Crime a Key Issue in Race for Top Lawman

His brow furrowed in concentration, Mayor Jerry Brown sat before a police computer, tracking a parolee by global positioning satellite. It was a chance to appraise the latest law-and-order technology he helped bring to this city -- and bolster his crime-fighting credibility as the Democratic candidate for state attorney general.

Three hundred miles south, his Republican opponent, state Sen. Chuck Poochigian of Fresno, vowed at a Los Angeles conference on DNA policing that as attorney general he would boost “CSI”-style forensics. He also jabbed at Brown, noting that Oakland police failed for a year to nab a child molester identified by DNA, allowing him to molest again.

Crime might trail education and illegal immigration in surveys of what is important to Californians, but it still commands center stage in the race for top state lawman.

In television ads and on the stump, Brown and Poochigian are warring over criminal justice credentials and crime-fighting philosophies. Brown calls Poochigian, a three-term legislator, an extremist on the conservative right. Poochigian labels Brown, a two-term former governor and three-time presidential contender, an extremist of the liberal left.

Brown has reinvented himself in Oakland as a mayor unafraid to live in a high-crime neighborhood and eager to support the needs of local police. He now has endorsements from the California Police Chiefs Assn. and, in a television ad playing around the state, ridicules Poochigian for voting in 2004 against legislation banning .50-caliber sniper rifles.

Poochigian and his campaign team aren’t buying the 68-year-old mayor’s criminal justice conversion.

They’ve dubbed the Democrat a “fictional crime fighter” and focused on his “Gov. Moonbeam” past: Brown’s veto of the death penalty in 1977, the recall of state Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird after she helped block more than 60 executions, his opposition to the state Victims’ Bill of Rights, and lefty pronouncements on talk radio in the mid-1990s.

The Republican also has highlighted a spike in Oakland crime this year. The city of 300,000 was hit by 111 murders in nine months, a pace that by year’s end could double the 60 homicides that occurred in 1999, Brown’s first year in office.

“He’s promising to inflict the same punishment on California that he has on the good people of Oakland,” Poochigian said.

Brown concedes that he is troubled by Oakland’s violent crime, much of it related to gangs and drugs. But he also believes a more accurate assessment compares his whole eight-year tenure to that of previous mayors. If the statistics are sliced that way, serious crime has fallen 30% more in the Brown years than under his Oakland predecessors.

Poochigian’s criticism, Brown says, is political rhetoric.

“I don’t think he’s ever been in the position of dealing with a police force in an operations sense,” Brown said. “He doesn’t know the challenges. What has Chuck Poochigian ever done?”

Poochigian remains little known outside the statehouse; four of five voters in an August poll -- the most recent survey data available -- had no opinion of him. And his own campaign has focused largely on Brown.

A lawyer and former top aide to two Republican governors, Poochigian has in his dozen years in the Legislature forged a reputation as an affable conservative popular on both sides of the aisle. During his last years in the state Senate, he was vice chairman of the Public Safety Committee.

Poochigian was principal co-author of a law signed by the governor last week that will help keep sexual predators behind bars longer and increase parole supervision. He is also co-chairman of the campaign for Proposition 83, which would restrict where sex offenders can live after their release.

This year, he pushed through a law requiring authorities to track identity theft crimes. But he failed to win approval of bills to boost penalties for identity theft and “phishing,” the use of e-mail to deceive consumers into releasing private information.

Poochigian also helped fight a ballot measure in 2004 that would have weakened the state’s three-strikes law, and earlier this year he battled legislation that would have placed a moratorium on capital punishment.

Fighting gun control is “not part of any agenda of mine,” Poochigian said, noting that he voted this year to authorize civil penalties for anyone who creates a nuisance by using assault weapons or large-caliber rifles. Poochigian has also sponsored legislation to boost penalties for criminals who use guns.

Though an opponent of prison reformers -- he says they coddle criminals -- Poochigian was one of the few Republicans to support Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s unsuccessful plan this year to buff up rehabilitation efforts in state penitentiaries. But more than anything, Poochigian fashions himself as a champion of crime victims.

After his recent speech to the lunchtime gathering of the Fifth Annual DNA Awareness Educational Forum at Cal State L.A., he talked about the parade of shattered loved ones he has watched come to the statehouse seeking legislative help.

“I want to be known as the A.G. who is aligned with their causes,” he said.

Mike Reynolds, father of the three-strikes law and one of California’s most recognizable victims’-rights advocates, supports Poochigian, who is a friend.

“We know Chuck Poochigian is solid on crime,” Reynolds said. “The question is: Do you roll the dice and take Jerry at his word that he’s a born-again crime fighter?”

Brown has had his work cut out for him in a city long shackled by California’s highest per capita murder rate.

Brown helped champion several high-tech initiatives at the Oakland Police Department, among them GPS monitoring of high-risk parolees and a “shot-spotter” system that triangulates the sound of gunfire to speed the response to shootings. The fancy equipment arrived, Oakland Police Cmdr. Pete Sarna said, because of Brown’s commitment “to spend the money to do what it takes.”

A few of the basics have been tougher to come by. The city has a chronic shortage of street officers. And the department has been criticized, as Poochigian said, for letting DNA cases slip through the cracks.

Out in a squad car for yet another ride-along, Brown got a look at the department’s latest weapon against crime. An infrared camera system mounted on the cruiser records licenses plates as cars pass by, and within seconds a computer spits out an alert for any stolen vehicle. In the first 10 days of its use, police arrested 20 suspected car thieves.

People might not associate Brown’s past with criminal justice, but during his governorship the state’s inmate population jumped 40%, he said. Brown also boasts about having signed the first measure mandating prison for the use of a gun in a crime.

He admits mistakes. In 2003, Brown testified before a state watchdog group that he regretted signing a sentencing law a quarter-century ago that replaced the use of parole boards to judge an inmate’s readiness for release with determinate, or fixed, sentencing.

Today the prisons are a revolving door, with 120,000 inmates leaving each year -- three-quarters of them destined to return. Though prisons don’t fall under the attorney general’s purview, Brown says he would use the bully pulpit to push for better education and skills training for inmates, beefed-up drug treatment and tougher supervision outside the walls.

Poochigian contends that his opponent is disguising a “radical ideology” with a phony crime-fighter’s cape. Over the course of the campaign, he has noted that Brown as governor pardoned seven first-degree murderers and in 1976 vetoed a bill to provide bulletproof vests for local law officers.

He also has cited Brown’s 1990 pronouncements on Bay Area talk radio. Brown called the war on drugs a scam, opposed the execution of “freeway killer” William Bonin, described lethal injection as a “Nazi-style” form of sanitized execution and suggested that banning capital punishment would elevate society to a “higher state of consciousness.”

“That somehow he can divorce himself from all that and serve in a way that’s fair to victims of crime and tough to the perpetrators is hard to accept,” Poochigian said.

Such talk rankles Brown as he glides along in the police cruiser.

Ronald Reagan pardoned 40 first-degree murderers during his two terms as California governor, Brown noted, all of them men or women who had served their time and went on to live law-abiding lives outside.

And he may have vetoed state financing of bulletproof vests for local police, but as governor, Brown signed a bill to buy body armor for the California Highway Patrol.

As for his radio years, Brown said, it is a case of the medium as much as the message.

“I was doing a talk show,” he said. “There is a huge entertainment factor in that. I’m not going to stand behind every remark I made.”

eric.bailey@latimes.com