Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva recently told Fox News that his office presented 13,238 cases that the district attorney’s office ultimately declined to prosecute under District Attorney George Gascón’s new soft-on-crime special directives.
“Astonishing number of cases,” Villanueva told the outlet. “These are people that did bad things that left a victim, have the evidence presented and they said ‘don’t bother.’”
When Gascón took office in December 2020, he vowed to stop prosecuting juveniles as adults or pursuing sentences of life in prison without parole. However, he later said he would review the specific circumstances of each case before making a judgment.
“There’s no deterrence in this current scheme,” Villanueva told Fox News. “We have to have teeth in what we’re doing.”
“The deputies are going to continue doing their job, they make the arrests, they’ll write the reports, but then what happens after it’s submitted to the D.A is where it all falls apart,” he added.
Villanueva said his department does not have a working relationship with the DA’s office and that he has never met Gascón in public, having only ever had one phone call with him.
Organizers of a second effort to recall Gascón — a first attempt last year failed to receive enough signatures — have blasted the DA’s policies as “soft on crime” and argue it is necessary to recall him to “keep communities safe.”
Gascón has been widely criticized for his handling of the case of Hannah Tubbs, a 26-year-old transgender woman who was sentenced to just two years in a juvenile facility for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl.
The DA himself acknowledged earlier this year that he may not have properly handled the case.
“While for most people several years of jail time is adequate, it may not be for Ms. Tubbs,” the progressive DA said in a statement, adding that he may have handled Tubbs’s case differently if he knew about the molester’s “disregard for the harm” committed against the young victim.
“After her sentencing in our case, I became aware of extremely troubling statements she made about her case, the resolution of it and the young girl that she harmed,” he added.
Fox News obtained jailhouse recordings of Tubbs’s speaking with Tubbs’s father in which the molester laughs about the lack of consequences for the crime.
The conversation also include “explicit remarks about the victim that are unfit to print,” according to the report.
Leaders of the recall effort said earlier this week that they had secured 400,000 signatures of the 567,000 needed by July 6 to bring the matter to a vote.