L.A. on the Record: The Gascón factor in the L.A. mayor’s race

Good morning and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our local elections newsletter. It’s Ben Oreskes coming to you live with a slimmed-down summer edition of the newsletter. Julia Wick, who is wonderful, helped.

Our paper and this newsletter have closely followed the pursuit to dethrone Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón. That effort has tracked with a national surge of anger at reform-minded prosecutors among people who link recent upticks in crime to those prosecutors’ tenures.

The Times’ James Queally has closely followed the race and — looking hard at the D.A. office’s filing rates, homicide solve rates and crime statistics — found a far more complicated picture of the surge in violence than the one asserted by some of Gascón’s opponents.

For them, it’s a straight line from Gascón’s policy changes to the upticks in certain crimes we’ve seen. This month they turned in 715,833 recall signatures.

At least 566,857 valid signatures are required before voters can decide whether to recall Gascón. The County Registrar-Recorder sampled about 5% of those signatures this week and found 78% passed muster. That means they’ll need to analyze them all — a process that must be completed by Aug. 17.

Recall proponents remain confident that they’ll have enough valid signatures to get on the ballot, and called this a “significant milestone in the effort to recall Los Angeles Dist. Atty. George Gascón.”

In recent weeks Gascón, a former police officer and San Francisco district attorney, has been more vocal about selling his policy ideas and beating back criticism — mindful of what happened in San Francisco, where Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin was booted by a well-funded recall effort. In an interview with Politico that came out this week, Gascón talked about the lessons from what happened up north.

“One of the mistakes that Chesa made that I learned from it — and he’ll readily recognize — is he was trying to talk to people about data,” Gascón said. “People don’t care about data. This is about emotions. This is about how you perceive and feel. And you cannot use data to deal with feelings. And I think that was a failure. And by the time he kind of woke up to that, it was too late for him.”

Having this recall on the ballot could have major ramifications for the mayor’s race and could cut in several directions. In a year when the governor and Senate races are a snore, a contentious recall effort is one more reason for Angelenos to come out and vote.

That might bring out an expanded base of voters who favor Rick Caruso and want Gascón gone. It’s hard to assess, but it’s possible that a group of voters will flock to the polls to register their discontent with the onslaught of recalls Californians have faced, like last year’s gubernatorial recall, in which a frothing mad group of people slapped back an attempt to take out Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Caruso had supported Gascón’s bid for D.A., co-hosting a high-profile fundraiser for him where John Legend performed, but then he shifted his support to incumbent Jackie Lacey. Earlier this year, he came out in support of the recall.

In a TV interview last week, he said he’d enthusiastically campaign in support of removing Gascón from office and attacked his opponent, Rep. Karen Bass, for having Gascón at her campaign kickoff event.

He’s “causing our communities to not be safe and he needs to be held accountable for that,” Caruso told Fox’s Elex Michaelson from the backyard of former diplomat and entertainment executive Nicole Avant’s home. Avant’s mother, Jacqueline Avant, was murdered in her Beverly Hills home last year.

Despite Caruso’s remarks to the contrary, Bass’ position on Gascón has been relatively clear. She doesn’t support the recall even though she doesn’t like certain policies he has implemented.

In an interview with Michaelson, Bass said she’d be focusing on her own campaign this fall if the recall makes it on the ballot and was skeptical it would even qualify.

“My focus is going to be on the [mayor’s] race,” Bass said. “I’m not going to be focused on the recall.”

Crime and public safety, perhaps more than anything else, are the wedge issue of all wedge issues in this race. It’s where the differences between Bass and Caruso are most borne out — whether it’s their view of the recall or the right size of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In a moment when many Angelenos do feel unsafe, Caruso is looking for any and all ways to paint Bass as soft on crime. Caruso argues that his time as L.A. Police Commission president uniquely positions him to handle the current state of the city and that Bass is unfit or unwilling to do what’s necessary to make people feel safe.

Bass says her work on policing in South L.A. in the ’90s along with her efforts to craft police reform in Congress show she has what it takes to make residents feel safe.

Caruso, as we know, used to be a Republican. He is now hammering on Bass’ support of another Republican turned Democrat, Faisal Gill, who is running to succeed Mike Feuer as city attorney.

In an email to supporters, Caruso asked them to share these talking points:

“While our city is seeing crimes of all types on the rise ... why is Karen Bass supporting D.A. Gascón and city attorney candidate Faisal Gill? Gill has promised a moratorium on prosecutions for the first 100 days of his term.”

Gill’s decision to run for city attorney grew out of his experience litigating against the office on behalf of one of his clients, Antone Austin, a Black man arrested by Los Angeles police during a search for a white suspect in 2019. On top of his promise to slow misdemeanor filings, he’s also said he will reform how the office deals with the LAPD.

On Friday, Bass advisor Doug Herman said: “Bass absolutely disagrees with Faisal Gill’s proposal for a 100-day moratorium on misdemeanor criminal filings, and in fact, our campaign contacted the Gill campaign and withdrew the endorsement on Wednesday.”

The Caruso campaign has been relatively quiet since the primary, and it appears his campaign is waking up. He held a news conference Friday morning to bash Bass for her support of Gill, though the event needed some last-minute rejiggering when Bass announced she was rescinding the Gill endorsement shortly before Caruso was slated to speak. (The news conference was also interrupted by a small group of protesters, two of whom were arrested.)

We’ll know by mid-August if the Gascón recall is on the ballot, and we’ll see if these moves by the candidates make a difference.

Bass has been doing more events than her opponent, but this was the first week when the campaign for mayor looked to be heating up again.

Pedestrians explore the 6th Street Viaduct during an opening celebration on Saturday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

BASS CAMPAIGN STAFF SHAKEUP: On Friday, we got word that the Bass campaign and spokeswoman Anna Bahr had parted ways. Bahr, who formerly worked for Mayor Eric Garcetti and Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, had been a pretty regular presence at the congresswoman’s side. Throughout that time, though, she’d been working as a consultant and not a full-time staffer, and also had other clients who were running for office.

“My contract has wrapped after a successful primary,” Bahr told The Times. “I’m extremely proud of the work we did to get through the most challenging part of the campaign.”

Bass advisor Doug Herman told The Times that Bahr had been a great member of the team throughout the primary and that the campaign would bring someone on full-time soon. With the workload the race requires, he said the team decided it needed someone who wasn’t working on several races at once.

The initial months of Bass’ campaign were characterized by ample staff turnover, and Herman was brought on to replace Parke Skelton and Steve Barkan, who exited late last year. The campaign ran through two fundraising consultants as well, and then in February campaign manager Jamarah Hayner departed.

Asked about what all this staff turnover said about Bass’ capacity to manage the city, Herman said: “Over the course of the last several months the congresswoman has hired the people she needs for this mayor’s race and as they have become available they have been fit into the campaign.”

ALSO: Let’s take a spin through a few other odds and ends and then let you get back to your weekend.

— The City Council is still on recess, but this week the big event for lots of electeds and lots of Angelenos was the opening of the 6th Street Viaduct. Countless politicians were in attendance for the opening, including Garcetti.

— Returning to Gill for a moment. His law license was placed on involuntary inactive status by the State Bar of California on July 1 and restored to active status Wednesday, Julia Wick reports. This stemmed from what Gill called “a small administrative oversight on my part.”

— Beyond public safety, homelessness is the biggest issue in our upcoming elections. KCRW’s crack homelessness and housing reporter Anna Scott takes a look at Garcetti’s homelessness policies and how they could change if Caruso or Bass is elected.

— Bass appeared on the Ankler podcast. Not a ton of new ground was covered in the interview, but Bass does talk about her ties to the entertainment industry and her frustration over The Times’ coverage of her relationship with Vice President Kamala Harris.

— This weekend, please spend some time with a series by my colleagues Gale Holland, Claire Hannah Collins and Christina House about a pregnant homeless woman in Hollywood. These stories truly show how hard it is to pull people off the streets and into a more stable situation. The articles also show the complex confluence of challenges that drive people into homelessness and then entrench them in it.

— The L.A.’s animal services agency is understaffed and as a result relies on volunteers to walk dogs and care for them. In a penetrating investigation, Dakota Smith looks at how dogs spend weeks or months inside their kennels without a break at Chesterfield Square Animal Services Center, the city’s most crowded shelter.

— Quartz reporter David Yanofsky put together an incredibly cool data presentation of how several City Council candidates fared in various parts of their districts.

QUICK HITS

• Who’s running the city? Still Eric Garcetti. More than a year on, his confirmation as ambassador to India awaits a Senate vote.

• The latest in mayoral endorsements: On Friday, the Bass campaign released a list of more than 45 elected officials who had endorsed her. The list includes over a dozen of her congressional colleagues, among them House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) and numerous state elected leaders as well.
  
• And other city and county endorsements: After endorsing Bass last month, the L.A. County Democratic Party endorsed a slate of candidates this week. It includes Hydee Feldstein Soto for city attorney, Katy Young Yaroslavsky in council District 5, Erin Darling in District 11, West Hollywood City Councilwoman Lindsey Horvath for county supervisor, and former Long Beach Police Chief Robert Luna for sheriff. Assemblywoman Tina McKinnor backed Gill for city attorney. Former city attorney candidates Marina Torres, Richard Kim, Kevin James and Teddy Kapur all backed Soto, as did former Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez.
  

(If you have an endorsement you’d like to flag for next week, please send it to us.)

• Now read this: “Inky peed on every rug and all the wall-to-wall carpets in the house. She ruined the living room rug, the dining room rug, then went to work on the second floor: the master bedroom. My niece’s bedroom. The office. Yes, yes, I know you must be thinking she’s got kidney or bladder problems. She does not. This girl was sending a message,” Times columnist Robin Abcarian writes of the 22-year-old black cat her late father left her and she begrudgingly cares for.
  
• On the docket for next week: Nada, but let me know if you hear of anything.