Delgadillo Record Is Ammo for Both Backers and Critics

After five years as Los Angeles city attorney, Rocky Delgadillo is running for state attorney general on a record that has combined innovative advances with controversial actions that appear calculated to further his considerable political ambitions.

In his race against former Gov. Jerry Brown in the Democratic primary, Delgadillo notes that during his watch crime has dropped and taxpayers have had to shell out less money over lawsuits against the city.

Delgadillo touts programs that put prosecutors in city neighborhoods and cracked down on polluters. He says his office has gone to bat to protect the elderly from con artists, put slumlords in jail and put street gangs on the defensive.

“My sense is he has done a very good job,” said L.A. investment banker John Emerson, who was chief of staff for former City Atty. James K. Hahn. “He’s been creative and appropriately aggressive.”

Critics, however, say Delgadillo’s tenure has been marked by the appearance of ethical lapses, including decisions that benefited campaign contributors.

They say Delgadillo is too timid a prosecutor who has been lucky that aggressive policing by the LAPD, economic changes and shifting demographics have driven crime down during his tenure.

And despite holding citywide office, Delgadillo has not become a political force in Los Angeles or a leader whose vision has inspired a broad following, skeptics say. That contrasts with Brown, the current Oakland mayor who has been much praised and much derided in his 30-plus years in elective office.

The city attorney “hasn’t emerged as a person with a particularly interesting or unique persona or vision,” said Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation who has written extensively about Los Angeles.

Kotkin called Delgadillo’s tenure in his current position “lackluster.”

Delgadillo, 45, was raised in Highland Park and educated at Harvard and Columbia University Law School before taking a job in the entertainment unit of the law firm O’Melveny & Myers. He later served a stint as an economic development specialist for Rebuild L.A., the riot recovery agency, and then as deputy mayor for economic development in the office of Mayor Richard Riordan.

Delgadillo won election as city attorney in 2001 in a runoff with then-Councilman Mike Feuer, and was reelected last year without opposition.

As city attorney, Delgadillo commands an office of 520 attorneys who prosecute civil violations of city laws and criminal misdemeanors, defend the city against litigation, and give legal advice to the mayor, City Council and 40 city departments. The state attorney general’s office, which Delgadillo aspires to lead, employs 1,100 attorneys and serves the same attorney-client role with state agencies.

He campaigned for office five years ago by promising that local neighborhoods, and their schools, would get help from his office in improving public safety and conditions for young people. Delgadillo led an effort to get the school district to fix and clean up broken and dirty restrooms, and he started Operation Bright Future, an anti-truancy program that targets at-risk kids.

“He’s been smart in that he took over a department that was lethargic and he brought in very talented people and put a fire under people. He stirred things up,” said Raquelle de la Rocha, an attorney and former head of the city ethics and police commissions.

Two primary roles of the city attorney are to fight crime and defend the city against lawsuits, and on both fronts Delgadillo has had success.

Police Chief William J. Bratton has given Delgadillo’s office credit for helping the LAPD bring down crime, which last year dropped 10% for the third straight year. So far this year, crime is down 12.6% compared with the same period last year.

However, the LAPD reports that the number of arrests for misdemeanors, the crimes dealt with by the city attorney, increased 11% from five years ago to last year.

Roy Ulrich, a Los Angeles attorney active in campaign reform issues, is among those who feel that Delgadillo’s office has not been a major factor in the overall drop in crime.

“Crime is down around the state, around the nation,” Ulrich said.

Delgadillo believes that his office has had an impact on crime by filing court injunctions against street gangs, which limits their ability to operate and pursue violent crimes.

When Hahn was city attorney, he filed eight gang injunctions, pioneering the practice in Los Angeles. Since Delgadillo took office, the number of such injunctions has risen to 26, and they cover about 13% of L.A.

Delgadillo said gang membership has dropped to 38,500 -- a 33% decline -- in the years since the injunctions were imposed.

“I’m bringing in gang injunctions, more than have ever been done before, and making neighborhoods safe -- taking gang members off their street corners and improving the quality of life of neighborhoods that are under the siege of gangs,” he said.

Malcolm W. Klein, a professor emeritus at USC and expert on street gangs, said he has seen “no evidence” to support the claimed drop in gang membership or to link the injunctions to any major decline.

Bratton, however, said he has seen a difference.

“Rocky Delgadillo has expanded, in creative ways, what Jim Hahn started, and it’s had a dramatic influence in reducing crime,” the police chief said. “Last year, murders were less than half what they were in the early ‘90s, when the annual totals numbered over 1,000.”

Another key element of Delgadillo’s strategy to fight crime is a neighborhood prosecutor program, in which deputy city attorneys are assigned to each of the 19 police stations to work on localized problems such as drug houses, street prostitutes and nuisance bars.

Terree Bowers, who quit last year as Delgadillo’s chief deputy, believes the program will be his most lasting accomplishment.

“That will be his legacy,” Bowers said. “It’s a mechanism to really get into the neighborhoods and find out what their priorities are and address them. It’s revolutionary, this way of going after quality-of-life issues in neighborhoods.”

City Council members especially like the program, because it gives them access to a prosecutor in the neighborhoods they serve.

“For us, the neighborhood prosecutor program has been an enormous success,” said Councilwoman Wendy Greuel. “It has put a legal face in the community and allowed us to deal with quality-of-life problems.”

The program has not always worked as intended, however. In March of 2003, Delgadillo held a news conference to tout the program’s success in jailing a transient who had been terrorizing a neighborhood for months, and said that it had won a court order barring him from the area.

But records showed that his office had repeatedly dropped serious charges against the transient, William Wray Holt, in order to plea bargain or gain convictions on lesser counts.

As a result, Holt was out of jail at the time Delgadillo held the conference, and police say that a month later Holt allegedly swung a large knife at an 11-year-old girl in Pan Pacific Park.

Critics say the incident is an example of how the politically ambitious city attorney’s news releases don’t always live up to reality. More broadly, they also question his aggressiveness as a criminal prosecutor.

Hahn reported filing 83,370 criminal cases in the 2000-01 fiscal year, the year before Delgadillo took office, while Delgadillo’s office reported filing 79,588 cases in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2005.

When his office does go to court against lawbreakers, Delgadillo’s prosecutors do well: The office’s criminal conviction rate in the year before his election was 91%, and it has steadily risen to 94% this year.

Although some Delgadillo backers say the drop in cases corresponds to the drop in crime, some City Hall observers argue that Delgadillo’s office avoids tougher cases so his win-loss record will improve.

Specifically, some accuse him of catering to campaign contributors.

Darla Fjeld, executive director of the tenant rights group Coalition L.A. gives Delgadillo’s office a D+ on its enforcement of housing laws.

“We need to have more fines and more prosecution of slumlords so they won’t do what they do, and that hasn’t been happening,” she said.

Court fines won by Delgadillo’s office in housing cases declined from $210,000 his first year to $188,800 in the fiscal year that ended in June 2005, a six-year low. And the number of landlords sent to jail or house arrest dropped from 12 in the fiscal year that ended in June 2003 to two in the last fiscal year.

The Times reported last year that Delgadillo had accepted thousands of dollars in political contributions from two landlords accused of operating apartments in slum conditions -- after he settled a lawsuit against them for a third of the amount the city initially sought.

“He has been less interested in the fair adjudication of justice than in currying favor with others,” attorney Ulrich said.

A similar controversy arose recently when The Times reported that Delgadillo’s office decided it had no reason to bring a case against Regency Outdoor Advertising, a major campaign backer, even though investigators did not interview key witnesses who had publicly accused the firm of vandalism.

Delgadillo received $125,000 from Regency in his 2001 election campaign.

John Van de Kamp, California attorney general from 1983 to 1991, said Delgadillo has introduced some fresh ideas to the office by bringing in top attorneys for his staff and focusing on neighborhood issues. But, he added, “it’s become a little more of a political office than it was before. I was troubled by the stories of the billboard companies.”

Delgadillo’s methods of defending the city against civil lawsuits have also raised some eyebrows.

The amount paid by the city in court judgments and settlements dropped from $92 million in fiscal 2000-01, the year before he took office, to $50.4 million in 2002-03, to $28.2 million last year. In part, at least, the drop stemmed from the settlement of many of the Rampart police corruption scandal cases in 2001 and 2002.

At the same time, Delgadillo has been criticized for spending too much money on outside law firms, many of which are big contributors to his political accounts.

In May 2004, The Times reported that the city’s payments to outside law firms were skyrocketing and that the firms Delgadillo hired and their attorneys had contributed $154,500 to his campaign committees.

In many cases, contracts were approved or extended by the city within weeks of a political fundraiser held by the benefiting law firm, records showed

A state audit in January criticized Delgadillo for failing to document why his office selected many firms. The auditors also found large accounting errors in the tracking of outside contracts.

Payments to private firms almost doubled from fiscal 2000 to 2005 to nearly $32 million, according to the audit.

Etan Lorant, who recently won a $15-million judgment against Los Angeles for wrongly firing three former Rampart Division police officers, said the city was not well served by hiring a private firm to defend it.

“I think they should use city attorneys on more cases, because in-house attorneys can do the job and save the city money,” said Lorant, who briefly considered running against Delgadillo for city attorney.

Bowers, Delgadillo’s former chief deputy, said the use of outside attorneys was instrumental in lowering the total paid out in legal judgments against the city.

“Sometimes bringing in an 800-pound gorilla means you are able to bring down the amount you end up paying to those who sue you,” Bowers said.

Delgadillo flatly disputes criticism that politics might have entered into the decisions involving billboard companies and apartment owners, as well as the hiring of outside law firms.

“Politics do not play a role in my decisions,” he said in an interview this month. “What plays a role in my decision is what is happening to people right where they live. And if they are being taken advantage of, if they are being hurt, I want to be there to protect them, and that’s what I do.”