San Diego’s D.A. Faces 3 Foes in Reelection Bid

Four years ago, Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst was unopposed in his bid for a second term.

Now, as he seeks a third, Pfingst is in a political free-for-all with three opponents who are drawing strength from an open rebellion among Pfingst’s deputies and from an angry police officers union.

Rivals for the job include a deputy district attorney, a Superior Court judge and a former federal prosecutor turned civil litigator and civic activist.

His critics claim Pfingst has an ethical blind spot and a mean streak. They say he refuses to recognize the transgressions of a favored few in his office while severely punishing even minor slip-ups by the majority of prosecutors on his staff.

His deputies point to Pfingst’s alleged refusal to investigate reports that a high-ranking deputy was selling real estate on county time.

They also say he was reluctant to investigate the conduct of another high-ranking deputy who may have helped a jailhouse informant get special treatment.

The deputy in the real estate case later pleaded guilty to a charge of misusing funds.

Pfingst replies that, in the real estate case, his trust in his deputy was betrayed.

But in the case of the informant, he notes that an outside evaluation by a former U.S. attorney cleared the deputy of wrongdoing.

Never one to back down, the 50-year-old Pfingst said the campaign against him is the work of malcontents who have never accepted the fact that he toppled a six-term incumbent in 1994 and then brought wholesale change to the office through demotions, reassignments and policy changes.

“I’m a demanding boss,” Pfingst said. “I have little tolerance for people who don’t work hard, and that causes some distress among employees within the office.”

Pfingst would have voters focus on statistics showing that San Diego’s crime rate has fallen at twice the rate of the national level and that the district attorney’s office has run up the highest conviction rate of any such office in the state.

Pfingst also cites nationally recognized improvements in welfare fraud prosecutions, child support collections and computer crime investigations.

And he points to frequent use of the three-strikes law and the voter-approved measure allowing minors to be tried as adults in violent crime cases.

His critics claim Pfingst is taking undue credit for the drop in crime, and that the conviction rate is misleading because it does not take into account cases in which charges were not filed.

Harping on the theme of ethical deficiency, the San Diego Police Officers Assn. is backing Superior Court Judge Bonnie Dumanis.

Pfingst said the police are angry at his criticism of their tactics in several officer-involved shootings and out to get him because he filed criminal charges against an officer in one case, a first for San Diego.

The clashes between Pfingst and his prosecutors--who gave him a vote of no-confidence--and between Pfingst and the police have led to one of the nastiest political campaigns in recent San Diego history.

Mark Pettine, the deputy district attorney who is running against his boss, said Pfingst’s disdain for his employees and his “bunker mentality” have caused an irreparable rift with his prosecutors.

The third opponent, former federal prosecutor Michael Aguirre, has launched a massive television advertising campaign with his own funds.

If Pfingst cares about the criticism, he isn’t letting on.

“My job is to represent the voters and make sure they’re safe,” he said. “The other three [candidates] want to be student body presidents of the [Deputy] District Attorneys Assn.”

If none of the candidates gets 50% in the March 5 primary, the two top vote-getters will face each other in a runoff in November.

The tenor of the race, so far, was captured in a newspaper picture of a recent campaign event. At a candidates forum, the three challengers are shown chatting amiably while Pfingst sits apart, frowning.

The forum also was marked by charges of dirty politicking when the Pfingst camp was accused of planting a question in the audience about whether any of the candidates had ever been under psychiatric care.

Judge Dumanis said she sought help after a failed suicide attempt 16 years ago following the death of a family member. Pfingst denied planting the question.

Besides cranking out a steady stream of scalding anti-Pfingst press releases, the Deputy District Attorneys Assn., through a political action committee, has been running radio ads with an anybody-but-Pfingst theme.

Among other things, the ads note that Pfingst was “fired for buying drugs while he was a New York prosecutor.”

Before he ran in 1994, Pfingst disclosed that he resigned under pressure in Long Island along with other prosecutors who were found to be smoking marijuana while off-duty.

He later became a prosecutor in Brooklyn and was hired in San Diego in 1984.