L.A. D.A. Gascón made strides in prosecuting police. Would a Hochman win change that?

Oct. 31, 2024 7:50 AM PT

Under George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office took unprecedented efforts to prosecute police for excessive force.
With challenger Nathan Hochman surging in the polls and the favored candidate of police unions, some worry he might be far less aggressive.

Chiquita Twyman didn’t think she’d ever see justice for her younger brother, Ryan.

The unarmed 24-year-old was killed after L.A. County sheriff’s deputies fired 34 rounds into the back of his vehicle in Willowbrook in June 2019.

Chiquita knew the district attorney’s office rarely prosecuted law enforcement officers for using excessive force. Even after George Gascón became district attorney by campaigning to hold police accountable, Chiquita remained skeptical.

But in his four years as the county’s top prosecutor, Gascón has been one of California’s most aggressive pursuers of law enforcement misconduct, making him an ally for criminal justice reform advocates — one some fear will be lost if the latest poll numbers prove true.

Nathan Hochman is heavily favored to oust Gascón from office on Nov. 5, and the former federal prosecutor is the preferred candidate of law enforcement throughout L.A. County. He’s raked in millions from police unions and often talks about restoring the relationship between the district attorney’s office and local cops.

Gascón has charged five officers in on-duty shootings since 2020, including one of the deputies who killed Ryan Twyman.

Chiquita said she once yelled “F— the police” at Gascón, a former LAPD officer. But speaking to potential voters last month at a rally for the incumbent, she sang his praises.

“Gascón is the real deal and that’s why we need him in office,” a tearful Chiquita said.

Yet in a race centered on voter anxieties over public safety and the legal controversies that have marred Gascón’s first term, the criminal justice reform issues that got him elected after George Floyd’s murder have largely taken a backseat.

“Everybody is looking at the November election in terms of the presidency, but I think for Angelenos, the most immediate and impactful change would be the change in the D.A. It’s an even greater threat to the Black community, I would say, than Donald Trump,” said Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. “What you’re gonna see if Hochman wins is a complete rollback of police accountability. He’s bought and paid for by these police associations.”

Hochman has scoffed at suggestions that he would be beholden to his police backers, often repeating a canned line that “nobody hates a bad cop more than a good cop.”

“At the end of the day what I will bring is a sensibility that I’m both a defense attorney and a prosecutor. Someone who has actually prosecuted police officers,” he said during a recent debate. “When I speak to police officers I make it crystal clear, ‘When you cross the line, you will be prosecuted.’”

But Hochman, who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles for years before becoming a defense attorney, hasn’t prosecuted a police officer in nearly three decades. Gascón, meanwhile, has spent three terms in San Francisco and L.A. overseeing crucial filing decisions in use-of-force cases.

A special prosecutor that Gascón hired to review cases that former L.A. D.A. Jackie Lacey declined to prosecute has brought charges in two additional police killings. Another 38 officers have faced charges under Gascón for misconduct, according to the district attorney’s office.

Although Gascón has made a stand of charging officers, his courtroom results have been mixed.

In Twyman’s case, the D.A. filed manslaughter charges against deputy Andrew Lyons.

Police had seized a cache of illegal weapons from Ryan Twyman’s home weeks before deputies cornered him in a car in Willowbrook, authorities said. Twyman had no gun on him, but Lyons and another deputy unleashed a hail of bullets into the back of his car as it rolled in their direction, according to video of the incident. Even after the vehicle stopped, Lyons grabbed a rifle and kept on firing, the video shows.

Lyons struck a plea deal that allowed him to serve just 30 days in jail.

In a 2021 case involving manslaughter charges against an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy, jurors voted to acquit. The next year, a judge threw out a case against LAPD officers accused of falsely labeling people as gang members. Lacey brought both cases, but they fell apart on Gascón’s watch.

Misconduct and assault charges filed against police officers have been dismissed at preliminary hearings on multiple occasions. In a pending civil lawsuit filed last year, members of Gascón’s administration were also accused of stalling decisions in police shooting cases for political gain.

In other cases where Gascón has won a conviction or secured a plea deal, sentences have been arguably lenient. A Long Beach school security guard who shot a teenager in the back of the head while she was driving away from a crime scene secured a plea that was tantamount to probation last month. In one case, a judge blocked a no-jail plea offered to a sheriff’s deputy who fatally shot a man in 2021.

In an interview with The Times, Gascón argued the officers likely would have faced no consequences in the prior administration. In several cases, the plea deals also barred the officers from serving as law enforcement officials in California ever again, an important step to eliminating bad actors from police rosters, he said.

Gascón also noted jurors still remain hesitant to convict police, and sometimes plea deals are the best way to attain some measure of accountability.

“We have to take a realistic view in the particular courtroom that we are in, who the judges are, what kind of rulings we’ve been getting,” he said. “Sometimes we settle for less than we want... sometimes we recognize we’re working with a handicap and we’re doing the best we can.”

Abdullah said anyone analyzing Gascón’s performance on police cases has to take into account the reactions of the families who have lost relatives to such violence.

“The sentence in the Twyman murder was really, really light,” she said. “But when we talk to the family, it meant everything.”

Gascón has sought to paint Hochman as too cozy with police, especially the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Law enforcement unions have spent $2.5 million to support Hochman’s candidacy, with $1 million of that coming from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department’s union. Gascón has also often reminded voters that Hochman defended disgraced ex-sheriff Lee Baca on corruption charges.

“He is beholden to police unions,” Gascón said. “When you look historically ... he’s been close to the sheriff’s department in ways that are more like a groupie.”

But Hochman’s most hands-on experience prosecuting police actually involved going after corrupt L.A. sheriff’s deputies. As a federal prosecutor, Hochman sought to convict a defendant caught up in “Operation Big Spender” in the 1990s, a scandal that implicated deputies in embezzling over $1 million seized in drug raids.

Teree Bowers, who served as U.S. Attorney for Los Angeles at the time, said Hochman helped build the case, which sprang from an FBI investigation. Bowers described Hochman as an “excellent” trial attorney and said it was much harder to convince jurors to convict police officers in the 1990s.

“I think the public was much more trusting of police at that time,” Bowers said. “Each of the prosecutors, including Nathan... their own integrity and honesty had to be unquestioned.”

Hochman touted his work on the case, saying the same issues he tackled three decades ago remain relevant today.

“I had to evaluate the credibility of law enforcement officers as well as build cases with corroborating evidence and witnesses to successfully prosecute them,” he said. “This same skill set is very relevant in analyzing the evidence and the credibility of witnesses in officer-involved shootings and uses of excessive force.”

Hochman blasted recent reports that Gascón’s special prosecutor, Lawrence Middleton, is expected to charge a former LAPD officer in the 2015 shooting death of a homeless man. With the statute of limitations expired for a manslaughter charge, it is likely the officer would be tried for murder, which Hochman said is unwarranted.

But while he has repeatedly criticized Gascón’s hiring of Middleton — whom public records show has billed the county for roughly $883,000 from June 2021 to April 2024 despite filing just two cases — Hochman stopped short of promising to fire him if elected.

Middleton has declined interview requests.

Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said it’s understandable that Hochman’s overwhelming law enforcement support might make some voters “nervous.”

Gascón, she said, has made inroads with communities mistrustful of the county’s prosecutors, but warned his courtroom shortcomings could overshadow those gains.

“It’s a double-edged sword. It’s good to have someone who is willing to bring the cases … but that person needs to be able to win the cases,” she said. “At some point, the public gets frustrated when you bring the cases, and the cops walk away, or they walk away with a slap on the wrist.”

Times staff writer Connor Sheets contributed to this report.