Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, who ascended to office vowing sweeping reforms to the criminal justice system and then faced intense criticism over public safety issues, lost his bid for re-election, The Associated Press projected.
Gascón was defeated by Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor who seized on voter concerns about crime and homelessness in the nation’s most populous county and largest law enforcement jurisdiction.
In recent weeks, Gascón made national headlines when he announced he supported clemency for Erik and Lyle Menendez, the brothers who were found guilty in the 1989 killing of their parents. The legal saga drew renewed public attention this fall after the debut of a Netflix miniseries and documentary about their lives.
Gascón was swept into office in 2020 amid national fury over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He harnessed the progressive energy surrounding that summer’s protests over police misconduct and racial inequality, riding a political wave that in previous cycles helped elect crusading prosecutors in cities like Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia.
In office, Gascón quickly got to work implementing his reformist agenda.
He barred prosecutors in his office from seeking the death penalty and various sentencing enhancements, stopped the prosecution of juveniles as adults and ended cash bail for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
But many of those initiatives drew fierce backlash, including from some of the county’s rank-and-file prosecutors.
Gascón staved off two recall efforts, both of which failed to secure spots on the ballot. Meanwhile, the resistance to aggressive criminal justice reforms continued building across California. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled from office in 2022 after his critics assailed him as a soft-on-crime progressive.
Gascón and other Los Angeles political leaders have attempted to rebut charges that the city is unsafe, a perception deepened partly by videos of “smash-and-grab” retail robberies.
Gascón faced 11 challengers in the county’s March 5 nonpartisan primary, advancing to a runoff against Hochman, an independent who ran for California attorney general as a Republican in 2022.
Hochman pledged to crack down on “lawlessness” and framed his candidacy as a sharp break from the Gascón era.
“DA George Gascón has miserably failed to protect our residents, leading to a spiral of lawlessness that endangers all L.A. County residents,” Hochman said in a statement announcing his candidacy. “It’s time to stop playing politics with people’s lives. It’s time we had a DA who fights for victims—not criminals.”
Gascón attempted to shift perceptions of his tenure and emphasized that he understood the spiking anxiety about public safety. But pre-election public polls showed him trailing Hochman. In a survey conducted Sept. 25 to Oct 1., for example, Hochman was 30 percentage points ahead of Gascón.
Hochman, 60, was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California in the 1990s. He then was the assistant attorney general for the U.S. Justice Department’s tax division under former President George W. Bush.
Gascón, 70, previously was San Francisco attorney general — a job once held by Vice President Kamala Harris before she won the state attorney general’s office. He was also an assistant police chief in Los Angeles, as well as the police chief in Mesa, Arizona and San Francisco.
