LOS ANGELES, CA – Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon – described as an “ultra-progressive” – is facing a recall vote over his controversial “soft on crime” approach to prosecution that has resulted in skyrocketing crime rates, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva in a recent interview.
Since Gascon was elected as DA in 2020, Los Angeles has experienced a 34 percent increase in homicide, a 15.5 percent increase in violent crimes, a 67 percent increase in shootings, and a 6.7 percent increase in property crimes; in contrast, arrests during the same time period have actually decreased by almost 25 percent, the LAPD reports.
Sheriff Villanueva pointed out that currently over 400,000 Los Angeles County voters have signed a petition for Gascon to face a recall in November’s upcoming election.
566,857 signatures are required by July 6 to make Gascon’s recall happen, something that Villanueva said is certain to take place, as voters want to “correct” the “mistake” of electing the super-liberal DA who many feel advocates for criminals and not the victims of crime.
“It looks like it’s gonna happen. I think that’s a historical moment for this experiment with ultra-progressive DAs who don’t do their job,” he said. “I think the country has had enough with it. They just want to see basic law and order reinstituted everywhere.”
Villanueva said that the “experiment” of soft-on-crime political policies and the “defund the police” movement – which sprang up in response to the death of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of police officers – have been rejected by the vast majority of Americans, especially in crime-stricken cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
“People want a sense of normalcy,” Villanueva said. “We can do a lot of reforms … but it shouldn’t be an either-or proposition. We can do both.”
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