Has L.A. County D.A. George Gascón delivered on his police accountability promises?

Yatoya Toy stood outside the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office in February, pointing at images from a cellphone video showing her brother Anthony Lowe being fatally shot by Huntington Park police as he fled on the stumps of his amputated legs.

Lowe was a suspect in a stabbing and armed with a knife, but Toy had two questions: How could a man who used a wheelchair be a threat to police? And what was Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón going to do about his death?

“He said, ‘I’m gonna prosecute killer cops.’ He hasn’t done that,” Toy shouted during the February protest.

Weeks later, a different grieving relative stood beside Gascón as the district attorney announced manslaughter charges against seven California Highway Patrol officers, claiming that their negligence led to the death of Edward Bronstein after his 2020 arrest on suspicion of drunk driving.

“I’m glad that it came to this point where they get prosecuted so they can’t hurt nobody else,” said Bronstein’s father, Edward Tapia.

Gascón surged into office in 2020 on a promise to hold police accountable following a summer of protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Some activists and families such as the Lowes want him to move faster to charge cops in high-profile incidents. But the district attorney has sought prosecutions against officers in at least six on-duty killings since taking office, something that was borderline unheard of in L.A. County before his election. During the previous two decades, two officers were charged in on-duty shootings.

A review of filing data also suggests that he has filed charges for on-duty misconduct more often than his predecessor, Jackie Lacey. And some activists say he’s opened lines of communication that didn’t exist before with victims of police brutality.

But there’s a gap between intentions and results, and halfway through Gascón’s term there are questions about his administration’s ability to win convictions against the officers he charges. A review of internal office documents and court records — as well as interviews with current and former members of the Justice Systems Integrity Division, which handles prosecutions of police officers — have raised concerns about the way the unit is run.

The only police shooting case brought to trial under Gascón — a manslaughter case originally filed by Lacey — resulted in an acquittal. The office also saw a perjury case against two L.A. County sheriff’s deputies dismissed at a preliminary hearing last year, a failure at a point in the legal process in which prosecutors almost never lose. The hearing was overseen by a former public defender with no experience as a prosecutor, one of two whom Gascón inserted into the JSID unit over strenuous objections from his own line prosecutors and their union.

Documents reviewed by The Times also show the office has sometimes waited months to inform the public of decisions not to prosecute officers in high-profile cases, such as the killings of Dijon Kizzee and Andres Guardado by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.

In the Guardado case, the district attorney’s office has promised to make its decision public this month. But records reviewed by The Times show that a prosecutor initially recommended in September against charging ex-sheriff’s Deputy Michael Vega, who fatally shot the 18-year-old.

Documents also show that prosecutors recommended against charging Deputy Doug Johnson — who was accused of kneeling on the head of a handcuffed inmate — six months before the office formally announced the decision. Former Sheriff Alex Villanueva was accused of covering up the high-profile incident.

Gascón declined to be interviewed for this story. His chief of staff, Joseph Iniguez, also declined to discuss specific cases but said prosecutor recommendations are not the final word. JSID decisions go through a rigorous review process, he said, before being approved by himself, Gascón and Diana Teran, the director of the bureau of prosecution support operations who also oversees JSID.

“We’re not rubber stamping ... it could go from Diana to me back down to Diana back to JSID because maybe there’s something I’d like more information on, or Diana would like additional [information], or there’s typos or spelling errors,” Iniguez said. “There are a number of reasons why it will ping-pong, for sure.”

Iniguez and Teran said prosecutors are sometimes asked to look at witness interviews and evidence gathered during parallel civil lawsuits that may not have been captured by the initial police investigation. Teran said that in one case a civil attorney found a witness to a police shooting who was never interviewed by the investigating law enforcement agency. She did not offer specifics.

Still, neither Iniguez nor Teran could point to a case in which a JSID prosecutor initially recommended against filing charges against an officer in a violent use-of-force case but their expanded review process led to a prosecution.

“I felt like we were being asked to spend a lot more time exploring angles on pretty clear-cut cases that would be declined,” said one JSID prosecutor, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. “If I was going to manage it, I would dispose of the easy ones more quickly.”

Legal experts said the review process described by Iniguez — whose appointment as Gascón’s chief of staff has been criticized due to his lack of court experience — sounded troubling.

“I think it’s particularly problematic,” said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and professor at the Loyola Law School. “Iniguez has so much less experience than a lot of the people who are doing these evaluations.”

Quantifying Gascón’s successes in prosecuting police is complicated by the fact that the office doesn’t track the number of police officers it charges. But documents provided in response to a public records request from The Times suggest his administration has been far more aggressive in pursuing alleged on-duty misconduct than Lacey.

In Gascón’s first two years in office, nearly two-thirds of the cases brought against police officers by JSID involved allegations of on-duty misconduct, including perjury and on-duty assault cases that were filed less frequently under Lacey. Records show that many of the police officers Lacey brought cases against were accused of off-duty domestic violence or driving drunk.

Gascón has also said he pushed for the investigation that revealed a racist text messaging scandal within the Torrance Police Department in 2021, a move that cost several officers their jobs. The district attorney’s office is prosecuting three linked to the scandal, including one for an on-duty shooting.

Some activists have grown frustrated with the pace of shooting investigations under Gascón and the seeming lack of action by special prosecutor Lawrence Middleton, whom Gascón hired two years ago to reevaluate several shooting cases in which Lacey declined to prosecute officers.

Public records show that Middleton is being paid $375 per hour, and some in the office derisively refer to him as “Millionaire Middleton.” A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office could not provide information about how many hours Middleton has billed since 2021, and the office has yet to respond to a public records request for that information. Middleton declined to be interviewed.

But Middleton did begin presenting evidence to a grand jury last month against two Torrance police officers who killed Christopher Deandre Mitchell in 2018. Those officers had also been linked to the racist text scandal.

Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles who once led weekly protests against Lacey, said she’s been impressed by Gascón’s willingness to pursue police misconduct cases. But she also expressed concern that he hasn’t moved more quickly on high-profile incidents of violence caught on video.

No charges have been filed in the Lowe shooting, she noted, which happened right after Memphis prosecutors rapidly filed murder cases against the officers who were seen on camera beating Tyre Nichols to death.

“I think that we’re all at this point where we know what other cities are doing and other locales are doing and what’s not being done in Los Angeles,” she said.

“What we’re hearing back from George’s office is that there’s basically a refusal on the part of a lot of the [deputy] district attorneys to cooperate with the agenda that he laid out,” Abdullah said. “So this is part of the limitation of electoral politics.”

The discord between Gascón and his line prosecutors has been well-documented, and those issues have spilled into JSID. Last year, the former second-in-command in the unit, Amy Pentz, testified in a lawsuit that Gascón had hired two public defenders who were unqualified to tackle such cases to serve as prosecutors in the unit.

One of those attorneys, John Perroni, was the prosecutor who lost a preliminary hearing involving perjury and assault charges against two sheriff’s deputies last year. It is extremely rare for a case to be dismissed by a judge at a preliminary hearing. Prosecutors only have to prove there is probable cause that a defendant committed a crime at a preliminary hearing, a far lower burden than the reasonable doubt standard for a conviction at trial.

“I can’t tell you the number of times he would walk in my office and say, ‘Well, I’m going to need some help. This is the first time I’ve done this.’ Things like that,” Pentz said of Perroni during a civil service hearing questioning whether Gascón’s hiring of public defenders for several roles is legal. “So they had never filed a case. They had never done — presented a preliminary hearing. They had never prosecuted a case.”

Perroni declined to comment. The district attorney’s office appealed the preliminary hearing decision, but that appeal was rejected. Pentz testified that Perroni and another former public defender, Gregory Apt, were inserted into JSID without being interviewed by any managers in the unit. Teran, another public defender, simply inserted them, according to Pentz.

Pentz also testified that Teran rejected the notion that Apt and Perroni should first gain experience prosecuting misdemeanors before being asked to prosecute police violence cases, which are considered complex. The two ex-public defenders are now set to try the case of the seven California Highway Patrol officers charged with manslaughter in Bronstein’s death of at the Altadena station in 2020, according to a district attorney’s spokesman.

Eric Siddall, vice president of the union that represents rank-and-file prosecutors and a possible challenger to Gascón in 2024, said he is concerned that JSID is filing unwinnable cases just to deliver on the district attorney’s campaign promises.

“Making sure cases are solid and provable beyond a reasonable doubt is more important than filing a case,” Siddall said. “If you file a case that’s not solid, that’s going to get dismissed at a preliminary hearing … I don’t know how much value that adds to holding police officers accountable.”

Siddall also said at least one prosecutor has filed a formal grievance with the union, alleging that Gascón’s executive team directed the person to stall the release of declination memos in two cases for political purposes. Declination memos are summaries that outline why prosecutors decline to file charges against officers; they eventually become public records.

“They were specifically told to delay the declination to after the sheriff’s election as to not impact or effect that election,” he said.

The cases in question were the 2020 shooting death of Kizzee, who was gunned down after a brief foot pursuit in South L.A., and assault allegations against Johnson for kneeling on the head of an inmate in the San Fernando jail.

The Kizzee case had drawn large-scale media attention and several days of protests when deputies shot and killed him in the Westmont neighborhood. Authorities alleged Kizzee dropped a gun while fleeing from deputies and made a motion toward it, causing the deputies to open fire. Grainy video from the scene seems to show Kizzee running from the officers, but a fence obstructs a view of the firearm he allegedly dropped.

Johnson’s case, meanwhile, became a regular talking point during Villanueva’s failed reelection bid due to its similarities to Floyd’s murder and allegations from other high-level sheriff’s officials that Villanueva covered it up to avoid bad press.

Siddall said a prosecutor alleged to the union that Teran and Iniguez ordered the release of information about the cases to be stalled until after the election during a meeting in which Gascón was present. Tiffiny Blacknell, director of communications for the district attorney’s office, said the union never raised its grievance with the office and declined to comment on what she called “unsubstantiated labor issues.” She did not deny that Iniguez or Teran made the alleged remarks.

Villanueva made similar claims about Gascón delaying cases to hurt his campaign during a news conference last year, but he offered no evidence or specifics. It is unlikely that the ex-sheriff’s political hopes would have been elevated by the lack of charges, however. Most pollsters expected him to be ousted from office after losing the support of nearly every elected Democrat in the county. His opponent, Robert Luna, won with 61% of the vote.

While The Times could not independently verify Siddall’s allegation, records reviewed by the newspaper show months elapsed between a prosecutor’s initial recommendation not to file charges in the Kizzee and Johnson cases and Gascón finally signing off on those decisions.

In Kizzee’s death, a line prosecutor recommended against filing charges in February 2022, but the district attorney’s office didn’t release the documents confirming that decision until The Times filed a public records request in November.

A prosecutor initially rejected charges against Johnson, the deputy in the kneeling case, in June 2022, records show. But the district attorney’s office again did not disclose the memo until it was requested by a Times reporter, also in November.

While Teran and Iniguez declined to discuss specifics about any of the delayed cases, they said sometimes the process of releasing declination documents to the public is slowed out of an abundance of care for victims’ families.

Sometimes, memos need to be edited to remove references to a victim’s gang affiliation or criminal history that had no relevance to the shooting, Iniguez said. The office has also been scheduling meetings with the loved ones of those killed by police to discuss cases in which officers won’t be charged before confirming those decisions to the public.

During the news conference in which Lowe’s family accused Gascón of not doing enough to prosecute police officers, Blacknell walked downstairs from her office to the protest to speak with the aggrieved parties.

Families of those killed by police held protests in the same spot for years during Lacey’s tenure, but the office never sent a representative.

“All I heard today was a lot of pain … and as a Black woman with a 15-year-old son who is going to start driving next year, I completely empathize. I will never know what it’s like, hopefully, to lose a loved one to police violence, but I fear it every single day,” Blacknell told the crowd in February. “I am here only to support. I am not here to defend [law enforcement].”

While some of Lowe’s relatives shouted at Blacknell that they wanted more than just “words,” other protesters that day embraced her. At least one was a former client from Blacknell’s time as a public defender, she said.

Legal experts said Gascón’s caring approach to victims of police violence and public stances on prosecuting officers who cross legal lines are laudable. But they added that he has to walk a fine line between delivering on his campaign promises and avoiding courtroom losses that could further shake public confidence in the criminal justice system’s ability to hold cops accountable.

“I think he’s looking to show that they’re going to be more aggressive in bringing cases than the prior administration was. And then they come up against the reality: I don’t think we can say that Lacey’s group was doing it wrong,” Levenson said.

“It’s really important to win these cases,” she continued, “because we have seen historically how devastating it is to these communities to charge officers and have them walk.”