As signatures come in, both supporters and opponents on the ground in Los Angeles are closely watching a recall effort against District Attorney George Gascón, who ran on a progressive platform, with some viewing it as part of a wider struggle for criminal justice reform.

Since Gascón took office in December 2020, he and his policies have faced a wave of backlash, including widespread opposition from prosecutors inside the office of the district attorney, and two formal recall efforts. While the first failed to collect even half the necessary signatures to get on the ballot, the second claims to be more than two-thirds of the way to the magic number, with two months still left on the clock.

Gascón's supporters and opponents disagree on many issues, but they also take divergent views of the recall effort itself, with those backing it framing the fight as purely about Gascón and his tenure, and those who support Gascón viewing the effort as part of a broader backlash against criminal justice reform.

"This is part of a national movement, and this is what goes along with that," said Elise Moore, a spokesperson for Gascón. "These are major changes that we're talking about, and many people feel they are overdue."

Gascón, who defeated incumbent DA Jackie Lacey in 2020 with 53.5% of the vote, is one of several DAs in recent years who have run on promises of reform, such as Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. While the goal of such reformers has been to change the system from the inside, they often face tough opposition — and in Los Angeles, the backlash seems to have been particularly fierce.

The Gascón campaign — which was largely financed by wealthy donors such as billionaire George Soros and Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix's CEO — vowed to combat mass incarceration through strategies such as ending cash bail, no longer charging those under 18 as adults, and holding law enforcement accountable to the community. Gascón also touted his track record as a DA in San Francisco, as well as his time in law enforcement.

Roughly a year and a half after he took office, supporters say he has kept his campaign promises.

"George Gascón has been very courageous from Day 1 in naming the policies, particularly the sentencing policies, that led to mass incarceration in California and have not been shown to empirically keep us safer," said Anne Irwin, founder and director of Smart Justice California, a group backed by the left-leaning Tides Foundation that endorsed Gascón in 2020.

"He has been willing to name the disproportionate impact that mass incarceration has had on particularly Black and Latino communities in California," Irwin continued. "He has a very evolved and nuanced analysis on where the criminal justice system is effective and ineffective."

Ace Katano, a public defender who was one of the organizers of the public defender's union in LA and a volunteer with grassroots reform group Ground Game LA, said he has been pleasantly surprised by Gascón's time in office thus far.

"When Gascón announced his initial reforms … I was overjoyed," he said. "It was frankly much more direct and steadfast and principled than I had expected. … I didn't actually have the highest possible expectations, but he did come out swinging."

However, others take a sharply different view of Gascón's time in office. Eric Siddall, vice president of the Los Angeles Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the union representing deputy DAs, told Law360 that many of Gascón's policies have not only been extreme, but contrary to the law.

"Before he even takes office, he … does a press conference [on his upcoming policy changes]," Siddall said. "We learned from reporters about these changes that he's about to unleash on the DA's office, and frankly, I thought the reporters had misunderstood what he was talking about because some of these changes were so sweeping they actually broke California state law."

The ADDA has strongly opposed several of Gascón's policies, including in court. The organization successfully obtained an injunction against Gascón's directives that prosecutors not file certain "enhancements" when filing charges, including enhancements for firearms allegations and those relating to prior offenses. A court ruled in 2021 these policies went against California law.

The union has also filed two other suits against Gascón, including one that alleges he retaliated against two prosecutors who objected to his orders and demoted them.

Siddall and the recall campaign both maintain that opposition to Gascón is about the DA himself and not about a broader opposition to reform.

"There is need for reform," he said. "There is no need to go back to the '80s and '90s, but reform should be reasonable and sustainable. … The problem with Gascón is that the reforms that he has implemented are not reasonable, they are not sustainable, they will last one election cycle, and not only that, my fear is that they will damage the reform brand in the long term."

Gascón supporters, however, take a different view, seeing the recall as indicative of something more than gripes about the DA himself.

"There is a strong desire, I think, on the part of law enforcement agencies to reassert their strength and control after the dramatic societal shift that happened in 2020," Katano said, saying he sees the recall as part of that broader picture.

Irwin pointed out that recall efforts began almost as soon as Gascón took office, which to her suggests they had less to do with him than what he represents. "This is part of a playbook — a nationwide playbook — where some wealthy conservatives, partnering with predominantly law enforcement, have figured out they have a vehicle in the recall to assert their own political will where they recently lost an election," she said.

The first recall effort against Gascón officially kicked off in early 2021 and never made it close to the roughly 570,000 signatures required to trigger a recall election. The current campaign, which involves many of the same participants, said the first effort was a grassroots movement by the families of crime victims who were upset by decisions made by the district attorney's office in their cases.

The current campaign, however, is more organized and better funded, though it still lists family members of crime victims as its leaders. After launching in December, the campaign had raised roughly $1.8 million by the end of 2021 when its most recent public filing was submitted.

Roughly two-thirds of that money came from just four donors: major Republican donors Gerard L. Marcil and Geoff Palmer, Santa Monica real estate firm Douglas Emmett Management, and corporate entity Ioaban LLC, which had each given at least $250,000. The campaign declined to comment on whether those were still its top funders, though it does say it has raised a total of $6 million as of May 1.

Tim Lineberger, a spokesperson for the campaign, said the campaign is not meant to be a referendum on broader criminal justice reform and that many of its supporters do want reforms, noting the recall has drawn support from both parties. The issue, he said, is the specific actions Gascón has taken as DA, such as ending enhancements and the "soft on crime" approach he says has contributed to a crime wave in LA.

Gascón supporters reject that framing, with Irwin pointing out there was an uptick in violent crime nationally in 2021, including places without any criminal justice reform going on, and that Los Angeles is in line with those trends.

"Blaming DA Gascón is simply false," she said.

Irwin and Katano both connected the recall effort against Gascón to the 2021 recall election targeting California Gov. Gavin Newsom. The two campaigns have donors in common, most notably Palmer, who donated more than $1 million to the Newsom recall.

"It's just reactionaries across the board," Katano said of the recall effort. "All it is, fundamentally, is the right wing is unhappy with progressives winning. And the functional way to undo those elections is recall."

While those in favor of the recall talk primarily about Gascón's time in office and specific grievances with his policies, Katano and Irwin both connect the fight in Los Angeles to the broader struggle for reform.

Moore, a former member of Gascón's election campaign and a spokesperson for the current committee opposing the recall, told Law360 Pulse there are ways in which the campaign has national dimensions — it has certainly attracted national attention, having been featured on Tucker Carlson's show, among other places — but that the recall push is also an expression of the stress felt in communities in LA, especially as homelessness rises.

Having worked on the campaign, though, she said she was not surprised to see recall efforts begin immediately, given the opposition to Gascón and the idea of criminal justice reform seen in some corners during the election, as well as the "recall fever" California appears to be in the midst of. If this effort fails, she said, there will likely be another.

"Whatever ends up happening with the recall, none of this is unexpected," she said.

--Editing by Philip Shea and Kelly Duncan.

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of Los Angeles public defender Ace Katano. The error has been corrected.

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