The crash was horrific, no doubt about it.
But did the aftermath prove that Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón is soft on crime and should be recalled, as the crash victim urged?
On Aug. 6, 2021, on the southern end of Speedway, a well-traveled alleyway in Venice, a teenage driver going the wrong way plowed into a woman pushing her baby in a stroller. The video of the crash, which went viral, was hard to watch. Thankfully, neither victim was seriously hurt.
The teen driver, who police said was intoxicated, was charged with two counts of assault with intention to harm and one count of felony hit-and-run and was sentenced to five to seven months at a Los Angeles County youth probation camp. These are not "summer camps," as conservatives describe them. They are incarceration facilities. (How do I know? I was married to a youth probation officer who worked in all of them.)
So was this sentence a mere slap on the wrist or a just punishment for a callow driver who came within a hair's breadth of killing a mother and child?
The mother, Rachel Hart, thought the sentence was an outrage, and said the driver should have gotten five years. She became a face of the latest movement to recall Gascón, who had forbidden prosecutors to charge minors as adults before softening his stance after an uproar from victims' rights groups and some of his own employees.
On Monday, county elections officials announced the recall failed to garner enough valid signatures to put Gascón's fate in the hands of voters in November.
Recall proponents needed 566,857 valid signatures. Despite collecting 715,000, only about 520,000 turned out to be valid. This was the second failed recall targeting Gascón, who will not face a challenger until his first term expires in two years.
Was Gascón humbled or chastened by this near miss?
Neither, it appears.
"Grateful to move forward from this attempted political power grab," he tweeted Monday, "rest assured LA County, the work hasn't stopped. My primary focus has been & will always be keeping us safe & creating a more equitable justice system for all."
I did not support the effort to recall Gascón.
I believe he is a principled proponent of equal justice. I support his commitment to ending racial disparities in the legal system and increasing police accountability. Voters share these feelings. After all, they put him in office by a wide margin in 2020 over two-time incumbent Jackie Lacey.
It's true that buyer's remorse is not rare in politics. San Francisco voters recently ousted progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin after 2 1/2 years in office. His recall prompted premature hot takes about the death of the progressive prosecutors' movement. At least I hope they were premature.
Still, I don't understand why Gascón felt the need to describe the recall effort as a power grab. Why can't he acknowledge — even if there are right-wing forces out there who oppose him — that many of his constituents and employees have sincere differences with him? And that his approach, which I believe in, has caused pain and division along the way?
Why can't he demonstrate just a little bit of humility?
Gascón is not the only Los Angeles elected official who lacks this greatly underappreciated quality.
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin, a principled politician who announced he would not seek reelection after a recall effort against him failed in January, also seemed unmoved by the many people in his district who were at the end of their ropes over homelessness and petty crime. Instead, he blamed right-wing forces for pushing his recall, although recall organizers said most signers were liberals simply exhausted by the city's inability to get traction on solutions for homelessness, especially as encampments multiplied during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Los Angeles anyway, it seems that the people who scream the loudest — about Gascón's approach to criminal justice and Bonin's approach to homelessness — are the noisy minority. And the more they have felt disregarded and disrespected, the louder they have yelled.
The rest of us, the quieter majority, you might say, want progressive solutions to the problems that bedevil us.
This dynamic was amply demonstrated in the June primary, when longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Karen Bass surged ahead of shopping mall developer Rick Caruso in the race for mayor, despite Caruso throwing a small hedge fund's worth of money into the contest. The same dynamic was at play in the race to replace Bonin. His choice for successor, Erin Darling, received more votes than Traci Park, whose hard-nosed stance on homelessness and crime provided a stark contrast for voters. (Bass will face Caruso and Darling will face Park in the November runoff.)
Judging from the way we vote, most Angelenos want sound, progressive policies to guide us to a more just city, nation and world. And we need principled public officials such as Gascón and Bonin to get us there.
In turn, the people we trust enough to put in office must be willing to bend a little, to compromise a little and, at the very least, to make their constituents feel heard and seen. Even — maybe especially — the angry ones.
