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      High-stakes California races will decide LA mayor and San Francisco recall

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      High-stakes California races will decide LA mayor and San Francisco recall Analysts watch to see if voters in America’s more liberal cities will address police reform, homelessness and mass incarceration High-stakes primary races taking place on Tuesday in California are expected to have major consequences for police reform, incarceration and the state’s growing homelessness crisis.The most closely watched race is the mayor’s contest in Los Angeles, where voters are deciding between a tough-on-crime real estate developer, Rick Caruso, who has already poured nearly $40m of his own fortune into his primary campaign, and the former community organizer and Democratic congresswoman Karen Bass.Street activist, congresswoman – mayor? Karen Bass reaches for LA’s top jobRead moreIn San Francisco, the city’s progressive prosecutor, Chesa Boudin, is facing a recall election that could have a major impact on movements for criminal justice reform across the US.Midway through a tense midterm elections year, the races are likely to serve as a litmus test for Democrats and progressives. Analysts are watching to see if the majority of voters in some of America’s most ostensibly liberal cities decide to reject attempts to reduce mass incarceration and address the stark racial disparities in the criminal justice system.But one of the starkest takeaways so far is that voters simply are not very engaged in California’s primary election, despite multiple measures designed to make it easier for them to participate. Early turnout so far has been abysmal, even though every registered voter in California was mailed a ballot.“Even if you make it extremely easy to vote, like in California, but the political culture, candidates and issues aren’t there, you aren’t going to increase the turnout,” political scientist Fernando Guerra said. “We have extreme generational issues, with homelessness and crime and the cost of housing, and I think we have the candidates. There’s a lack of political culture.”Lower turnout is likely to be a particular challenge for “a lot of the young progressive candidates”, who might end up losing to an incumbent by a small margin of votes, Guerra said.Voters in California and nationwide are concerned about gas prices and the cost of living. A recent poll found that only a third of Los Angeles voters approved of the city’s police department, a lower approval rating than in 1991, after the police beating of Rodney King, but that nearly half of voters surveyed wanted to increase the size of the force.The role of the police in public safety is one of the key issues up and down the ballot, with younger progressive candidates who support defunding the police challenging older centrist Democrats in several Los Angeles city council races.Bass, the former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, supports police reform and a modest increase in Los Angeles police department staffing; Caruso has pledged to put an additional 1,500 officers on the street.Both Bass and Caruso have promised to put an end to people sleeping on the street in Los Angeles. Caruso has expressed willingness to arrest unhoused people who refuse to move to a city-provided shelter bed, and has also praised an army camp for undocumented children at the Texas border as a good model for how to deal with the city’s homelessness crisis.For some Los Angeles progressives, Bass’s more centrist positions on policing and homelessness have been a disappointment. Two years after George Floyd’s murder by police sparked worldwide protests, some activists see Bass’s endorsement of putting more police on the street as a step backwards.“She’s losing the enthusiasm of folks on the left, and I think that is a miscalculation,” said Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Los Angeles, who endorsed Gina Viola, a local activist running to Bass’s left, for mayor.Progressive groups in LA have also organized to oust the incumbent LA county sheriff, Alex Villanueva, who has been at the center of multiple scandals related to abuse and misconduct cases within the department. His critics, however, have not rallied behind one opponent among his eight challengers.The role of massive personal fortunes in public elections has also become a central issue in California’s primary campaigns. The attempt to recall Boudin, a central figure in the movement to elect prosecutors who want to make the legal system less punitive and racist, is reportedly being funded by ultra-wealthy donors, many of them in the tech industry, including: Ron Conway, an early DoorDash investor; Garry Tan, an Instacart investor; and David Sacks, a former PayPal executive.The result of the attempt to recall Boudin in San Francisco will “affect whether prosecutors elsewhere feel emboldened to take new approaches or whether they will perceive that as a political risk”, said Sandra Mayson, a University of Pennsylvania law professor.Political spending on the Los Angeles mayoral primary has already topped $50m, with Caruso’s campaign spending more than $40m of that. Bass’s campaign has spent $3m, in contrast, and a local police union has spent a similar amount on advertisement opposing her candidacy.On Friday, Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, tweeted his public endorsement of Caruso, who himself is ranked No 261 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans. “He’s awesome,” Musk wrote. “Executive competence is super-underrated in politics – we should care about that a lot more!”Caruso, a real estate developer with an estimated net worth of $4bn, has used at least $38m of his own money to move to the front of a crowded non-partisan primary field, a number that has already broken every previous record for mayor’s races in Los Angeles, local experts said. The billionaire’s personal fortune has funded a barrage of attractive television ads and mailers touting his candidacy, even as Caruso has skipped some mayoral debates, and largely avoided engaging with the press or holding open public events.Bass and then Caruso took an early lead in mayoral polls, leading other mayoral primary contenders to drop out of the race, though some, such as Kevin de Leon, a current city council member, fight on.Heading into Tuesday, polls showed Bass and Caruso closely matched in terms of voter support, setting up the possibility that neither would surpass the 50% vote threshold needed to win outright. In that case, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff election in November, a result that is expected to generate millions more in political spending from Caruso and from Bass’s progressive backers in Hollywood.TopicsCaliforniaUS politicsLos AngelesSan FranciscoUS policingUS justice systemnewsReuse this content More

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      Could this tough-on-crime billionaire be LA’s next mayor?

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      Could this tough-on-crime billionaire be LA’s next mayor?Rick Caruso’s campaign is tapping into fears of rising crime and Angelenos’ frustration with the homelessness emergency A billionaire real estate developer has spent more than $23m on his campaign to become Los Angeles’s next tough-on-crime mayor, and experts say his record-breaking investment is buying him a real chance at victory.Rick Caruso, a real estate magnate who is ranked No 261 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans, entered the crowded race to run America’s second largest city in February with single-digit support and little name recognition.Two months and nearly $10m in advertising spending later, he jumped to first place, polling alongside the previous mayoral frontrunner, congresswoman Karen Bass.‘A metastasizing crisis’: can Karen Bass end street encampments in LA?Read moreCaruso has focused his campaign ahead of the 7 June primary on fears of rising crime and Angelenos’ frustration at an ever-growing homelessness emergency, arguing that the city’s political establishment has been putting residents at risk: “I see my city being torn apart because of bad decisions by leaders,” he said in November.He has pledged, if elected, to hire 1,500 more police officers, and has suggested he would arrest unhoused people who refuse to move into city-run homeless shelters. “You don’t get a choice to stay on the street any more. The minute we have a bed for you, you move into the bed, or otherwise there’s a consequence,” he said in anearly Fox News interview.Caruso is “catching the wave” of some voters’ anxieties about homelessness and crime, but “there’s no way he would be where he was if it wasn’t for the money,” said Fernando Guerra, a political scientist who has studied Los Angeles’ electoral dynamics for decades.The billionaire has spent more in the first months of the race than the city’s current mayor spent during his entire campaign, Guerra said. Caruso’s millions have translated into a flood of campaign ads, mailers and text messages targeted at different groups across the city.“If you watch TV in Los Angeles, you’ll see [his ads] three times an hour,” said Adam Conover, a Los Angeles-based comedian who has become a prominent critic. The ads are very effective, Conover added, “gorgeously shot”, “glossy”, and “completely inescapable”. In them, a sun-tanned Caruso makes a simple pitch: he loves Los Angeles, and he wants to clean it up.“He’s pure Ronald Reagan,” Conover said.A fortune in shopping mallsThe scion of a wealthy family, Caruso made his fortune in real estate. He owns a luxury beach hotel in Montecito, California, where rooms start at $2,000 a night. But he’s perhaps most famous for his outdoor malls, one of which is called the Americana, and which all feature quaint trolleys, giant fountains and speakers playing a rotation of old-fashioned tunes. Caruso’s company likes to tout that the flagship mall in Los Angeles, the Grove, gets more daily visitors than Disneyland.Caruso has never held public office, but over the years he has served on a series of high-profile public boards, from the department of water and power commission to the Los Angeles police commission and the University of Southern California’s board of trustees, which he chaired in the midst of a sprawling campus sexual abuse scandal.He has received glowing, high-profile endorsements – from Gwyneth Paltrow, his neighbour in the posh neighbourhood of Brentwood; Bill Bratton, the former police chief and champion of “broken windows” policing; and the rapper Snoop Dogg, who endorsed Caruso via a Zoom call.His campaign has highlighted photos of smiling Black and Latino youth who benefited from what it says is a total of $130m in charitable giving, though his opponents instead like to put the spotlight on what they say is his “$100m yacht”, which reportedly has nine bedrooms, a gym, a pool and an elevator. (Influencer Olivia Jade Giannulli was on that same yacht when her mother, actor Lori Laughlin, was charged for paying $500,000 in bribes to get her daughters admitted to USC.)Campaign spokesperson Peter Rangone would not confirm the value of the candidate’s yacht, saying in an email: “It’s too bad that our opponents spend so much time on personal attacks.” The Caruso campaign declined to make Caruso available for an interview, or share any information about in-person campaign events a reporter could attend.Tough-on-crime DemocratAs a real estate billionaire running for office on a law-and-order platform, Caruso has drawn plenty of critical comparisons to Donald Trump. It doesn’t help that Caruso has refused to release his tax returns, providing instead a summary of his finances “so sketchy that it’s insulting”, as one Los Angeles Times columnist put it.The comparison has its limits. Caruso is a lifelong Catholic, lauded by Pope Francis for his service to the church. He is by all accounts a profitable and detail-oriented developer, who continues to operate and fine-tune the properties he builds.“Trump doesn’t remotely know the real estate business like Rick Caruso knows the real estate business,” said Don Luis Camacho, a Caruso supporter and the owner of El Paseo Inn restaurant, a longtime family business based in downtown Los Angeles.What is clear, however, is that his policies lean more conservative than those of the other Democrats running in the race. (Caruso announced he had registered as a Democrat this January, after decades as an independent, and, previously, a Republican.)His campaign says he has “always been pro-choice” and that, with abortion rights under threat nationwide, he plans to spend $1m to support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion in California. But Planned Parenthood called on him this month to apologize for previously donating “nearly $1m to policymakers who put forth legislation that criminalized abortion”. The Caruso Catholic Center at the University of Southern California, which the Caruso family donated at least $6m to build, helped lead the March for Life through the streets of Los Angeles earlier this year.At a time when LA’s homelessness emergency has taken on staggering proportions, with at least 41,000 people unhoused, he has pledged to rid the city’s streets of encampments. He has even suggested that an army camp for undocumented children at the Texas border that has been the subject of multiple whistleblower reports alleging “gross mismanagement, chaos and substandard conditions” is a good model for sheltering the unhoused.“Fort Bliss is very well done. It has its own medical facilities, recreational facilities, its own cafeteria facilities. It has arts and crafts. It’s really an amazing place,” Caruso said in late April, noting the camp was built in “about a month and a half”.Caruso has also been a champion of the Los Angeles police department, once working with LAPD to build a miniature station for “community-based policing” at the heart of his flagship mall. (It was set on fire during the George Floyd protests in 2020.) Police outpost at #TheGrove set on fire…. pic.twitter.com/GdN9OZClX8— Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Paul) May 31, 2020
      And he’s been a critic of some criminal justice reforms designed to reverse mass incarceration. When the Nordstrom store at the Grove was targeted last November as part of a series of smash-and-grab robberies of high-end stores across LA, Caruso called the robbery “a manifestation of ‘We’re going to defund the cops’”. He has blamed a measure that reduced the criminal penalty for certain thefts under $950 for driving the recent string of California luxury store thefts.“We can all agree that stealing a $900 handbag or watch shouldn’t be an offense for which someone is released from custody within hours of being arrested without consequence,” his campaign website notes.He has also claimed that residents are now experiencing “some of the worst crime we’ve had in the history of Los Angeles” and “the most violent crime”. Compared with 1992, when Los Angeles saw 1,094 homicides, the city is substantially safer, according to police department data. The city’s homicide increase over the past two years, part of a troubling national rise in killings nationwide, pushed the number of homicide victims from under 300 a year to 397. Property crimes ticked up in 2021, but were actually down compared with most of the five previous years.“People in LA do not feel safe, that is not fearmongering, it is stating reality,” Rangone, a campaign spokesperson, wrote in an email.Any increases in crime and violence can have a big impact on people’s sense of safety. Among last year’s homicide victims was a beloved, well-known 81-year-old philanthropist, Jacqueline Avant, who was shot to death during a burglary of her house in Beverly Hills. Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix and Avant’s son-in-law, has become a prominent Caruso supporter.‘Unthinkable’Liberal Democrats have dominated Los Angeles’ politics for so long that it would have been “unthinkable” a year or two ago to have someone like Caruso, “who is not from that progressive coalition, on the brink of winning”, Guerra said.But Caruso’s arguments have definitely struck a chord with a much broader swath of voters. Polls this year have found that many residents are deeply concerned about homelessness and public safety and feel the city is going in the wrong direction.Twice in the city’s past, after uprisings against police violence towards Black residents in Watts in 1965 and in South Central and across the city in 1992, majorities of Los Angeles voters rejected a liberal Democrat to elect a Republican, pro-police mayoral candidate, Guerra said.In the wake of intense protests in Los Angeles over the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, Caruso may be the latest conservative police department champion to ride a reactionary wave to the mayor’s office.Some of the traits that Caruso’s more progressive opponents are attacking may actually make him seem more relatable to many Angelenos, Guerra said.The city has the highest total number of Catholics of any US city besides New York, Guerra said, and it’s the center of the largest Catholic diocese in the US, boasting a total of 4.3 million members across the southern California region.For many Catholic voters, watching Caruso struggle with his stance on abortion, saying he’s pro-choice and does not want Roe v Wade overturned but also funding politicians and a Catholic student center that are actively anti-abortion, may feel very familiar, Guerra said.And while the city’s global fame is focused on its film and TV industry, “the number one industry in Los Angeles today, 20 years ago, 50 years, ago, 100 years ago, is land development. Always has been, always will be,” Guerra said.Caruso “captures the aspirations of every single Angeleno who bought that second property and thinks they’re going to be the next monopoly tycoon”, he added.TopicsLos AngelesUS political financingUS policingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘We have failed’: how California’s homelessness catastrophe is worsening

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      ‘We have failed’: how California’s homelessness catastrophe is worsening A new Guardian US series reports on a seemingly intractable crisis, and hears from those living on the edge in one of America’s richest statesWhen California shut down in March 2020, advocates for unhoused people thought the state might finally be forced to solve its homelessness crisis. To slow the spread of Covid, they hoped, officials would have to provide people living outside with stable and private shelter and housing.But in the two years since, California’s humanitarian catastrophe has worsened: deaths of people on the streets are rising; college students are living in their cars; more elderly residents are becoming unhoused; encampment communities are growing at beaches, parks, highway underpasses, lots and sidewalks. California has the fifth largest economy in the world, a budget surplus, the most billionaires in the US and some of the nation’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Yet the riches of the Golden State have not yielded solutions that match the scale of the crisis that’s been raging for decades. Pandemic-era programs have had some success for a slice of the unhoused population, but many measures have fallen short.Meanwhile, homelessness has become the top issue in political races. Polls in Los Angeles, which is home to 40% of the state’s unhoused population, suggest that a majority of voters want their governments to act faster, and that residents are angered by the immense human suffering caused by a seemingly intractable crisis. ​​Unhoused and unequal: a California crisis. The pandemic brought money, political will and public support to tackle California’s longstanding homelessness crisis. Instead, things got worse. In a new series, the Guardian’s west coast team reports from across the state, exploring what it would take to address a seemingly intractable problemIn response, governments across the state are increasingly cracking down on people sleeping outside. Out of the 20 largest cities in California, the majority have either passed or proposed new laws banning camping in certain places or have ramped up encampment sweeps. LA and Oakland passed laws meant to prohibit camping in certain zones; San Francisco’s mayor has pushed for a police crackdown on unhoused people using drugs in the Tenderloin neighborhood; Fresno adopted a law to fine people up to $250 for entering certain restricted areas; and Modesto, Bakersfield and Riverside are pushing to expand the number of park rangers in an effort to enforce anti-camping rules and related restrictions.Some unhoused people and civil rights activists warn that those escalating efforts to force people off the streets are only further hurting the most vulnerable.“We have failed in so many respects,” said Theo Henderson, a Los Angeles advocate for the unhoused, who was himself living outside until recently. “There are families with children living in automobiles. There are elderly and the infirm on the streets … It’s a dark time right now, and unhoused residents are very afraid.”‘Unacceptable’ numbersIn a new series that will be published over the next several months, Guardian US is examining California’s homelessness crisis across the state.While homelessness remains concentrated in major metro areas like Los Angeles, San Jose, the San Francisco Bay area and San Diego, communities from the north to the Mexico border are facing their own emergencies.Bar chart showing the 31% increase in California’s total unhoused population, largely driven by a 57% increase in those that are unsheltered, or living on the streets, since 2010.California counted 161,548 unhoused people in the state in January 2020, the most recent count data available. The count is a “point in time” estimate that tallies people living on the street or in shelters. Since it’s a rough snapshot of a single day, and doesn’t account for people who are hidden from public view or are unhoused but couch-surfing that night, it is considered a significant undercount.At least 113,660 of those counted were classified as “unsheltered”, making California home to more than half of all people without shelter in America and the only state where more than 70% of the homeless population is unsheltered (by comparison, just 5% of New York’s homeless population was unsheltered.A treemap area chart that shows California has up over 50% of the US’s unsheltered population.The consequences of so many people living outside are severe and fatal. In 2015, the LA county coroner’s office recorded 613 deaths of unhoused people. That number has steadily climbed each year, rising to 1,609 fatalities in 2021, a spokesperson said. Those figures are an undercount, because the coroner only tracks fatalities considered sudden, unusual or violent. A report by the University of California, Los Angeles last year estimated that overdoses were a leading cause of death of unhoused people during the pandemic.Deaths of unhoused people in LA county up 160% since 2015. Bar chart showing the increase in LA county unhoused deaths from 2015 to 2021.Data analyses have revealed other disturbing trends: one UCLA study estimated that at least 269,000 students from kindergarten to grade 12 in the state were experiencing homelessness before the pandemic; in LA county, Black residents were four times as likely to be unhoused; and also in LA, there was a 20% jump in the number of unhoused seniors, with nearly 5,000 elderly people living outside before Covid arrived.“It’s just not acceptable,” said Wendy Carrillo, a state assemblymember who represents parts of LA and chairs a budget committee on homelessness. As a kid, she would pass by Skid Row and struggle to understand why so many people were forced to live outside, she said. The crisis has grown since: “We’ve become so disconnected as a society, so cold to the issue that people are OK with stepping over someone who is passed out on the floor.”A $14bn investment – and a crackdown on campingCalifornia’s catastrophe stems in part from a longstanding, statewide housing affordability crisis. Californians spend significantly more of their income on housing compared with the rest of the nation. More than 1.5 million renters spend half of their earnings on rent, leaving them potentially one medical emergency or crisis away from homelessness. In recent years, income inequality has only worsened.UCLA research on the residents of one LA encampment found that people cited a range of factors that led them to become unhoused, including eviction, job loss, domestic violence, former incarceration, family conflict and low wages in gig economy jobs.Responding to the crisis, California is pouring billions of dollars into housing and related services, but the success of new programs meant to expand affordable housing and emergency shelter has been mixed.“One of the challenges of housing policy is that it’s like turning around a giant ship. It’s a slow process,” said Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project. The state has made significant progress in recent years in investing in housing, he noted, but the benefits can sometimes take more than a decade to materialize.There are also systemic and historical problems that housing programs can’t solve, including the loss of social safety nets, the dissolution of redevelopment programs, and a controversial state tax measure passed in 1978 that has created significant obstacles for new home ownership, Roller said.And some regions have invested more in temporary shelter programs than in permanent housing, making it hard for people to transition out of shelters, especially as the housing market worsens and as more people newly become unhoused, advocates said.Emblematic of the challenges is California’s signature homelessness response during the pandemic: Project Roomkey. The program temporarily provided motel rooms to an estimated 50,000 people living on the streets. But the program was administered at the local level and some counties fell short of their goals or failed to meet the demand in their regions; participants reported struggling to find housing after hotel stays ended and some returned to the streets because of the strict rules in the program, advocates said.This year, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, is pushing a $14bn investment in homelessness solutions, meant to create 55,000 new housing units and treatment slots. His Homekey initiative, the successor to Project Roomkey, allows local governments to buy motels to use as temporary or permanent housing for unhoused people. As of last week, the state has awarded $695m for more than 2,400 units.While the programs could be transformative for some participants, advocates worry their impact for many could come too late, especially with statewide eviction protections expiring at the end of the month and pandemic-era rent relief efforts winding down. Even with a partial eviction moratorium in place, sheriffs enforced lockouts of thousands of households in the first year of the pandemic, according to a CalMatters analysis.“We are getting a lot of calls from tenants who are being evicted,” said Jovana Morales-Tilgren, housing policy coordinator with Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, a Central Valley-based organization. “A lot of undocumented folks don’t have the resources to battle an eviction notice … and then there are not enough shelters for the unhoused people.”Meanwhile, advocates warn, conditions for those living on the streets are only getting harder amid increasing restrictions on camping. A proposed state law would also allow courts to force some people with severe mental illness into treatment.The crackdown on tent living and fear of possible forced treatment can lead people to scatter into more hidden locations where it can be harder for them to access services and get into programs, advocates say.“Using law enforcement to respond to houselessness is both counterproductive and ineffective,” said Eve Garrow, policy analyst and advocate at the ACLU of Southern California. The expansion of criminalization was overwhelming, Garrow said. “And people are experiencing compassion fatigue, and they want something done. Local public officials are responding with what they see as ‘quick fixes’ that aren’t fixes at all and are completely misguided.”‘I don’t want to die on the streets’People living on the streets or in temporary shelters waiting for housing said they were worried and exhausted by the increasingly hostile rhetoric of politicians and communities.“Unhoused people are blamed for every social ill,” said Henderson, who regularly talks to unhoused residents on his podcast. “There’s an uptick in burglaries, and then the response is, ‘Can we get the unhoused removed?’ Every unhoused person has those stories – as soon as something happens, here comes the police looking at them as the prime suspect.”Kenneth Stallworth, who has been living in a group shelter since his Venice Beach encampment was shut down in a high-profile dispute last year, said he didn’t mind the shelter and appreciated the electricity, but also noted that he had seen several people die or have health emergencies in the facility.“The people are getting what they want,” he said of his fellow Angelenos. “The homeless are getting moved away from areas where there were the most complaints.”Dawn Toftee, 57, was living at an encampment near the stadium where the Super Bowl was held in LA last month, until she was forced to leave in advance of the big game. Officials said the residents were offered housing, but a month later, Toftee is camping down the street – and is still waiting for a housing voucher that could subsidize a rental.“I’m getting old and I don’t want to die on the streets,” she said, adding that she didn’t think officials cared whether people like her got housing: “They just want us out of eyesight.”TopicsCaliforniaUnhoused and unequal: a California crisisLos AngelesHomelessnessPovertyHousingUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      California gives people leaving prison just $200 to start over. After 50 years, that could change

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      California gives people leaving prison just $200 to start over. After 50 years, that could change The ‘gate money’ the state offers is ‘insufficient to survive’, one activist says, and can contribute to recidivism A California lawmaker wants to increase the allowance that people released from prison receive to cover basic needs for the first time in nearly 50 years.Sydney Kamlager, a state senator representing Los Angeles, is introducing legislation Friday to bump up the “gate money” – funds that people released from state prisons are given – from $200 to nearly $2,600.Omicron wreaks havoc across California prison facilities as staff cases surgeRead more“This is really about making sure that when people get out, we are not perpetuating a cycle of economic violence,” said Kamlager, whose office exclusively shared with the Guardian plans to introduce the new bill. “We have got to stop legislating poverty.”This is the first major effort to increase gate money in recent memory. The roughly 600,000 people released from federal and state prisons each year are usually offered a pittance – if anything – to buy a bus ticket home, or a first meal, clothing and toiletries. California currently provides a debit card loaded with at most $200, though people serving short sentences receive even less. It already offers more than other states, an investigation by the Marshall Project found. Colorado, Texas, Florida and some other states provide $100 and Louisiana and Alabama offer just $10.California last increased the amount of gate money it offers in 1973 when $200 could cover a month’s rent. “Now that money is simply insufficient to survive,” said Samual Nathaniel Brown, the co-founder of the Anti-Violence Safety and Accountability Project.When Brown was released in December after being incarcerated for 24 years, the first thing he bought was a meal for his wife, his two daughters, his sister and his niece. It was a way to thank them for their love and support throughout his imprisonment. They got Korean barbecue, and the bill was about $140.“And there went my gate money,” he said.Brown considers himself blessed that his family picked him up from prison, and he has been able to depend on them after his release. For those without people to lean on, the $200 can be a taunt – or a sign to simply give up, he said.Re-entering society after years or decades behind bars can be rough, with scarce housing and job opportunities available for people with a criminal record. Parole requirements, obligations to family, outstanding debts and health needs stack up quickly, and can be a steep hill to climb.More and broader reforms are required, said Kamlager and the activists she is working with – including of the low wages paid for exploitative prison labor. But upping gate money is also urgently necessary, she said.People often enter prison impoverished and are being thrown into poverty upon release, Kamlager said. The system “perpetuates a fall deeper into desperation for folks who have just been released”, she added.Kamlager is proposing increasing the allowance to $2,590 after consulting with federal data on the cost of food and housing, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Living Wage Calculator, to find the average monthly expenses for a single adult with no children in 2021. Starting in 2024, the bill specifies that the allowance should also be adjusted annually to account for inflation. Kamlager pushed to introduce the bill on Friday, which is the last day to broach new bills during this legislative cycle.It costs California more than $8,800 to keep someone incarcerated each month, the senator noted – and increasing gate money allowance would cost the state less than pushing those just released back into the prison system.Kamlager said she decided to introduce the legislation after receiving a letter from an incarcerated person, asking, “How do you expect any of us to make it if we’re getting out with just $200?”. “It struck a chord,” she said“In 2022, when the price for a gallon of gas in Los Angeles is almost $5, it is unconscionable that the state of California still gives just $200 in allowance for folks who are getting out of prison,” she added.Experts view a person’s first 72 hours after release as a vulnerable, crucial time that can determine whether or not they end up back in prison, said Amika Mota, the policy director for the Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition, a group that is working with Kamlager’s office on the bill. In a criminal justice system that purports to uphold public safety, providing a pittance to people when they are released is “counterproductive public safety”, Brown added. “Not having enough money, it makes people think ‘I need to do something fast.’ And that’s the same type of thinking that led most women and men to prison to begin with.”For mothers leaving incarceration, $2,600 could offer a chance at finding secure housing and reuniting with their children, Mota said. Amid the pandemic, when re-entry after release has been especially perilous and chaotic for many, a pilot program by the nonprofit Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) has been distributing $2,750 in cash assistance to people leaving prisons all over the US. An early evaluation found that participants were able to use the funds to buy food, pay for transportation and contribute to caring for families. Some participants said the money helped lift them out of homelessness.Meanwhile, Rasheed Stanley-Lockheart, a reentry director for the Ahimsa Collective, a restorative justice non-profit said, “I’ve seen guys come out holding that $200 in their hand, and it’s almost like they don’t know what to do with it because they’re scared.”“We need much more than that to survive,” he said.TopicsCaliforniaUS prisonsLos AngelesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The LA mayor’s ‘jinx:’ Garcetti could leave for India as city faces host of challenges

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      The question has loomed over Los Angeles politics for years: when will the mayor resign?Pundits have long predicted that Eric Garcetti, the mayor with clear ambitions for higher office, would not finish out his second term. Now, it seems likely that the Democrat running the second largest city in the US will be stepping down more than a year early – with widespread reports that Joe Biden has selected him as his ambassador to India.If confirmed, Garcetti, 50, will be leaving behind a thorny legacy in a megacity facing a confluence of challenges: a warming climate, congestion and air pollution, a housing crisis, gentrification battles and some of the worst economic inequality in America.LA is facing some serious problems, and I think he understands that this isn’t a record that he is going to want for the rest of his careerWhile he has enacted major policies on climate and transit, he could be departing amid a sexual harassment case in his office and at a time when his popularity in the heavily Democratic city has slipped. Garcetti has increasingly become a target of progressive groups over his policies on policing, homelessness, and other racial justice issues.“LA is facing some serious problems, and I think he understands that this isn’t a record that he is going to want for the rest of his career,” said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola law professor. “It is hard to run for higher office when your most recent resume line is mayor of LA. He’s made the calculation that … he has to enter the national or international stage before he comes back home to try [to] move up the political ladder.”Garcetti, the son of a former LA district attorney, served as a city councilman before being elected mayor in 2013 on a “back to basics” platform of increasing jobs and fixing city streets. He had initially considered a 2020 White House run and later joined the Biden campaign as a co-chair. When it was rumored last year that he was under consideration for a cabinet position (possibly transportation or housing secretary), Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups began holding loud, daily protests outside Getty House, the mayor’s residence, urging Biden not to pick a “self-seeking mayor for a cabinet position in which he is completely unqualified”.The mayor announced he would not be taking a secretary job in December, citing the city’s rapidly worsening Covid catastrophe.Garcetti, the youngest mayor in LA in more than a century, would likely defend his record by pointing to his leadership during Covid, his efforts to stabilize the economy, his bid to bring the Olympics to LA in 2028, and his green jobs plan, said Levinson. It remains to be seen how the Olympics will impact the city, with opponents arguing that the games would accelerate displacement, gentrification and inequality.The LA Times editorial board recently urged Garcetti to stay, praising his “vision for a more livable, transit-oriented, environmentally and technologically friendly city” and his success at passing a new earthquake safety law.Carlo De La Cruz, California deputy for the Sierra Club’s My Generation Campaign, praised the mayor’s goals of 100% clean energy by 2045 and committing to an entirely electric fleet for garbage trucks: “It’s an achievement that I think people will remember as a critical shift … that will create ripple effects for the west coast and hopefully the nation.”The mayor succeeded in pushing a key transportation funding measure in 2016 and set commendable goals for improved mobility and safer streets, said Juan Matute, the deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. But the execution of his plans has been slow and haphazard, he said.“There was a lot of promise for changing mobility in southern California that came through in plans … but they’ve fallen short of implementation,” according to Matute.It’s his legacy on homelessness, however, that could haunt him for years, contributing to what some commentators have called the “jinx” of the LA mayor job, which has not generally led to higher office, observers say.“We are seeing homeless encampments increasing everywhere,” said Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie, a pastor at Skid Row, the epicenter of the crisis. “His legacy with us is a total failure. The issue of housing is not taken seriously in this city, because this city has never taken Black people seriously … and Garcetti is more concerned with getting people off the street and out of sight than getting people housed.” There are more than 41,000 homeless people in the city, according to last year’s count, and more than a thousand unhoused people die on the street each year in LA county.The pastor said Garcetti had been too focused on forcing people into shelters and relying on law enforcement instead of providing long-term housing solutions. He pointed to the 2015 LAPD fatal shooting of an unhoused Skid Row resident, Charly Africa Keunang, amid a Safer Cities initiative, which funded officer patrols in the neighborhood. Most recently, city leaders faced intense scrutiny for the eviction of a homeless community from a popular park, aided by police.Garcetti has recently touted his proposed $1bn budget for homelessness, which would go to new housing projects, homelessness prevention and eviction defense programs and the expansion of services and cleanup teams. He also made national headlines with his announcement of a basic income program that could be the largest in the nation.But racial justice groups have been pressing the mayor to redirect funds away from LAPD and into services and programs, and while there has been some reallocation, Garcetti, in what could be his final days, has pushed a police budget increase.Garcetti was co-opting BLM’s words by calling his proposal a “justice budget” and claiming to “reimagine” public safety while expanding police funds, said Dr Melina Abdullah, the BLMLA co-founder: “He appropriates our language and then does the exact opposite … This is really a rightwing strategy. It’s like advancing corporate interests and allowing them to pollute the environment, and then calling it the ‘clean skies act’.”The mayor’s office has pointed to ongoing efforts to send mental health specialists to certain 911 calls. But for his harshest critics, an early exit before his term ends in 2022 would serve as confirmation that he was not dedicated to the hard work of running a city struggling with a major humanitarian crisis. He would be the first LA mayor to step down mid-term since 1916 when the mayor resigned due to a cheating scandal, according to the LA Times.Garcetti is also leaving during an ongoing lawsuit alleging that the mayor ignored or laughed off sexual harassment by his former top aide. Attorneys for the plaintiff, who have deposed the mayor’s wife, have raised concerns that she and the mayor could be in another country and “out of this court’s subpoena power” before a scheduled deposition in July. The LA Times reported that the city’s attorneys have responded that she would be available.“It is the perfect end note for a legacy of really ineffectual leadership that at its best was just self-serving, but at its worst was very deadly,” said Ina Morton, an organizer with the activist group, People’s City Council LA.“It’s not surprising. He has this reputation of being a mayor who likes to show up for a photoshoot … who is not really concerned with making the political sacrifices that are necessary to lead a city and help people.”A spokesperson for the mayor did not respond to an inquiry. More

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      Republicans are winning over Asian immigrants like my father. Here's why | Geoffrey Mak

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      My father is a Chinese immigrant, middle-class. Growing up, he and his family were often on the move, escaping conflict in Vietnam, then the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution in China. During the reign of Chairman Mao, my father remembers schoolmates in Shanghai who were disappeared by the government. He had heard of dissidents who swam from mainland China to Hong Kong by night. Politically, he considered evangelicalism, anti-communism and democracy to be radical: the west. America captivated his imagination by way of Woodstock – Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary – and pictures of the magical big houses that sprawled the suburbs.After he immigrated to the States in the 1970s, he eventually did get his big house in the suburbs, which today stands at the heart of California’s 39th congressional district, comprising parts of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange county. It’s where the rapidly growing Asian American population was, in the last decade, heralded as the future of the Republican party. In November, the district flipped a House seat from Democrat to Republican. My father voted for Trump.He is just one of many Chinese American immigrants who increasingly find sympathy and belonging in the Republican party. They appear undeterred by Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, with slurs like the “Chinese virus” and “kung-flu”. More pressingly, they vehemently hate the Chinese Communist party and support Trump’s hawkish stance against China in the trade wars. Chinese voters make up the largest group within Asian Americans, who are collectively the fastest-growing demographic category in the country. While Asian Americans supported Biden overall, Trump gained seven percentage points with Asian Americans this election. (Among Asians, only Japanese Americans shifted toward the Democrats.)This might be cause for alarm for Democrats, who like to see themselves as the bearer of a nationwide multiracial coalition. Is this a myth? In California, a Democratic stronghold, Asian Americans appear increasingly nonplussed about campaigns touting multicultural ideals. For instance, many Asian American families oppose affirmative action, fearing that their children would suffer in elite university admissions if merit were given less weight than race. So when Proposition 16 – which would have ended a 24-year-old ban on affirmative action in education, employment and contracting – appeared on the ballot, Asian Americans played a pivotal role in voting it down. They were not taking it for the team. But should they be expected to?I voted for Proposition 16 in support of affirmative action, but I represent a segment of the liberal elite: a photogenic if not misleading face of the Asian American constituency. For people like my father, Democrats’ messages of inclusion and multiculturalism are leaving them cold.When Kamala Harris identified as the first Asian American vice-presidential candidate, my father did not particularly “feel seen”. When he read that Black Lives Matter protests turned violent, he bought an American flag from Amazon and hoisted it above his front door. Some of his views and choices mystify me, but I see how, for instance, a term like “Bipoc” – which stands for Black and Indigenous people of color, and stakes authority based on relative disadvantage – risks leaving many Asian Americans feeling squeezed out of the minority coalition, like an expendable casualty. This breeds the kind of resentment that the writer Wesley Yang identified when describing Asian Americans as “a nominal minority whose claim to be a ‘person of color’ deserving of the special regard reserved for victims is taken seriously by no one”.While the Biden campaign heavily courted the suburban vote, it still missed demographics like my father’s. In California’s 39th district, where my parents live, Democrat Gil Cisneros launched a much-lauded campaign where Chinese-speaking staffers reached out to voters on apps like WeChat and Line (popular with Chinese), and Korean speakers to voters on KakaoTalk (popular with Koreans). This diversified approach helped secure his victory in 2018. Yet this year he still lost to the Republican candidate Young Kim.The Republican campaign to Asian Americans was narrower in scope than the Democrats’, but Republicans still won the hearts and minds of California’s 39th district. That so many swing congressional districts pivoted Republican seems to indicate that Biden’s victory is more indicative of a general impatience to vote Trump out of office, rather than a long-term persuasion towards Democratic interests. While Democrats still hold the majority of Asian American voters, they can hardly take them for granted.Today, Asian Americans are the only major demographic category in which naturalized citizens make up the majority, and the immigrant population is increasing. While the multiracial coalition is certainly an ideal worth fighting for, the Democrats need to find ways of reaching immigrant voters that go beyond an identity politics that treats Asian Americans as a consolidated monolith, and listen more to the grievances and enthusiasms immigrants feel today. Asian Americans will be ignorable up until they’re not. More

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      'We knocked on 80,000 doors': how progressive Nithya Raman won Los Angeles

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      [embedded content]
      A Los Angeles urban planner who made homelessness and housing the central issues of her campaign and condemned the Los Angeles police department for “responding to protests against police brutality with more police brutality”, won a crucial local race this November.
      Nithya Raman, 39, joins the list of Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressives who have beaten Democratic party incumbents in closely watched races. Her opponent, David Ryu, had been endorsed by Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
      Raman’s Los Angeles city council victory won’t change the balance of power among Democrats in Washington. But her win does show the impact progressives can have by organizing at the local level, and the intensity of enthusiasm she prompted among Angelenos has earned her comparisons to the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
      Raman’s campaign was powered by local advocacy groups, including the Sunrise Movement and Democratic Socialists of America, and she has endorsed a swath of bold progressive policies, from backing a Green New Deal, to arguing that some of the Los Angeles police department’s budget should be diverted to pay for unarmed community crisis specialists and outreach workers. She is pushing for a rent forgiveness program in response to the coronavirus crisis, and opposes all policies that criminalize people who are unhoused.
      Raman spoke to the Guardian the week after her victory. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
      How significant were the George Floyd protests to the progressive victories in LA this year, including voters choosing a new, more progressive local prosecutor and supporting a measure to devote more taxpayer dollars to community prevention services, rather than incarceration?
      After the protests began happening, people began making connections between what they were protesting in the streets and the decisions made by our county supervisors, our city council. They were finding out the name of their city council person. They were learning about what we spend on sheriffs and policing. Many groups in Los Angeles, like Black Lives Matter LA and the Youth Justice Coalition, had been doing the work around these issues for a long time. This election in Los Angeles was a result of that existing work on the ground, plus this widespread engagement. More