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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
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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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
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Voters in Los Angeles have approved new limits to police power, elected a prosecutor who promised to reopen police shooting cases and mandated that 10% of the local budget be spent on prevention programs rather than incarceration.
The slate of progressive victories in Los Angeles, which counts 10m residents and is home to the largest jail system in the United States, show the potential impact of local wins for criminal justice reform, as well as the growing electoral influence of Black Lives Matter.
“So many people got involved and wanted to vote,” said Leah Garcia, an East Los Angeles resident whose 18-year-old son Paul Rea was shot to death by a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy in 2019. “A lot of the families I talk to – we’re tired of living in fear.”
Los Angeles elected a new district attorney, George Gascón, who has pledged not to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, not transfer teens to adult court, not pursue the death penalty and won’t use “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
Though Gascón faced protests in his former job as San Francisco district attorney for refusing to prosecute officers in several high-profile police killing cases, he vowed during the campaign in LA to reopen some police shooting cases, and has said that incarcerating people for low-level offenses during the coronavirus pandemic is “unconscionable”.
Law enforcement unions had contributed millions of dollars in political spending to backing Gascón’s opponent, the incumbent prosecutor Jackie Lacey.
For the past three years, Lacey had refused to meet with Black Lives Matter activists protesting against what they say are more than 600 police killings and in-custody deaths of prisoners since she took office in 2013 and Lacey’s refusal to prosecute the officers responsible. More
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Jackie Lacey, the Los Angeles district attorney, was ousted by her progressive challenger in one of the most closely watched criminal justice races in the US this year.
George Gascón, the former police chief and district attorney of San Francisco, won the race to lead the Los Angeles prosecutors’ office with more than 53% of the vote, as of Friday morning. Black Lives Matter LA and other activist groups played a major role in the heated contest, having protested against Lacey’s policies for years.
An emotional Lacey conceded the race on Friday, saying that while 791,000 ballots remained to be counted in Los Angeles county, her consultants advised her that she would not be able to close the gap enough to claim victory. She suggested that unprecedented amounts of money poured into the race contributed to her defeat, as well as the nationwide protests that erupted over the summer following the high-profile police killings of Black civilians.
“The circumstances surrounding the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery gave breath to an in-progress discussion around racism, policing and criminal justice reform,” she said. “These incidents were painful and exposed an issue that existed in this country for years: racism. Our nation is going through a reckoning and what happened in my election may one day be listed as a consequence of that. It may be said that the results of this election may be the result of our season of discontent and our demand to see a tsunami of change.”
Lacey was the first woman and first African American to serve as the Los Angeles DA. In her second term, Lacey faced intensifying scrutiny over her refusal to prosecute police officers who kill, her close ties with law enforcement unions and her continued use of the death penalty.
Gascón, who was endorsed by political heavyweights such as Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, is part of a wave of liberal, reform-minded DA candidates across the US who have pledged to undo some of the harms and racial inequities of policing and prisons.
BLM and other activist groups have increasingly put pressure on elected district attorneys, who are some of the most influential and least accountable players in the US criminal justice system.
Los Angeles’ prosecutorial office is the largest local prosecutor’s office in the country. The Los Angeles DA’s office oversees 1,000 lawyers, funnels defendants into the world’s largest jail system and reviews police violence cases in a county that has some of the highest number of police killings in the nation. LA prosecutors are also responsible for investigating misconduct in the LA sheriff’s department, which has been plagued by recent scandals, including controversial killings and alleged gangs of deputies engaged in criminal behavior.
Gascón gained traction and celebrity support amid national protests against police killings and racial inequality following the death of George Floyd in May. He has pledged to hold police accountable for brutality, promising to reopen specific cases of killings by police that Lacey had previously cleared.
In an interview with the Guardian last month, Gascón said he would stop using a number of “tough-on-crime” laws that have contributed to mass incarceration and California’s prison overcrowding crisis: “We can see incarceration and safety are not necessarily synonymous, and the fact that this is becoming more obvious to many, it’s very, very energizing to me.”
As DA, he said he would not fight to keep people in prison when they are up for parole, not transfer teens to adult court, won’t pursue the death penalty and won’t use “gang enhancements”, which have long been used in racially discriminatory ways.
Lacey disappointed progressive groups during her tenure, including by sending 23 people to death row, more than any other county in the US in recent years. All but one sentenced to death were people of color. Despite hundreds of killings by police, she only brought charges in one case.
Gascón also faced progressive protests when he was San Francisco DA, stemming from his refusal to prosecute police in a number of high-profile killings. Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, who has long rallied against Lacey, noted that she would probably end up protesting Gascón, too, once he is DA, given the nature of the prosecutor’s office.
Gascón is expected to make his first public remarks on Friday afternoon. More
The race for top prosecutor in Los Angeles has become one of the most important criminal justice elections in the US this year, with Black Lives Matter activists pushing the contest to the forefront of national debates on racist policing and incarceration.Jackie Lacey, the first woman and first African American to serve as LA district attorney, is facing a tough challenge from George Gascón, a former San Francisco district attorney who has positioned himself as a progressive candidate dedicated to police accountability and reducing the prison population. More
A dozen local governments have moved to reduce their police budgets by more than $1.4bn, marking a significant shift in American politicsIn the days after the killing of George Floyd, an extraordinary wave of mass protests erupted across the US, with demonstrators setting fire to police buildings and cars, shutting down freeways and bridges and storming city halls and neighborhoods.Amid familiar chants of Black Lives Matter, a new slogan emerged: “Defund the police.” Continue reading… More
