On the Issues

Sexual Assault – Protecting and Holding Abusers Accountable

As District Attorney, Gascón prosecuted more than double the national average of sexual assault cases and successfully fought to test every backlogged rape kit.  He reduced the average days to conviction by over 20% in a single year between 2016 and 2017 and implemented a Sexual Assault Response Team, enhanced office training and education on effective communication with survivors of sexual assault, created a campus sexual assault task force, and created a dedicated Child Abuse and Sexual Assault (CASA) Unit to prosecute sex crimes.  He brought full-time facility dogs to the office to assist victims in the most difficult of circumstances, and implemented an annual Red Zone public education campaign to promote awareness around the first six weeks of school in which college students are 50 percent more likely to be sexually assaulted than they are at any other time.  He worked with Colleges and Universities to create agreements with law enforcement and community based organizations to work together with victims in order to connect them with services as soon as possible, regardless of whether or not they choose to file a police report.  Gascón also implemented a Safe Bars partnership which worked with staff and owners of bars, clubs and restaurants to implement a bystander intervention program.

Read Gascón’s proposed policies for domestic violence, sex assault, and human trafficking, by clicking  here.

Taking LADA into the 21st Century

As District Attorney, Gascón would implement a Crime Strategies Unit (CSU) as he did in San Francisco, a multi-disciplinary team of prosecutors, analysts and investigators that use a data-driven approach to resourcefully address chronic crime and repeat offenders. CSU’s approach in San Francisco has been credited with multiple major organized crime takedowns, including Operations Wrecking Ball and Cold Day, the latter of which netted the most arrests in a single day ever for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, a federal agency.  Gascón would also implement a Gun Enforcement Unit (GEU) to ensure recovered weapons and ammunition is adequately mined for evidence and can be tied to crimes and dangerous persons. 

Read Gascón’s report, “Transformative Justice Prosecution Strategies to Reform the Justice System and Enhance Community Safety,” by clicking here.

On Behavioral Health and Its Nexus to Homelessness

More than half of all people incarcerated in prisons and jails have a mental illness: 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners, and 64 percent of jail inmates. Of those who have a mental illness, about three-quarters also have a co-occurring substance use disorder. 

Correctional facilities are fundamentally places of punishment and control, not treatment and rehabilitation. By necessity, security within a jail or prison is paramount, making it difficult to create and maintain an effective system of mental health care. By virtue of their very nature— from their architectural design to the manner in which they are routinely operated—jails and prisons tend to exacerbate mental illness.  As a result, adding treatment services to traditional jail facilities will never adequately address this inherent problem.

Ultimately, you simply cannot resolve our behavioral health crisis with a law enforcement response.  The use of police, prosecutors and jails results in individuals being released without adequate medication or prescriptions.  Failure to adequately prepare for community reentry and continuation of mental health services can exacerbate psychiatric conditions and increase the likelihood of addiction, homelessness, and recidivism.

The most widely accepted, evidence-based practice for treating such individuals is Integrated Dual Diagnosis Treatment, which treats both mental health and substance abuse disorders simultaneously and in the same setting.  Therefore, if elected I would work to implement regional Behavioral Health facilities where law enforcement would work hand in hand with public health officials.

Additionally, programs like Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) must be expanded and embraced as they have proven to outperform traditional approaches to this difficult population. LEAD is an innovative pre-booking diversion program that refers repeat, low-level drug offenders at high risk of recidivism at the earliest contact with law enforcement to community-based health and social services as an alternative to jail and prosecution.  

The program is based on a model developed in Seattle which has seen excellent results.  Evaluations of Seattle’s program revealed that participants were 58% less likely than people in the control group to be rearrested, and found statistically significant reductions for the LEAD group compared to the control group in average yearly criminal justice and legal system utilization and associated costs.

Read Gascón’s proposed policies for Behavioral Health and its Nexus to Homelessness by clicking here.

The Death Penalty

Gascón is opposed to the death penalty and has never sought to condemn someone to death.  State sanctioned killings do not deter crime, but in light of the unequal application of the death penalty to communities of color it does inflict an extraordinary amount of harm to the moral authority of our justice system.  It wastes a massive amount of taxpayer resources and creates an unnecessary risk that the state will put an innocent person to death.

California has spent more than $5 billion since 1978 prosecuting death penalty cases and maintaining a death row that houses approximately 737 inmates.  During that time, however, only 13 death sentences have been carried out at an outrageous cost of $384 million per execution.  The death penalty is morally dubious at best and Gascón believes it’s time to end it.

Read Gascón’s proposed plan to end the death penalty and resentence those convicted to death to life without parole by clicking here.

Environmental Justice

Gascón has used his offices’ power to hold both individuals and corporations accountable for actions harming the environment. As San Francisco’s DA he cracked down on corporate polluters, fighting to hold an oil tanker accountable after spilling 422 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay in 2009. Gascón also held California Walgreens accountable after over 600 stores throughout the state dumped hazardous medical waste, full of toxic and flammable materials. Walgreens Company paid $16.67 million in settlement costs. In addition to prosecuting large corporations and oil companies, Gascón reprimanded individual polluters, charging those who incorrectly disposed of hazardous waste from restaurants and other shops. Beyond using the traditional powers of the District Attorney’s office to prosecute polluters, Gascón is committed to diverting public funds away from jails and applying them towards public goods like parks in environmental deserts.

Children in the Justice System

Under Gascón’s leadership San Francisco experienced a dramatic decline in youth crime, arrest and incarceration rates, and became the first major city in the U.S. to close a juvenile hall.  Two programs implemented by Gascón that are being duplicated across the country are:

Make It Right, a program for justice involved juveniles which sees participants reoffend at less than ¼ the rate of those who go through the traditional process.

Young Adult Court, a program designed to address the unique needs of young adults ages 18-25, an age group that is disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.

Read Gascón’s youth justice policy proposal to enhance safety and start treating kids as kids by clicking here.

Immigration

Gascón immigrated to Los Angeles from Cuba when he was 13.  He has been a major advocate for immigrant rights, having taken on Joe Arpaio when he was Chief of Police in Mesa, AZ, and leading state legislative efforts to ensure immigrants aren’t targeted with inappropriate questioning about their status when they take the stand.  He implemented a court escort policy in the era of ICE agents in courtrooms in order to ensure that every resident of our community has equal access to our courthouses and our system of justice.