I know he’s going to lose, but I’m voting for George Gascón because he’s a great prosecutor – San Gabriel Valley Tribune

So I was on the phone – okay, I was texting – with a local prosecutor who has been retired for many years.

“So who are you going to the DA with?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m voting for George,” I replied. “Even if he’s going to lose.”

“Same,” she wrote back. “Sigh.”

If it’s not easy to be a supporter of a political candidate — in this case, the excellent and honorable Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón — who the polls show is going down in flames, imagine candidate yourself.

He’s everyone’s punching bag every time some motherfucker raises a Stop ‘n’ Rob like Los Angeles County thugs have been doing since we invented the mini-mall. If gangs of hammer-wielding thugs and thugs love the sound of breaking glass in the maxi-mall jewelry store, then the word on the street is surely George Gascón’s fault.

The money from justice reform advocates who supported his candidacy four years ago has dried up. Tech bros who gave him half a million are giving a few thousand this time. George isn’t going to win.

I call the August prosecutor “George” because I have met him twice during editorial meetings. But they were very small, informal gatherings. We had a real chance to visit and get to know each other. I have met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of local politicians at such meetings over the decades. Few have impressed me as much as George Gascón.

He is both more intellectual and more of a normal guy than 99% of the people you would want to meet. He arrived without security or assistants, and there were no weapons lurking in the hall. He’s neat, in a good way, not in the Tucker Carlson Brooks Bros way. He is slim and athletic. In conversation, he is genuinely interested in the problems facing the justice system today, and how to get rid of the revolving-door prison-industrial complex – which, if you think, is a great plan to create a safer society. create, then you have another thought.

The petty thieves and also the insignificant thieves that you want locked up for decades will eventually be released. If you keep them in hellholes for long periods of time without serious rehabilitation programs with a bunch of other bad guys, you probably won’t get the results you imagined.

In defending George over the years, I have often had to point out simple things in his astonishing resume that those who portray him as a soft-on-crime liberal almost always admit they had no idea about.

He was born in Cuba and his family were classic refugees from communist oppression when they fled to America. They ended up not in Miami, but in Bell, the most working-class city in Los Angeles County. He had so much trouble reading English that he left Bell High in 1972 to join the Army, where he received his high school diploma.

He was a cop from the start, a member of parliament. He was honorably discharged as a sergeant. He came back to Cal State Long Beach for a degree in history.

And then he – no, Joe Voter, not a community organizer, union agitator or Socialist Workers Party apparatchik – became a career police officer. Once he joined the LAPD, he quickly served as a sergeant, lieutenant, captain, commander, and then deputy chief in 2002. After the (quite) Rampart scandal rocked the department, with the department (quite) under federal oversight , he was placed in prison. mastery of the training at the Police Academy. When no new money for training was actually provided, he found it himself in the form of a community policing grant.