The Last LA Election When Crime Was Going Up For Real

What an old District Attorney race says about the new one.

Screengrab from an ad on Nathan Hochman’s Youtube channel

George Gascón, the Los Angeles County DA and one of the most prominent advocates for criminal justice reform in the country, just lost his reelection campaign to Nathan Hochman, a defense attorney who has pledged to pursue the death penalty and changed his party registration from Republican to independent during the campaign. When the counting is done Gascón is going to lose by just under 20 points.

Everyone knew it was coming and why. Here’s the AP article covering the end of the primary:

The challengers, ranging from line prosecutors in Gascón’s office to county judges to former federal prosecutors like Hochman, sought to blame Gascón and his progressive policies for widespread perceptions that the city is unsafe. They highlighted shocking footage of a series of brazen smash-and-grab robberies at luxury stores. The feeling of being unsafe is so pervasive that even the Los Angeles mayor and police chief said in January that they were working to fix the city’s image.

Coverage of this race tends to use words like “perceptions” and “feeling” to talk about the city being unsafe, because the actual data tells a much less definitive story. Murders spiked during the pandemic — as they did in the rest of the country — then leveled off, then fell. Robberies actually fell during the pandemic, then rose, but are still below pre-pandemic levels. Both are far, far under the peaks of the nineties.

But declaring that crime had exploded and then connecting that explosion to how Gascón ran the DA’s office was Hochman’s entire campaign. Here’s his closing argument video, summing up the case that easily won him the election:

Hochman even hammered it one last time in his election night victory statement:

“While the final votes haven’t been tallied, all indications are the voices of the residents of L.A. County have been heard and they’re saying enough is enough of George Gascón’s policies and they look forward to a safer future.”

I was curious to see if anything like this had happened before. So I decided to go back and look at old newspaper coverage of the last LA DA race that played out in a context of rising crime. Back… to the nineties.

The last election year before 2024 when LA crime was really going up was 1992. That year deputy prosecutor Gil Garcetti made the runoff in the District Attorney race against his own boss, the incumbent DA Ira Reiner.

Reiner had been the defense attorney for Leslie van Houten, the Manson family member who participated in the killing of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca at a house near the Gelson’s in Silver Lake (a Mayfair at the time). Reiner was described in the New York Times as a “friend of Manson’s,” but later got fired when Manson didn’t like his defense strategy. He then somehow shed the Manson friend label to run for and win elections for LA City Controller, LA City Attorney, and LA County DA.

(Here’s an unrelated clip from the New York Times article I thought was kind of funny).

Gil Garcetti is the father of former Mayor Eric Garcetti and much later went on to be a producer on legal shows like The Closer and a semi-professional photographer. Here’s a nice picture he took of the rose garden in Expo Park:

We find these two men in 1992 running for District Attorney at what is basically Peak Crime in Los Angeles. That year in the County there were:

• 1,919 murders, a record at the time (for comparison there were 683 last year)

• 68,959 robberies, still a record today (there were 17,635 last year)

• 88,770 aggravated assaults, also a record today (39,221 last year)

All of these crime categories had gone up sharply every single year since 1988, when the last election happened. Also the LA Riots happened one month before the primary.

So you can imagine what I was expecting when I went back to look at coverage of this race: a full-blown crime panic plowed directly onto the forehead of incumbent DA Ira Reiner, who would be accused of presiding over a breakdown of society just like Gascón was by his own opponents.

The “soft on crime” charge had already been a staple of presidential campaigns for years by ‘92 — it helped make Jimmy Carter a one-term president and may have sunk Dukakis. So naturally a similar strategy would be deployed in a local race for a position overseeing the criminal legal response for a county that was actually experiencing a historic crime outbreak. Homicides, riots, the fact that Reiner defended one of the city’s most famous murderers — obviously that’s what this race would be about.

But I found no mention of any of it.

Nothing about the crime rate.

Nothing about the riots.

Not even an allusion to mild unease about public safety.

Here’s an entire LA Times article breaking down the “nasty” DA race as it headed into the runoff:

Sorry for dropping an entire article screenshot in here (more are coming), but I just feel the need to prove that there was no mention of the crime rate being a factor in either campaign. Instead the main issues are accusations of self-dealing/impropriety on both sides and a few embarrassing cases for the DA.

The same goes for every other piece of coverage I found about the race. Reiner gets dinged for low support from his staff and for being a nakedly ambitious politician, but never for exploding crime. Garcetti even wrote an op-ed in the LA Times that does not mention the crime rate at all — instead he attacks Reiner for not being transparent enough about declining to prosecute police shootings.

The endorsements for the race, which generally sum up the issues brought up by both campaigns, also do not mention the all-time-high murder rate. Here, I’ll pop in another whole one from the San Pedro News-Pilot.

I didn’t find any endorsements for Reiner, who was so massively unpopular he ended up dropping out of the race in September after he was already on the ballot. But in the coverage his unpopularity is never attributed to crime, or even fear of crime — it’s mostly chalked up to some prominent failures like the Rodney King verdict and the McMartin Preschool trial. (That one started when a woman accused a preschool teacher of having sodomized her son during Satanic rituals where the teacher also “flew around,” then grew into charges of 321 counts of child abuse, then ended seven years later with zero convictions after the longest trial in US history).

Here’s yet another article, this one from the LA Times about why Reiner dropped out. Nothing about crime! In a record-setting murder year!!

Compare all of these articles to every single piece of coverage about the race between Gascón and Hochman. Actually, let’s put a bet on this: I will offer my vintage zoo mug to anyone who can find a full article about the 2024 DA race that doesn’t mention rising crime or the accusation that Gascón made LA unsafe.

My zoo mug

Honestly, reading those old articles knocked me on my ass. I, like everyone else, have been conditioned over the last few years to believe that crime always get pinned on the District Attorney — but last time LA actually had a worsening crime problem that was clearly not the case.

And why should it be? There is zero evidence that a DA’s policies have any impact on crime rates. When a pro-incarceration prosecutor took over for a recalled progressive DA in San Francisco last year and started making more arrests, violent crime was up a year later. During Gascón’s term, crime trends in counties with “tough” prosecutors pretty much mirrored what was going on in LA — except that those prosecutors didn’t get blamed and probably kept their jobs last week.

What all this means is that the placement of responsibility for LA’s crime rate (real or perceived) on the District Attorney — a strategy that got national pickup and was one of the most successful of the election cycle — is new. It was planted and grown all the way to becoming an accepted truth within the single term of a progressive prosecutor, and pollinated by the national campaign against the Democrat in the White House.

Will it disappear just as quickly now that both are gone?