trained mental health professionals and not armed police. And then sort of more broadly, like if 5% of arrests in America are for violent crime,

does it make sense for basically 100% of responders who are police officers to be heavily armed? Probably not. And so that's a piece of it. Part of it is that I think for a lot of communities in this country, they just believe that the institution of these police departments, they're just fundamentally broken. Like there's historians who compellingly argue that police forces were founded primarily to enforce racial segregation and not enforce laws. It was not about justice. And it is certainly true that for

centuries in this country, African-Americans could not turn to the police for justice in matter in matters involving crimes committed by white people. In fact, they were often complicit in those crimes. The police were. And today, like the African-American community has a fundamentally different relationship with the police than most white Americans do. Right. I mean, I don't think any of the three of us were sat down by our parents to have a talk about how to interact with police if we're pulled over, because it's not a thing that is really discussed in white communities. So I think there are activists who are thinking like, this is a fundamentally broken, flawed institution at its core. We should think about how we reconstitute

it to deal with the problems that police are supposed to respond to, but in a way that's more effective. Love it. You guys talked about this on your show. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that I think what Tommy said is right. You know, you step back and you say, all right, we closed asylums and mental hospitals because they were hellholes and mistreating people and abusive. And we replaced it with basically nothing. We didn't do anything to help people in the long run with mental illness. We didn't put the resources in it that were necessary.

So it became a police problem. We have a rising homeless problem across the country. We don't put the resources in it that are necessary. We respond with police. The same about addiction and drug abuse. All the evidence is clear, right, that if someone has an addiction, if someone is struggling with drugs, that treatment and not punishment is the answer for them. Not only is it more effective, it's less expensive, it's more humane, and we don't do that. We respond with police. Why? Because over the course of 30 years, in part because of rising crime from the 60s into the 90s, in part because it was embraced not just by Republicans, but by Democrats, we shifted our resources towards police and we sort of sucked the resources away from social services and all the rest. And so we're in this situation where saying something

that's obvious and true is seen as radical, right? Saying that we should reimagine what the police do, saying defund the police is radical when actually when you dig into it, it's saying, here's what, here are the problems that police aren't solving. Here's what all the experts say we should do. Here's what our budgets actually look like. Can't we actually have an honest conversation about it? And it is seen as radical because these structures have been in place for so long because the hierarchies are so entrenched, whether it's political, whether it's, you know, in terms of our government and the role police play in budgets and in local politics. And also in our culture, there is no law and order special housing unit, right? Our shows are about how tough and good cops are. Our shows are about

how the police come in to solve all of our problems. And so I think what's interesting is you have the conversation being set by these protest movements calling for something that sounds radical. When you dig into the actual questions that they're raising, the answers are actually not radical. They're honest and reflect the evidence. And what you will see over time, I think, is that these radical sounding solutions become more and more mainstream as Democratic politicians don't necessarily embrace the phrase defund the police, but embrace the larger vision of reimagining the role of police and reimagining the relationship between people and their government. Yeah, I think before you get into slogans, you have to step back and ask a couple larger questions, which is what is the purpose of law enforcement?

What do we want from law enforcement? Right. We want a police force that doesn't commit violence, but stops violence. You want a police force that gives every citizen in the community equal protection under the law. We do not have that right now. We have not had that for a long time. So you look at the story of the Minneapolis Police Department. They have tried a number of reforms with this city council, with this mayor. They have tried trainings for bias and de-escalation. They have a diverse police department. They have body cameras. They have community policing. Every time they have tried further reforms,

tried to redirect some proposed budget increases to fund a new office of violence prevention, every time they've tried to do that, a lot of reforms have been blocked by the police department and their union. Steve Fletcher was one of the Minneapolis city council members. He was writing this in Time Magazine this week. Police chief, who they think is a good reformer, has fired officers

only to have his decisions overturned, and those officers reinstated by arbitration. After they cut money from the police budget in Minneapolis, officers retaliated by not responding to 911 calls in certain wards of the Minneapolis City Council people who decided to vote to cut their budget. And so from the perspective of the Minneapolis City Council, you think we've tried everything else. And they feel the police department feels like they are unaccountable to the people they're supposed to serve. What else are we to do but at least try to stop the power of the police union from blocking these reforms? And there is a model for this, right? In Camden, New Jersey, which had the fifth highest murder rate in the nation, in 2013, the police department was disbanded by the city.

It was restructured as a county police department. They actually had more officers at first throughout the county, but they had lower pay and benefits. They were trained to use handcuffs and handguns as a last resort. Not only body cameras, but they had GPS tracking devices on them. There was community policing, stricter use of force rules. And since then, reports of excessive force have dropped 95 percent and violent crime is also way down in camden so they got both they had less excessive force and less crime they showed it's possible now i think that the the tough part here is it is it is a very local issue because different cities and different police departments will need

different reforms so it's not like a one-size-fits-all thing and you hear the minneapolis city council saying this too they're like we don't know what replaces it yet. We have to have these conversations with the community. Right. But at the very least, they're down that path. But I do think it's the impunity that you described that has, I think, led this country to erupt at several times. Right. Like now it's it's watching George Floyd be murdered. And in 92, it was the cops who beat up Rodney King getting away with it. And when you step back and think about it, right, like Richard Nixon very famously said, well, when the president does it, that means it's not illegal. Trump has expressed similar sentiments. We all flip out

about it. But that kind of impunity happens every day with police officers in a lot of communities. And like beyond, you know, the brutality we've seen in videos, like nothing about arresting someone requires you to beat the shit out of them and grind their face into the concrete and smash their limbs with a baton. But yet we're watching police in Buffalo

shove a 75-year-old man to the ground and do nothing as he starts to bleed out and then lie about what happened. If I can be charged with filing a false police report, where is the accountability when the park police brazenly lie to journalists about using tear gas on protesters? So I think part of this is like we give police so much leeway when it comes to using force and lethal force because it's a dangerous job. force and lethal force because it's a dangerous job. But we need to fix that. We need to right size that because what we're seeing is dramatic abuses of that power and people stepping up and saying, this doesn't make sense. We should not tear gas citizens. We shouldn't shoot people

with rubber bullets. We don't have to do that. It's making it worse. Yeah. I mean, I do think to a lot of what we're seeing is this is the unaccountability. This is the aggressiveness that wasn't a bug, but a feature when this was put in place, in many cases by a white majority that didn't ever have to fear that this would come for them. What we are seeing is that aggressiveness, that brutality taken as a part of the job, that that is what it means for police to do their job, in part because of so long a culture, a culture that basically rewarded politicians, rewarded police chiefs, rewarded cities that invested in police and largely look the other way. You know, Keith Ellison talked about this this morning on What A Day. He talked about the fact that it's not just that the rules meant that police weren't accountable. It meant there are also juries, grand juries,

ordinary citizens who have been trained to just defer to the police, assume the police are telling the truth. But what we have seen, as Tommy pointed out over the past two weeks, is just how often that is irresponsible, just how often police are lying, even when caught on camera. And I think that that is shocking to a lot of people, myself included, who haven't always been paying attention. All right, so let's talk about the politics of this. We just spoke about sort of the rapid shift in public opinion in favor of protesters, in favor of Black Lives Matter, in favor of systemic police reforms. No one so far has polled defund the police or polled abolish the police. But YouGov from last weekend decided to poll, do you favor various police reforms? And, you know, banning chokeholds, body cameras, training to deescalate conflicts all got like 70, 80,

90 percent, hugely popular. Then they said, do you support cutting funding to police departments? So just cutting funding. Only 16 percent of all voters said they support any cuts in funding for police departments. That includes 16 percent of Democrats, 21% of 18 to 29 year olds, and 33% of black Americans. So, you know, I think for those of us who have been paying close attention to the protests, who've been reading a lot of these very thoughtful pieces about police reform over the last weeks, I think what we're saying, you know, it makes sense. You can see why police need such sweeping reform, of course, for a lot of Americans. And of course, these numbers may change and probably will change, I imagine, over the coming weeks.

But they're still pretty low. And you saw Biden come out today and say, you know, he's not for defunding the police. And so far, no. A lot of elected Democrats, I saw Cory Booker, Karen Bass, a lot of the people who worked on this, Hakeem Jeffries, a lot of people who worked on the bill that they co-sponsored, the bill that they introduced today also said that they don't support defunding the police. And, you know, Republicans are out there saying they're Trump and the Republicans are salivating about using this as a wedge issue against Democrats. What do you think about the politics of this issue, Tommy? Well, I mean, look, I don't know yet. I mean, so look, there's sort of like a near term. Let's talk about the politics of success or failure. So in the near term,

like there's a big piece of this that's about the budget, because all these cities are going to deal with huge shortfalls thanks to the coronavirus. And you're seeing everywhere that every component, like agencies are getting gutted except for the police. And people are asking why, like, why are we gutting school budgets and not police funding? So in LA, in April, Mayor Garcetti had proposed furloughs for 15,000 city employees, but not for the police. In fact, he offered to give them a 7% increase in spending for the LAPD. Since the protests have started, Garcetti has reversed course and said he will now direct $250 million to youth jobs, health initiatives, peace centers to heal trauma,

and help those who are dealing with discrimination. That will be partly funded by $150 million that was previously allocated to the LAPD. That is like head snapping political change for Los Angeles. Because in 1993, after the Rodney King riots, LA elected a Republican mayor who promised to hire 3000 more cops to bring the force up to 10,000 officers, which is about where it is now. And so that's remarkable progress. Like that's political success, no matter how you measure it. I do think that like, broadly, there's going to be an inside game and an outside game where activists who are marching and protesting are going to have to keep pushing people like Joe Biden to do more if they believe that's what's necessary. I also think there's a political imperative to more clearly define the policy and then tell a story about how that will make America a better, safer world. And so, you know, I don't think that we are immediately going to see Joe Biden say we should

defund the police. But I do think like the amount of progress that's been made in even just the small amount of time since Ferguson in 2014 is incredible. And so three years from now, we might be having an entirely different conversation. Love it. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, police budgets were sacrosanct. They're not going to be sacrosanct anymore. This is going to be a big part of the political fight. And I think that that's a victory. You know, it does remind me a bit of the debate around Abolish ICE in that activists and some candidates, but mostly activists, embrace this term abolish ICE. Democrats don't embrace the term. Republicans

try to tar Democrats with the term anyway. And all the while, the conversation led because of this provocative and, you know, maximalist phrase leads to a debate about, well, what should these reforms look like? Well, it turns out, you know what, there are huge problems in ICE and huge reforms are needed. And maybe this department should be broken up in certain way and its functions devolve to other agencies so it doesn't have this noxious, toxic culture. So I see the same thing playing out with defund the police in that, you know, Kamala Harris writes she's she and Cory Booker on the Senate side introduced this bill. She was asked by Meghan McCain this morning. The mayor of Minneapolis refused to say defund the police. I'm going to ask you the same question as protesters did. Do you support defunding police? And she didn't answer it. Yes or no. She explained why we need to reimagine the role of police in our lives. You gave a pretty cogent answer. I don't know if it will satisfy activists ultimately, but it is so clear how much the conversation from the streets has trickled down into a much more progressive vision for what is possible in governing.

Yeah, two points for me on this. One, very much agreeing with what Tommy said is I think sometimes we forget to separate the role of activists and politicians. You know, politicians will do what is broadly popular, or at least if it's not broadly popular, it's in the 40s, in the high 40s. Right. So like you would not expect Joe Biden to come out for defunding the police or a lot of people who have to run in a purple state, a red state in competitive districts. I listened to Ezra Klein interview Ta-Nehisi Coates on his podcast this week, and everyone should go listen. It's a fascinating and fantastic conversation. And he said, like, yeah, I don't expect Joe Biden to say defund the police, but I really hope that the people around Joe Biden are

reading all the thoughtful takes about defunding police so So that energy and those ideas bleed into his policymaking in some way. That's what you can hope. So then the question is, how do the activists tell a story about defunding the police that becomes broadly popular? Anat Shankar Osorio, who I had on The Wilderness, who's just an expert on messaging, you know, she was tweeting about this weekend and she said, sometimes we fall back on negative framing what we don't want and we forget to tell sort of the positive side of the story. And it's not just if we just talk about defunding the police and we don't talk about what we want to replace that with sort of the positive things we're looking for, we kind of fall short. Data for Progress,

our friends at Data for Progress did a poll over the weekend and they tested, do you support or oppose a new agency of first responders like emergency medical services of firefighters to deal with issues related to addiction or mental illness that need to be remedied but do not need police? 68% of the people they asked support that kind of agency, which is the exact kind of agency that some of these cities like Camden and possibly Minneapolis might create to sort of supplement or to sort of shrink the role of traditional policing. So I do think it's incumbent on activists and all of us who want to see major structural

police reforms to tell a story and paint a very clear vision of a world where our tax dollars are not funding police violence, but funding public safety that is equitably distributed to everyone in the community. That's what I would suggest. So let's talk about how Trump's response to the last few weeks is affecting his bid for reelection. New CNN poll out today finds Trump losing to Biden 55-41, the biggest margin yet in Trump's lowest approval since the beginning of last year. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that even some Republican Party leaders won't be voting for Trump in 2020, including their last two presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. Times also reported that former Republican leaders like the former speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner won't say how they'll vote.

And some Republicans who I know I'm sorry, Dan, Dan is an episode because I know he's going to have something to say. And some Republicans who are already disinclined to support Mr. Trump are weighing whether to go beyond backing a third party contender to openly endorse Mr. Biden. A number of military leaders who served in Republican administrations, including Trump's former defense secretary and chief of staff, have broken with the president in the last week. And over the weekend, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told Jake Tapper he'll be voting for Biden, saying this about Donald Trump. And so we're not a country of just a president. We have a Congress, we have a Supreme Court. But most of all, we have the people of the United States, the ones who vote, the ones who vote him in and the ones who vote him out. I couldn't vote for him in 96. And I certainly cannot in any way support President Trump this

year. So yeah, I know you didn't vote for him in 2016. I assume, based on the fact that you approved Joe Biden when then-Senator Obama picked him to be his running mate in 2008, I assume you're going to be voting for Joe Biden? I'm very close to Joe Biden on a social matter and on a political matter. I worked with him for 35, 40 years, and he is now the candidate and I will be voting for him. Tommy, Colin Powell is riding with Biden. How much does any of this matter? And do you think some of these endorsements or anti-endorsements carry more weight than others? I mean, I think Paul Ryan refusing to say who he'll vote for is just, it's worthless. It's pathetic. It's just it's it's worthless. It's pathetic. It's chef's kiss, Paul Ryan. You know, I do think like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, that's significant.

I think General Mattis's broadside against Trump actually was pretty significant for a few reasons. I mean, first of all, like the D.C. pundit class reveres him like no other. So it got a ton of attention. It will continue to. reveres him like no other. So it got a ton of attention. It will continue to. Second, I think it will move opinions within the military itself and give others the courage to speak out. And that to me is what matters. Like people in politics talk a lot about permission structures. If you see people who are in your party, who you respect, who you may have voted for previously saying they can't go with Trump this time, they're going to go for Biden. I do think that helps you get permission internally to switch parties as well for a vote. I do find myself quite frustrated in some cases that it took this long. I think Trump's response to Charlottesville told you everything you needed to know about how racist and divisive

he is. And so reading Mattis's comments about Trump recently, I felt like they could have been written the day after Charlottesville. But we're about building coalitions. We're about peeling off soft Trump voters. So this stuff could be incredibly meaningful on the margins. And I think you're seeing it in these polls like everyone listening should know as much as you hate Donald Trump, 55 percent of the country voting for any one human being is unheard of. Jesus Christ himself probably couldn't crack 54. So like we're in a weird reality right now. It's going to shrink.

But it's a big deal. Love it. What do you think? I wish Mattis would do it on television and stop doing it in the Atlantic. Like this is a culture that doesn't read. So that doesn't do as much for me. That's what we were saying last week. Although, the Lincoln Project this morning

finally did a VO of his Atlantic piece. I was like, we need a good voiceover here. And you know what? I'm glad Mitt Romney is out there saying Black Lives Matter. It's worth remembering that we have one Republican saying Black Lives Matter we have many more

saying how much Trump worries them in private and then we have the vast majority standing behind him I would like to see Mitt Romney not be so cute and write in Ann's name you know this is a choice we have a choice do you want to be part of do you want to help us make

this choice or not I'm not interested in Republicans who write in other people's name. You know, this is a choice. We have a choice. Do you want to be part of, do you want to help us make this choice or not? I'm not interested in Republicans who write in other people's name. It's a, it's evading responsibility, not taking responsibility. And so like, I'm not going to give people points for doing less than the bare minimum of helping to remove Donald Trump, because there's only one person that you can vote for to help remove Donald Trump. That said, I think it's a good thing. I am very reluctant to start saying something feels different. Something feels different. Is this the end? Is this the end? A, it's prognostication. It doesn't matter. We still have to all do our job. And B, we've seen versions of this in the past. And, you know, it's never it hasn't been the end for Trump yet. He's not ended. And there have been many times where it seemed like the end was

around the corner. We can remove him in November. These are, I think, are good and hopeful signs. And I just want to know that this wasn't a nadir and a low point from which Trump slowly crawled back and actually the beginning of the actual end. Mitt Romney, you know, and it doesn't we were talking about this earlier. It doesn't like negate all the bad positions Romney has taken throughout the course of his life or all the things he said that we've disagreed with over the course of his life. Like people can change, they can grow, and then sometimes they can do things that are bad and sometimes they can do things that are good. Like, you know, there's like a raging debate about this. I don't think it's that complicated to me. a raging debate about this. I don't think it's that complicated to me. I give Mitt Romney a little extra credit because he is the one Republican who voted to impeach the president when he had a chance. So he actually took an action that meant something as well. I do agree, Lovett, that the writing in the third party or writing in the name thing, you know, it I get why they're doing it. But like what we're trying, we're trying to send

a signal to voters, many of whom in 2016 may have helped cost Hillary the election by either leaving the presidential thing blank on their ballot, voting for a third party, whether it was, you know, the Greens or whether it was the Libertarians or whatever. And we want to we want to send the message to everyone that if you want Donald Trump out of office, it is a choice between two people. And so to the extent that leaders let everyone know that it's a choice between two people, I think that's important. You know, I'm with Tommy that it's all about a permission structure. I think there's two kinds of swing voters in this election.

There's there's people who are like you get a lot of college educated white males who, you know, they voted for Trump in 16. A lot of them voted for Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan in 18 or Tony Evers in Wisconsin in 18. And they're still not sure if they're going to do it. Vote for Joe Biden. Evers in Wisconsin in 18, and they're still not sure if they're going to do it, vote for Joe Biden. And I think for those voters, seeing military leaders, seeing Republicans say it's okay to vote for Joe Biden could actually have an influence. There's a whole bunch of other voters who don't know if they're going to participate in the political process at all, because they think institutions have fucked them over for their whole lives, and they don't trust them. I don't think George W. Bush or Mitt Romney is going to mean much to them.

This is not for them. This is not for them. But not everyone's the same. Not all swing voters have the same beliefs and values. Not all swing voters are going to be motivated by the same thing. I think Mitt Romney deserves credit for marching. I think he deserves credit for voting for impeachment. It's also just worth remembering that Mitt Romney's dad, George Romney, marched in favor of civil rights in the late 60s. Romney's dad, George Romney, marched in favor of civil rights in the late 60s. Nixon tapped George Romney to run HUD and basically drove him out of the administration because George Romney refused to stop enforcing fair housing laws. So, you know, I think he has a history of this kind of activism in his family. It doesn't mean I regret kicking his ass in the 2012 election.

doesn't mean I regret kicking his ass in the 2012 election. I find all this chatter on Twitter that he was horribly mistreated to be a touch overstated. It was a presidential campaign. But I don't remember. I remember the Romney campaign. I remember the Romney campaign putting on a pair of white gloves and showing up at the boxing match. You know, it was a it was a fight. There was a political fight.

Yeah, I remember sitting in my office in the NSC and reading a blistering press release from the Romney campaign on the night of the Benghazi attacks, you know, or, you know, as there's still like massive protests outside of embassies

and feeling like that was a touch outrageous. But here we are. I want to focus on the current and good for him for these books. I don't. I'm ready. I want to fight old wounds. That's what i want to focus on the current and good for him for for these books i don't i'm ready i want to fight old wounds that's what i want to do it's just worth noting as one of you just did about like the weird weird times we're in politically that like we may go forward in november with a coalition that includes alexandria ocasio-cortez and Bernie Sanders and George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. Like, what the fuck is happening right now?

That is a big, rowdy, very diverse, crazily weird coalition of people who are going to be voting in the election. I'm just going to say this, too. All right. Right here, right now. All right. George W. Bush, maybe he puts out an ad saying he supports Joe Biden. And we don't say much about it all right the day after that election we're back to saying fuck george w bush but just i'm not doing it now but uh george w bush just

between us i'm saying really quiet really quiet but fuck him i like this is a very weird political moment obviously as you said john my only hope for an admonition for folks is like, let's all just have a little grace for each other in terms of what we choose to believe in and how we all choose to conduct activism. You're allowed to believe what you believe. You're allowed to fight for progress and change how you want to do it. Everyone chill the fuck out with with browbeating people who 99 percent agree with you. Like, I don't know. I think like we could train our energies towards a cause. And even if, even if you don't want to be graceful, like Tommy so nicely suggests, just from a raw political standpoint, you know, movements are built by addition. Just to welcome people in. That's how you fucking win. Can I make one other, one other observation

just about, about Biden, too? Do you remember the episode and how there's now everyone from, you know, as you said, George W. Bush to AOC? Do you remember the Seinfeld where Elaine and Jerry want to get with a couple that just broke up? There's a couple. They're both attracted to the members of the couple. And they're both attracted to the members of the couple.

And they basically are like, here's our plan. First, we're going to be there for you. And then we're just there. I was looking for the connection back to this. Biden's there for us. And then he's just going to be there. That's how you build this giant coalition from basically all ends of the political structure. First, he's just there for us.

And he's there. And that's how you know that that segment is over. All right. So we've talked before about how the one political strength that's keeping Trump in the race is that voters tend to trust him over Biden on managing the economy. President clearly thought he could build on this advantage last Friday when we received a better than expected jobs report. Economists had predicted unemployment rise to 20% in May, but instead it fell to 13.3% and we added 2.5 million jobs. During a speech in the Rose Garden, Trump celebrated this news and said the following.

Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying there's a great thing that's happening for our country. There's a great day for him. It's a great day for everybody. There's a great day for everybody. There's a great, great day in terms of equality. That fucking guy, man. Let's start with the numbers themselves. Tommy, what are economists saying about why they were better than expected?

So, John, I just want our readers to know that we don't have readers, listeners to know that I barely understand this. People are talking about how there was a misclassification error in the BLS data, which means the unemployment rate would have been about 3% higher. So about 16.3%. Some people who are classified as temporarily unemployed were misclassified as absent, like you would be on, say, jury duty. I don't really care about fighting about that. It was a big Twitter dust up on Friday that I did my best to mute. But I do think like big picture, like people are still suffering a lot. I think the Republican Party is going to create massive problems for itself if they use this job report as an excuse for not doing more to help people who are hurting as a result of the

pandemic. So that's kind of like the Democratic eye on the prize here versus, you know, unskew the BLS or whatever the debate was on Friday. Yeah, love it. You know, controversial out there political opinion. You tell me what you think. You shouldn't celebrate. You shouldn't celebrate double digit unemployment. No, I, you know, look, I, I remember, John, you remember years in the White House, years, years, years, any good jobs report, you had to go and get a chain and you had to make sure that you hit yourself back on the back five times, ten times, to make sure you understood inside of the speech that even though you were pointing to progress on the economy,

how hard things were for many people. And I'm being glib about it, but it was taken as an article of faith, backed up by polling, backed up by evidence, polling, backed up by evidence, that Barack Obama, President Barack Obama, did not want to be out there celebrating these numbers, which were far lower and better than the current numbers Trump is celebrating, for fear that he would seem out of touch and unable to relate to the real pain that people are feeling, in part because any time Barack Obama said anything approaching what Donald Trump has been saying, he would have been pilloried. He would have been mocked mercilessly by Republicans claiming he was out of touch. So I am I continue to believe that that is good politics and that, you know, Larry Kudlow in his fucking night. We have a clip. Oh, play the play the clip. This is how Larry Kudlow responded to the news. America is coming back.

Three million new jobs, lower unemployment rate, furloughed temporary layoffs, going back to work, green shoots popping up everywhere, stocks are soaring, POTUS policies are working. Stay with the winners, and pence and me the best is yet to come wow it's just it's um it's hard for you to hear it's hard for you to hear in the audio but the but the pinstripes on his suit are made of cocaine the look the the cudlow a green room creature in his, you know, wide lapelled shirt and jacket out there saying that everything is OK. It's, you know, it's preposterous. And this little debate about whether the unemployment rate is 13 percent or 16 percent. Like these are some of the worst jobs numbers in history in a century. There's no getting around it. There's

no talking their way out of it. They can't get past it. Look, the flip side of your point, the flip side of my original point is that Trump taught me that economic sentiment and how you feel about the economy is totally partisan, right? I mean, like the economy had barely changed. Donald Trump becomes president and suddenly a bunch of Republicans feel great about the economy because Trump is now in charge. So that irrationality behind that voter sentiment was surprising to me. Maybe that was naive. Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe I'm gonna get well-actualied off of all social media. But like that was shocking to me because you guys are right. We we like love it said like every Barack Obama statement was as hedged and measured as possible about a good jobs report, in part because the underlying data suggested that people still weren't feeling things being better in their own lives.

I'll just add one small point, which is Tommy's right that there is partisanship in terms of how the economy is viewed, but it actually isn't total. There's data on this and it shows that when your party is in charge, you are more likely to say the economy is doing well. That's true of Democrats and Republicans. It is just more true of Republicans that they are more likely to take a partisan view. But it's not total. Reality still exists. That's all. So, yeah, no, I completely agree. I think that polarization now, because it's so extreme, takes care of about 90 percent of what what Tommy's talking about. I think there were always this segment of voters and we saw this popping up in our own polling and other people's polls that like the only thing that's keeping Trump alive is people who disapprove of his job as president.

But they think he's good on the economy and they might approve in the economy. So I think for those people, you know, you need to message the right way, message this the right way. What would have made me nervous from a political standpoint is if Trump came out, can't really imagine him doing this, but said like, look, this is better than expected, but we have so much more work to do to bring this economy back. And I'm going to be fighting for a new package in Congress and all this kind of stuff. That would have made me nervous because it would have looked like he's fighting for people instead it was a big fucking celebration republicans in congress are like all right now we can pump the brakes on the next stimulus package trump is like i'm gonna ask for more but i'm gonna ask for a payroll tax cut which no one really wants and i think it is what

he did right there was it was a huge political opportunity for Democrats, because basically Trump has now decided he is running as the candidate of the status quo in an election where like record numbers of people think the country's on the wrong track. The virus is gone. The economy's back. Nothing's wrong. There's no social unrest or racial. Everything is fine. The great American comeback has begun. You know, keep America great, which I guess now, according to The Washington Post, they might ditch that slogan. They might need a new slogan because America doesn't seem that great to anyone right now. They're buying whiteboards by the bulk over at the White House.

So, like, I think that is a huge risk for him he was he got to run as a change candidate in 2016 and now he's running as the candidate of the status quo by like celebrating this and i don't know look he can try you know he's going to try to say already that like joe biden's been in washington forever and he's ineffective and you know he could get some traction with that message but it's in Trump to celebrate everything and say everything is fine all the time. It's not in Trump to say, like, things are bad and I'm going to fix it

while he's the president. He's incapable. And I think that's a real danger. Yeah, he's incapable. He said that George fucking Floyd, like the jobs numbers. We just went right by it. The man is incapable of expressing

any other emotion than celebration of himself. That's it. That's all he's got. He is without empathy. The job has done what it has done to every American president, which is take their worst qualities and make them worse. And that's what we've got. And that's that it was just it's been on display. That's all. That is correct. OK, when we come back, we'll have Tommy's interview with L.A. District Attorney candidate George Gascon. George Gascon is a candidate for district attorney here in Los Angeles. He's also a former D.A. in San Francisco and our guest today on Pod Save America. George, thank you so much for joining the

show. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. So just right at the top here, full disclosure for listeners, I have donated to your campaign, so I am hardly impartial, but I don't think they look to me for that. So anyway, I thought I should say it. So George, a lot of our audience is in So, George, like a lot of our audience is in L.A., but most of them are not. So I was hoping we could start with some basics about the job itself. What decisions does a district attorney make? And in particular, for for listeners that are horrified by videos of police brutality, what actions could you take if you're elected to address that problem, to stop that violence? Of course. I mean, the first thing that you can do is ensure that you're taking a transparent and a biased look at police behavior when there is criminal conduct by police that

you're going to hold them accountable and you're going to prosecute. And that's really important. I think looking the other way, as a current district attorney has done very often, emboldens police. And I think the problem that we have nationally is that prosecutors generally, for a variety of reasons, including pressure from police unions and the difficulty of making cases against the police, are often not taking, they're not being assertive and i think that we have created a culture in policing in this country for police use force because they can not because they should um and they can because you know prosecutors are often not holding them accountable the second thing that you have to do is you also modify behavior in policing by the way you

prosecute your cases so for instance I have been very outspoken about what I think is the overly broad curfews that have been imposed around LA County. And then the use of the curfew as a tool to go out and arrest and, you know, quite frankly, sometimes use force against peaceful demonstrators. The DA should make it very clear that none of those cases will be prosecuted. If you make that unequivocally clear, that also sends a message to the police. If you're going to do that, you're going to be standing alone because we're not going to support you. Obviously, if you have somebody who's committing other crimes,

they're harming other people, they're burning buildings down, they're looting, that's a different story. And then you have to use proportionality and you have to evaluate each case on their own but I think when you're talking about peaceful demonstrators which we have seen throughout the nation and certainly right here in LA County being you know having force being used upon them having put into plastic handcuffs having been held in what I consider extremely dangerous conditions given the pandemic that we have,

exposing hundreds, if not thousands of people to what potentially could be the death penalty for either them or someone else. I think that that has to stop. And the way to stop that is simply by the prosecutor come out very openly, unequivocally, and saying, I will not prosecute this case under any condition.

Unfortunately, our prosecutor hasn't done that. And that continues to be a problem. Yeah. So for listeners, I mean, you came up in this system as a beat cop. So you have real on the ground experience policing communities. I've also heard you talk about how growing up, your parents were terrified of the police. You said one time that if there was a cop behind your mom when she was driving, she might pull over or ask your father to pull over. So you viewed this from different perspectives. There are some people, particularly communities of color, who feel like the systemic problems with the police go so deep that the forces should be

defunded or disbanded and we should essentially start over. Do you agree with those calls to defund or disband police departments? You know, I agree with the anger that is driving this. And I often tell people that if we were redesigning our entire criminal justice system from the ground up, police departments would not look the way they look today so to that end i think that we need to start uh shifting funding away from the traditional policing and putting more money in services that i believe actually not only increase community safety but actually create a more sustainable community so mental health services intervention workers both gang intervention workers social

workers there are so many calls that police are required to respond on a regular basis that we would be much better off if we took the gun and the batch away and we had a medical professional or a social professional responding to those calls. Additionally, creating a vehicle to divert people even before they get into the system and giving them the medical assistance and social assistance that they need is likely actually to not only increase public safety, but reduce a lot of the needs for funding that we have today that go unmet because we can reduce the footprint of jails and criminal justice system and put that money into other services that are more likely to create a much better community. So to the end, that I have said before all this, the need to, as we reduce the footprint of the criminal justice system, that money needs to be shifted into mental health services, social services, education, and other services that are likely to create a more sustainable, safer

community, we need to start doing this. Quite frankly, I used to say that six months ago, got no traction at all. Right now, we're talking about people wanting to completely defund a police department. I don't think we can afford to completely defund a police department, but we can certainly begin to start taking a lot of money away and putting that money into the services that are going to be much more sustainable and a much better fit for what we need. So to that end, do you support Mayor Garcetti's proposal to direct $250 million towards youth jobs, health, these peace centers, and partially fund it by cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget? Does that make sense?

That makes sense. I think it's actually extremely conservative. I think that the LAPD budget could take even a bigger cut. Look, the mayor just gave the LAPD about a 7% bump that he was going to keep. So really what we're talking about by taking this money away still keeps LAPD at the funding levels that they were a few months ago, right pre-fiscal year 2021. In LA, the fiscal year is July to June 30th. So quite frankly, what I see given back or taken away, it's almost token because it really doesn't alter the operations at all. All it's doing is taking pay raises away, which I don't think that we should have gone forward with given that every other city worker was asked to take a 10% cut.

So I think we have to go deeper than what is being proposed. I think that we need to start moving away from being fearful that as we start shifting funding away somehow, we're going to be less safe. The reality is we're not. I think, you know, we have to really start pushing back on police union political pressure. I mean, you still see it in the last few days, maybe not as openly, but there's so much pressure that goes by unions to make sure that, you know, funding is going to continue to the

same level saying, if not, the world's going to fall apart. Guess what? The world is not going to fall apart. And in fact, we were probably going to be a better world if we start shifting some of that funding to the service of the mayor's talking about now. So to that end, this show is probably listened to by a bunch of political junkies or people who are trying to influence people as organizers. How do they fight back on those arguments? The people who say, oh, you cut $150 million from the LAPD budget. There's going to be fewer cops on the street. There's going to be higher crime. I mean, even just the increased scrutiny of police activity after 2014 had people blaming crime on the Ferguson effect and claiming that cops were being handcuffed

and that may have led to an increase in crime. How do you combat those arguments? Look, I think that there's two ways that we combat that argument. Number one is in the case of LA, really taking that phone away is just simply keeping the status quo. There's not any less officer.

It's just simply not giving the officer a pay raise, which I'm not sure that given the economic scenario where, you know, everybody else taking significant deep cuts that we should give a pay raise to the police department. Police department needs to be part of our community. And you know what, you're a public servant. And I think that you have to adjust to the realities. And the reality right now is that we're all, you know, suffering and, you know, that suffering should be across the realities. And the reality right now is that we're all suffering and that suffering should be across the board. The next thing that we have to do is that we really actually have to reduce the presence of policing in many communities. I think actually over-policing in

many communities creates more problems than not. Look, I saw demonstrations in the last few days that actually became violent when the police showed up. They were peaceful until there was police presence. So evaluate. And, you know, we need professional police officers and managers that understand that sometimes your presence actually is going to raise the anxiety. And maybe you're better, especially given the context of the current situation, sometimes it's better just to back off a little. And if you're going to approach, do it in a way that it's not with, you know,

with all the right gear and all the stuff, all the things that actually increase tensions do not reduce tensions. So I, at the same time, you know, we got to make sure that, you know, if police goes into a work slowdown, you know, they work for us, right? And they work for mayors and city councils and boards of supervisors. And if you see that there is a decrease of desirable policing levels, then you start holding them accountable accordingly. You know, it's not, you know, policing should not be in a vacuum. It would be like having the armed forces be in a vacuum, you know, without Congress and without the president, you know, without Congress and without the president.

No reference to the current occupant of the White House. That is an anomaly. But, you know, just in general, we want police forces, we want the military to respond to civilian authority. And that, sometimes we're losing that and we get intimidated and we're actually being coerced into allowing police to do whatever they want to do. So in preparing for this interview, I talked to someone who was a critic of yours in San Francisco who argued that your office sort of essentially gave up on prosecuting crimes like car break-ins or low-level drug offenses. And that led to a poorer quality of life for residents of San Francisco. What do you say to that critic? And how, you know, bigger picture, do you balance these long-term needed reforms with the immediate term demands from residents

to stop theft, for example? Yeah, you know, look, that's the police narrative. Here's what happened in San Francisco. I was one of the co-sponsors of Prop 47, which was one of the major criminal justice reform efforts dealing with the war on drugs, right? And really brought some sanity to reducing some of the felony consequences for drug possession, for personal use, and wound up putting hundreds of millions of dollars, over $500 million back into our communities. Police departments were against this, and they basically in many places went into a work slowdown. San Francisco really went into a work slowdown. Here's where I'm going with this.

Car burglaries were not covered by Prop 47, but during the next four years after Prop 47, or three and a half years, until the new shift of police came up, there were about 81,000 car break-ins and there were 11 arrests. Which by the way, all 11 arrests were filed on and were prosecuted. But when you have 81,000 cases and 11 arrests, it's not the failure to prosecute. It's a failure for the police to do their work. But they were very good at shifting the narrative and saying that the DA was not prosecuting these cases, or they were now misdemeanors, so we had less of a tool, which neither one was true.

Not only were we prosecuting the very few cases, 11 of them that came up, but more importantly, when a new chief of police came on board and he said, you know, we're going to do our work, we saw immediately a 17% reduction in property crimes, including car break-ins. And now when I left,

we had two years on the road of reductions. So that narrative is precisely the narrative that the police wants people to hear is the fear-mongering and is sometimes the manipulation of things by, you know, just simply getting into the work slow down. Unfortunately, in San Francisco, like in many other communities, there's not a strong enough leadership in county or city government to look at the police and say, wait a minute, 81,000 cases, 11 arrests, you're not doing your job. And if you don't do your job, I'm going to start taking action, right?

You have the purse trains. You control who the chief of police is. They work for you. They work for us, right? It should not be the other way around. But it's very hard to push back in that narrative because people just buy it. You know, a cop shows up to the scene. Look, I mean, in 2014, the Police Officer Association in San Francisco laid out somewhere around $400,000 in radio ads right after Prop 47.

And the radio ad, I'm not quoting it exactly, but I'm going to paraphrase it. And basically, it was every morning, morning drive. If your car gets broken into or if you're a victim of a crime, call San Francisco police. We will be there to serve you. But don't expect district attorney Gascon to do anything about it. And then they went out for about three and a half years to go into a work slowdown. Yeah. So it seems like a very purposeful stoppage there.

Got it. So I want to switch gears a little bit because there's so many important issues that the role would cover and that you've worked on. The United States has 5%, I think, of the global population, but 25% of the prison population. Clearly, that is a problem. What kinds of policies do you want to put in place to reduce mass incarceration and reduce the insane number of people we have locked up in jails right now? Yeah, look, when I became the district attorney, our jail was in 2011, our jail was full every day. And within a year, we were able to lower our jail population by 30 to 40% on a daily basis. And crime did not go up. By the way, violent crime in San Francisco continued to go down through this entire period. Whereas in L.A. County, it went up by 30% in the county, 50% in the city, with a DA that incarcerates at rates that are 70% higher than anybody else in the state.

We also had the lowest number of prison commitments. In fact, we had in 2015, 2016, there was a group of researchers that came to San Francisco and said, if every county in America took the same steps that San Francisco did, we would end mass incarceration in this country in a year's time. So what you have to do is we have to begin to move away from using incarceration as a first level of response to any problem. It's starting with pretrial detention at our jails, which in the case of LA County, about 50% of the people are in pretrial detention. By the way, San Francisco too, even the numbers were a lot lower and we were able to decarcerate.

We still had a problem because we still go to Montebello and many other reasons that people are held, even if before the DA takes a look at it, you know, the DA has 48 hours, so people are in jail for 48 hours before the DA may take a look at it. So that population and the thought process, the people that are committing non-serious, non-violent offenses have to be booked, they have to be kept in jail, either because they cannot afford bail or because they don't have an attorney that comes out right away. We need to stop that. bail or because they don't have an attorney that comes out right away. We need to stop that.

The next thing that we have to do, which I have pledged to absolutely do in LA, and we started to do that in San Francisco as I continue my journey understanding the work, is we have to go back to what we used to do before this craziness of about three decades ago that we kept adding more enhancements and more prison enhancements and punishment To the point that you can have a person that commits a crime and the base offense may be let's say five years but because of gang enhancements and other enhancements they may end up in prison for 15 or 20 years and we often see now as LA is a perfect example where people are being placed on the gang files, and the offices are fraudulently putting people, young people of color, in gang files, which then create the vehicle for the gang enhancement, which automatically multiplies a sentence if there were to be a sentence. So we have to move away from what we call status enhancements because that is driving incarceration in this country and California led the way with three strikes and gang enhancements and felon with a gun and just all kinds of things that are applied often by prosecutors. First of all, to coerce a plea agreement,

the plea always being in a sentence that will be so much less if it weren't for the enhancements, or people go to trial and they end up running a risk of going from the potential of a low period of incarceration to go into prison for 25, 20, 25, 30 years. We have to move away from that. Last question that's sort of related, which is, you oppose the death penalty. I was hoping you could explain why. And then, you know, obviously the death penalty is the most severe example of the use of force by the state. But I think a lot of people have been shocked by the fact that police have been tear gassing,

pepper spraying, shooting with rubber bullets, citizens. I mean, do you think those tools are appropriate for crowd control? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And I have, I tell you that I was brokenhearted seeing some of the images that we have seen in TVs and the internet, you know, rubber bullets, which, you know, the business are called, you know, foam rubber baton rounds. First of all, they're not intended to be shot directly at anyone and in the upper torso area, which I saw a lot of that. They are meant to be skipped on the ground so that they hit the ground first to lose some of the momentum and then they're supposed to hopefully hit in the lower,

you know, below the waist. We have seen contrary to that. They're never intended to be for peaceful demonstrators. They're not a crowd control moving tool, just like a baton should not be a crowd control moving tool or tear gas. So things are really when you have exhausted all the other possibilities and you have actual violence going on. And we have seen those tools used not in those scenarios. And that, to me, is very problematic, and I think that we need to hold people accountable for that.

But going to the death penalty, which you asked earlier, why am I opposed to the death penalty? I'm going to tell you my personal reason, but then I'm going to give you a whole host of reasons why we should all be opposed. I am opposed to the death penalty because I think it's immoral, right? Now, it's immoral. Why? Because it's being disproportionately applied for people and people of color. Let's take L.A. County. L.A. County, the state of California has the biggest death row in the country, roughly 750 people. About a third of those come from L.A LA County. Under the current district attorney, 22 people just in the last eight years have been placed in death row and all but one are people of color. You cannot tell me that in a county of ten and a half million people where the African-American population is

less than five percent, but they make up the majority of the people on death row. So there's a problem with proportionality and the morality of that. Number two, it doesn't help public safety. It doesn't deter crime. When people are committing a crime that allegedly could be worth the death penalty under the current law, they're not thinking, if I get caught, I may be facing death row. That's not how we as human beings work. First of all, it's too remote. There's too many things. You're just not thinking of that. So it's not a deterrent. It's immoral and disproportionately apply. And then I'm going to go to the third

major reason. It is so expensive. You know, it costs, an execution in the state of California currently would cost around $340 million to execute one person. It's crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. People on death row, the cost of keeping people on death row is so many more times than if you put people within the regular population. Most of the people on death row, by the way, about 50% went in with a mental health problem, which also brings other ethical considerations. So we have someone that may have committed a serious crime. I'm assuming that they did, right? But they're mentally ill, right? And I forgot one other thing that I should have mentioned at the very beginning, which brings to the power of immorality.

We don't always get it right. We know that people get wrongfully convicted. And the death penalty is irreversible. So if we convict someone to death row, and we know that there have been innocent people in this country that have been executed. We have had people in the state that have gotten out of death row that were wrongfully convicted, and 20 years, 30 years later, have been able to finally gain their freedom. So you've got an issue of proportionality.

You've got an issue of wrongful convictions and the potential for an innocent person to be executed, which go to the morality of this. You've got an issue of it doesn't serve any public safety purpose. It doesn't deter crime. And then it's so expensive. We can buy so much more public safety and so many other things with a penalty that doesn't have any applicability, in my opinion, in modern society. Yeah. I mean, I think I saw might've been on your website that California has spent more than $5 billion with a B since 1978,

prosecuting death penalty cases and maintaining a death row that currently houses 737 inmates. What the fuck are we doing? Excuse my language. No, no, no. Listen,

you know what? I generally won't say this in the air, but yeah, what the fuck are we doing? It's a good question because it doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Last question. So there's a lot of people who have been marching, who have been donating, who care deeply about criminal justice reform, who care deeply about reducing mass incarceration. How can they get involved in your campaign if they're in this area and help you out?

And are there other people running for DA seats across the country that they should check out if they want a more progressive policies implemented everywhere? Totally. So as to my campaign, you can go on our website, georgegascon.org, and you can see their volunteering opportunities, their policy papers that you can read up, there are statements that you can use if you yourself wanted to go out and talk to people as to why you're supporting this. There are volunteer opportunities. As to other DAs, there are. There's Kim Gardner in St. Louis. There's Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore. There are many others. There are approximately, I believe there are 10 of us right now that are running countrywide, all deserving of attention,

especially if it's close to the place where you live. But even, you know, as Senator Bernie Sanders says, you know, just donate $10, $1 each. If we get, you know, several million people that $1 each to all of us, it would certainly go a long way because we're all facing the same things. We're facing police unions coming after you. In my case, we're in the primary local police unions put $2.1 million against me. They have pledged. Yeah, they have pledged now for the general election to put between $4 and $5 million against me. Right.

So in a market like la by the way which is the largest county in the country ten and a half million people fighting that kind of money in order to communicate it's going to take you know the pushback we're going to have to have the people uh power which means you know donating a dollar ten dollars what you can but also people being willing to volunteer, to engage, whether it's in social media. We know that with COVID, we may not be able to be door knocking in October, November, but we can certainly engage in the phones. We can engage in social media.

We're putting a very robust volunteer operation here. But if you're closer, if you're in the St. Louis area or if you're in the Baltimore area, you have great progressive district attorneys that need your help. And I strongly encourage you because the other component to this is that criminal justice reform really needs to start with electing DAs that are going to do the right things, right? And if you consider that the district attorneys in the major urban centers in this country really are the ones that drive mass incarceration, are the ones that can drive reform. Obviously, LA is just this huge monster. LA is

bigger than over 30 states with 10.5 million people. So we drive the dialogue at rates that nobody else does. But I strongly encourage you that this speaks to your heart, or if you know people that are in those areas there, please donate. Please help those DAs. You can look at the website. Senator Sanders, he actually listed all 10 of us. There's a lot of ways to engage here. It's great to go out there and engage in civil disobedience and exercise your First Amendment rights.

But remember, at the end of the day, if you got a DA that is not going to follow through, you can continue to do that until, you know, until health reasons over, but you're not going to get much impact other than that. Amen to that. Thank you so much for doing the show. I hope everyone will check out your website and just, you know, look, whether or not you can vote in LA, get educated on these issues, think about finding a more progressive. to run where you live.

But we have to focus locally first. So I'm so grateful for your time. Thank you so much, you guys. Thanks to George Gascon for joining us today. And we will talk to you later. Bye, everybody. Bye. and we will talk to you later bye everybody bye Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Reston, and Elisa Gutierrez for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.