Cooley, Garcetti Trade Charges in TV Debate

The Gil and Steve Show went prime-time Thursday, with the two candidates for district attorney of Los Angeles County going head to head in a lively televised debate over such issues as the Rampart scandal, personal integrity and enforcement of the three-strikes law.

In one particularly pointed exchange, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti urged his opponent, Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, to turn down an endorsement announced earlier in the day by the powerful union representing Los Angeles police officers.

The Police Protective League had taken the extraordinary step of withdrawing its support of Garcetti and switching to Cooley, saying that Garcetti had made a shambles of the case against allegedly corrupt officers in a Rampart Division anti-gang unit.

Garcetti said the change in endorsements was orchestrated to undermine the prosecution’s case in the first Rampart trial against four police officers. But Cooley refused to back down, saying that he welcomed the support.

“If you want to be a leader, you have to have a following,” he said, prompting Garcetti to shoot back: “The fact that Mr. Cooley is so hungry to accept a political endorsement and put at risk the entire case shows you what kind of D.A. he would be.”

The debate between the two bitter foes was their 12th so far in the campaign, and the first broadcast on television during prime viewing hours. KCAL-TV Channel 9 said it usually reaches 150,000 households during the period the candidates debated, making it probable that they were reaching by far the largest audience of the campaign.

As has been the case in other recent debates, the dominant topic was enforcement of the three-strikes law, which calls for a sentence of 25 years to life for commission of a third felony. The two candidates strongly disagree: Garcetti believes in a relatively stringent application of the law, while Cooley has called for a policy of “proportionality,” under which prosecutors would generally seek a 25-to-life term only when the third crime was violent and serious.

“Guess what? I’m going to use that law to protect you,” Garcetti said, using his oft-repeated example of a violent gang member arrested for a relatively minor third felony. That person should be taken off the streets, he said.

Cooley said he agreed the law should be used to get violent felons off the streets, but “not 25-to-life for a small petty theft, small possession of drugs--that’s unfair, it strikes at certain communities much too harshly and it’s going to change when I’m district attorney of L.A. County.”

Garcetti repeatedly urged viewers to “get to know Steve Cooley. . . . You’ll find that he’s not the kind of person you want as your D.A.” He said Cooley didn’t support crime prevention programs that Garcetti has instituted, and was soft on gun control.

As he has stated before, Cooley said he supports gun licensing and some other forms of gun control, and lashed into Garcetti for using money from criminal settlements to fund “self-aggrandizing” crime prevention programs.

He also harshly criticized Garcetti for his administration of child support enforcement, which he said had ranked 58th out of California’s 58 counties. Garcetti praised his own efforts, prompting Cooley to quip: “Sometimes I think I’m in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ type existence here.”

Garcetti lost a powerful ally earlier in the day when the Police Protective League withdrew its support.

The league, which represents 9,000 rank-and-file officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, had endorsed Garcetti in both of his previous campaigns for district attorney and before the March primary.

“Since the primary . . . we’ve seen how this office of the district attorney has gone downhill, and failed to do their job,” Cliff Ruff, a director of the police union, said at a news conference Thursday morning. “We’re admitting the error of our original endorsement.”

The switch in endorsements was the latest in a series of setbacks for Garcetti in the campaign. His campaign manager, Erik Nasarenko, said the Garcetti camp wasn’t surprised by the loss of the union’s support.

“Gil understood early on that his prosecution of allegedly rogue officers could result in the police union withdrawing their support,” he said. “When you’re cracking open this city’s largest-ever police corruption scandal, you’re going to pay a political price with the union that represents police officers.”

But the union officials said Garcetti was not so much cracking open the scandal as gumming it up. They criticized him for not detecting corruption in the Rampart anti-gang unit sooner, and for balancing his case on the word of an admitted liar and thief, Rafael Perez. Finally, they suggested he let political considerations dictate when he prosecuted officers.

“He’s sitting here, letting things unfold, hoping they don’t unfold before the November election,” said Ruff, who spoke along with union President Ted Hunt and two other officials.

Despite that observation, the first trial against Rampart Division officers has begun--disastrously so for prosecutors, who announced at the last minute that they probably wouldn’t call Perez, their star witness, to testify. His lawyer had indicated Perez would invoke his 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination, if asked about a federal murder investigation in which he is a suspect.

Cooley said the police union endorsement came as a surprise. He said he had never sought the group’s support, recognizing that he could wind up prosecuting police officers should he win. He did not appear at the news conference announcing the change.

He noted that he had received several endorsements from “front-line” police organizations, including the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, the Southern California Alliance of Law Enforcement and the Peace Officers Professional Assn.

Garcetti was endorsed last week by the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Assn.