Cooley Stands Between Garcetti and a Rare Third Term

It has been 60 years since a district attorney of Los Angeles County was elected to more than two terms. Gil Garcetti could break that streak if he wins reelection to a third term Tuesday--but it’s a big if.

Garcetti is widely viewed as vulnerable to a challenge from top Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who finished first in a three-way primary election March 7 and has led Garcetti in every poll conducted since then. The two have strong disagreements, and will have debated at least 15 times by election day. So voters have an unusually revealing record on which to base their decision.

The district attorney’s race is one of two campaigns for countywide office on the ballot. The other is a much quieter race for county assessor that features a bumper crop of candidates running for an unexpired seat.

Garcetti, 59, barely won his first reelection bid in 1996, four years after he defeated two-term incumbent Ira Reiner. If the 1996 campaign was a referendum on the Garcetti staff’s loss in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, Cooley, 53, has sought to frame this year’s race as a referendum on the Rampart Division police corruption scandal.

Over the course of the campaign, other issues have emerged, including Garcetti’s emphasis on crime prevention programs, the personal ethics of the two contenders and the enforcement of California’s three-strikes law.

Cooley has accused Garcetti of overlooking warnings within his own department that something was wrong in the anti-gang CRASH unit of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division. Had Garcetti paid more attention to a deputy’s memo in 1997 expressing concerns about Officer Rafael Perez, the central figure in the scandal, the D.A. might have been able to crack down on allegedly corrupt cops several years ago, Cooley says.

Moreover, Cooley argues, Garcetti lost an opportunity to uncover rogue officers when he canceled his office’s “roll-out” program in 1995. That program, later reinstated, dispatches prosecutors to the scene of shootings involving police officers to determine whether the police have acted properly.

Garcetti maintains that Rampart is a problem born and bred in the Police Department, not in his agency. He has dismissed talk about his deputy’s memo on Perez, saying it was handled properly by D.A. supervisors and never really implicated Perez in any pattern of corruption.

And he says that budget concerns forced him to reluctantly cancel the roll-out program, but that it is unlikely that it would have uncovered “dirty” shootings in Rampart anyway.

Garcetti maintains that the most important issue dividing the two candidates is not Rampart, but the crime prevention programs that he has instituted as district attorney. These include programs to prevent truancy in elementary and middle schools, to rescue children from the brink of delinquency, and to discourage hate crimes, stalking and “date rape.”

Cooley says some of the programs may be worthwhile, but others are little more than publicity stunts designed to promote Garcetti. He has promised to assess each program if he is elected and determine whether it is accomplishing its goals and is worth the cost.

Each candidate has accused the other of lax ethics. Cooley has charged that Garcetti has given special treatment to campaign contributors or their relatives. Garcetti has countered that Cooley acted improperly by accepting campaign donations from judges and fellow prosecutors.

In the closing weeks of the campaign, the three-strikes issue has emerged as one of the hottest in the race.

Garcetti believes in relatively strict enforcement of the three-strikes law, which sets out a prison term of 25 years to life for anyone who commits a third felony after being convicted of two violent or serious felonies. He says it should be applied even when the third crime is relatively minor.

Cooley supports a policy under which the third strike would ordinarily be waived if a person is convicted of a minor, nonviolent third felony.

In addition, Garcetti, a Democrat, has tried to play up the fact that his opponent is a Republican, even though the office they are seeking is officially nonpartisan. Only 28% of registered voters in Los Angeles County are Republicans.

The contest has seen a barrage of expensive mailers and television ads. To pay for that, Garcetti has raised roughly $1.8 million, including $200,000 of his own money. Cooley has come close, with about $1.4 million.

In the county assessor’s race, 16 candidates are running to fill the unexpired term of Kenneth P. Hahn, who retired in January because of his own and his mother’s illnesses.

The Board of Supervisors named Rick Auerbach, 52, a 30-year veteran of the office, to fill the vacancy until Tuesday’s election, and Auerbach has the power of incumbency working in his favor.

His strongest opposition is expected to come from former Assessor John Lynch, who is trying to recapture the job he lost to Hahn in 1990. But county government insiders say any of the candidates could capture the $141,000-a-year job in a field so large for a post so relatively obscure.

Hahn, who is unrelated to the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, benefited from having the same name when he defeated Lynch. Now Lynch gets the benefit of name recognition because Deputy Dist. Atty. John Lynch, who is unrelated, very narrowly lost his bid to defeat Gil Garcetti in the last district attorney’s race.

The field also includes eight deputy county assessors: F. Eugene Driver III, John E. Hasley, Desmond Kester, Dan Kumaus, Peter W. Lee, John Loew, Mark McNeil and Yolanda T. Salazar.

The other candidates are county urban research chief Wayne Bannister, retired Deputy Assessor John Carl Brogdon, assessment appeals board division chief Don Garcia, appeals board member John Y. Wong, engineer and financial consultant Khalil Khalil, and South Gate City Treasurer Albert T. Robles.

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Gilbert Garcetti

* Political affiliation: Democrat

* Born: Aug. 5, 1941, Los Angeles

* Residence: Brentwood

* Current position: District attorney

* Education: Bachelor’s, business, cum laude, USC, 1963; law degree, UCLA, 1967

* Career highlights: Deputy district attorney, 1968-92, including stints as head of Special Investigations Division and as chief deputy district attorney, No. 2 position in the office. Elected district attorney 1992, reelected 1996

* Family: Married with two children

*

Stephen Cooley

* Political affiliation: Republican

* Born: May 1, 1947, Los Angeles

* Residence: Toluca Lake

* Current position: Head deputy district attorney in charge of Welfare Fraud Division

* Education: Bachelor’s, social science, Cal State L.A., 1970; law degree, USC, 1973

* Career highlights: Deputy district attorney, 1973 to the present. Served as deputy in charge of Narcotics Division and as head deputy district attorney in Antelope Valley and San Fernando branch office, before being named head of Welfare Fraud Division in late 1996. Recipient, outstanding alumnus award, Cal State L.A., 1999

* Family: Married with two children