Former SF DA George Gascon wants to bring SF policies to LA, but critics are skeptical

Blind charging, a crime strategies unit, a diversion program for juvenile criminals, and a separate court for young adult defendants are the strategies George Gascon plans to bring to Los Angeles County if he's elected district attorney next March. But the stark contrast between the sprawl of LA and the urban density of San Francisco, the city where Gascon introduced similar programs during his tenure there as DA, are prompting critics to question the scalability of his plans.

"What works in San Francisco is not necessarily going to work in Los Angeles," said Richard Ceballos, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles County who is also vying for incumbent Jackie Lacey's seat. In addition to being geographically larger and more populous, Los Angeles County is also "much more diverse" than San Francisco County, Ceballos added. "What works for one community is not going to work for another."

Los Angeles County has the largest population of any county in the nation and is exceeded by only eight states.

Lacey pointed out similar programs already exist in Los Angeles County. "Putting a new name behind existing efforts and calling it reform doesn't accomplish anything," Lacey said in an email this week.

But Gascon, who grew up in LA and served in the police department for more than two decades, argues his strategies can be adapted for LA County with success -- partly because some of them have already been implemented in other cities across the nation. The crime strategies unit, for instance, was first introduced in Manhattan by District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in 2010 and has since been adopted in Albuquerque, Seattle, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco and Santa Clara County.

The strategies aren't "unique to San Francisco," Gascon said on Monday. "They're just good 21st century approaches to criminal justice and community safety."

Lacey questioned whether Gascon's strategies were needed in LA County. "Most of these programs proposed by the former San Francisco district attorney are not new ideas," the LA County DA said. She pointed to two existing programs run by her office. CLEAR, the Community Law Enforcement and Recovery program, and HEAT, the Heightened Enforcement and Targeting program, are counterparts to Gascon's crime strategies unit, she said. With both CLEAR and HEAT, Lacey said, prosecutors work in tandem with law enforcement to develop "crime strategies against gangs."

"CLEAR has been around since the early 1990s, and the former San Francisco district attorney would be aware of these programs given that they existed back when he was police officer for LAPD," Lacey added.

For about 20 years, LA County has also run a correlate to Gascon's Make It Right program. LA County's JOIN, or Juvenile Offender Intervention Network, offers an alternative to prosecution for juvenile criminals, allowing them to pursue other routes to making amends, like undergoing counseling and compensating victims. First-time lawbreakers aged 10 to 17 are eligible for JOIN but won't have access to the program if they've committed a serious or violent crime such as selling drugs, sexual assault, residential burglary, driving under the influence, and possessing or using a firearm.

San Francisco's Make It Right program is open to teens aged 13 to 17 who have committed felonies where custody is not required and for which there is an identifiable victim, such as vandalism, theft, burglary and some types of robberies. Unlike JOIN, Make It Right is not only available for first-time lawbreakers, although juveniles who are on probation are not eligible.

Frank Carrubba, division manager in the San Jose Police Department, offered another contrast between Gascon's agenda and existing efforts by the LA DA's office. Carrubba, an assistant DA in San Francisco during Gascon's tenure, led the county's crime strategies unit after working with a similar program in Santa Clara County, where he previously was a deputy DA. While CLEAR and HEAT focus on gangs, Carrubba said the crime strategies unit tackled a wide variety of crimes in San Francisco.

"I'll give you a spectrum," he said in an interview last week. "We did everything from an operation that involved someone dressing up as Elmo and sexually assaulting people in Fisherman's Wharf to ... people who are victimizing the large retailers in the Union Square area of the city, and using ambush style tactics to burglarize and rob." The crime strategy unit also handled a "large-scale gang and firearms and narcotics case that led to the indictment of over 120 people in both federal and state court," Carrubba added.

Lacey was more amenable to Gascon's young adult court and blind charging program, describing each as an "interesting idea" while also suggesting there isn't enough data to prove either are effective.

Ceballos expressed clear reservations about each. In 2015, Gascon launched San Francisco's young adult court for 18- to 25-year-old lawbreakers, based on research he said showed adults in this age range processed information differently than juveniles and older adults because their prefrontal cortexes are not yet fully developed.

Ceballos agreed with the premise of a young adult court. "We need to treat kids like kids," he said. But he was more skeptical about how it would scale to LA County. A young adult court "might work for a city the size of San Francisco, where there's one main courthouse," Ceballos said, but "doing it in a county the size of Los Angeles, where we have a couple dozen courthouses ... is impractical."

He also disagreed with how the San Francisco special court tries serious, including violent, cases. "I think sometimes even a young child knows it's wrong to hurt somebody," he said. "The ones that engage in the violent crimes, that [should be] left to the regular adult court."

While Ceballos argues there is "implicit bias in the criminal justice system," he also said Gascon's blind charging policy is focusing resources in the wrong area.

In June, Gascon announced the San Francisco DA's office would use a tool developed by the Stanford Computational Policy Lab to remove information about race and "other details that can serve as a proxy for race," from police incident reports. The goal of the policy was to prevent prosecutors from making charging decisions influenced by racial biases.

"We ensured that when we created the algorithm [we] put it in the public domain so there's no ownership to it," Gascon said Monday. "We'll be able to use it in LA."

In Ceballos' experience, however, implicit bias doesn't happen at the charging stage. In the 30 years he's worked as a prosecutor, he said, "I've never seen this as being a problem. The way the paperwork is processed, in terms of filing the race of the suspect ... that's one of the last things we look at." He added, "It's buried in the paperwork. ... The only time I look at race now is [when] I prosecute race crimes."

If implicit bias does come up, Ceballos said, "it's going to happen in the courtroom where the prosecutor first lays eyes on the defendant."

Gascon, meanwhile, said he is prepared to learn more about local concerns. "How do we bring these practices to LA? Well, we bring them by bringing the stakeholders together, analyzing what the problems are, evaluating the resources and then applying the resources to the various needs."

The other candidates in the LA race did not respond to requests for comment. They are deputy district attorney Joseph Iniguez and former deputy public defender Rachel A. Rossi, who announced her candidacy Tuesday.