Los Angeles Times
CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS
Crime a Key Issue in Race for Top Lawman
Brown and Poochigian battle over criminal justice credentials as they
campaign for attorney general.
By Eric Bailey
Times Staff Writer
September 29, 2006
OAKLAND – His brow furrowed in concentration, Mayor Jerry Brown sat
before a police computer, tracking a parolee by global positioning
satellite. It was a chance to appraise the latest law-and-order
technology he helped bring to this city – and bolster his
crime-fighting credibility as the Democratic candidate for state
attorney general.
Three hundred miles south, his Republican opponent, state Sen. Chuck
Poochigian of Fresno, vowed at a Los Angeles conference on DNA
policing that as attorney general he would boost "CSI"-style
forensics. He also jabbed at Brown, noting that Oakland police failed
for a year to nab a child molester identified by DNA, allowing him to
molest again.
Crime might trail education and illegal immigration in surveys of what
is important to Californians, but it still commands center stage in
the race for top state lawman.
In television ads and on the stump, Brown and Poochigian are warring
over criminal justice credentials and crime-fighting
philosophies. Brown calls Poochigian, a three-term legislator, an
extremist on the conservative right. Poochigian labels Brown, a
two-term former governor and three-time presidential contender, an
extremist of the liberal left.
Brown has reinvented himself in Oakland as a mayor unafraid to live in
a high-crime neighborhood and eager to support the needs of local
police. Henow has endorsements from the California Police Chiefs
Assn. and, in a television ad playing around the state, ridicules
Poochigian for voting in 2004 against legislation banning .50-caliber
sniper rifles.
Poochigian and his campaign team aren’t buying the 68-year-old mayor’s
criminal justice conversion.
They’ve dubbed the Democrat a "fictional crime fighter" and focused on
his "Gov. Moonbeam" past: Brown’s veto of the death penalty in 1977,
the recall of state Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird after she helped
block more than 60 executions, his opposition to the state Victims’
Bill of Rights, and lefty pronouncements on talk radio in the
mid-1990s.
The Republican also has highlighted a spike in Oakland crime this
year. The city of 300,000 was hit by 111 murders in nine months, a
pace that by year’s end could double the 60 homicides that occurred in
1999, Brown’s first year in office.
"He’s promising to inflict the same punishment on California that he
has on the good people of Oakland," Poochigian said.
Brown concedes that he is troubled by Oakland’s violent crime, much of
it related to gangs and drugs. But he also believes a more accurate
assessment compares his whole eight-year tenure to that of previous
mayors. If the statistics are sliced that way, serious crime has
fallen 30% more in the Brown years than under his Oakland
predecessors.
Poochigian’s criticism, Brown says, is political rhetoric.
"I don’t think he’s ever been in the position of dealing with a police
force in an operations sense," Brown said. "He doesn’t know the
challenges. What has Chuck Poochigian ever done?"
Poochigian remains little known outside the statehouse; four of five
voters in an August poll – the most recent survey data available =80′
had no opinion of him. And his own campaign has focused largely on
Brown.
A lawyer and former top aide to two Republican governors, Poochigian
has in his dozen years in the Legislature forged a reputation as an
affable conservative popular on both sides of the aisle. During his
last years in the state Senate, he was vice chairman of the Public
Safety Committee.
Poochigian was principal co-author of a law signed by the governor
last week that will help keep sexual predators behind bars longer and
increase parole supervision. He is also co-chairman of the campaign
for Proposition 83, which would restrict where sex offenders can live
after their release.
This year, he pushed through a law requiring authorities to track
identity theft crimes. But he failed to win approval of bills to boost
penalties for identity theft and "phishing," the use of e-mail to
deceive consumers into releasing private information.
Poochigian also helped fight a ballot measure in 2004 that would have
weakened the state’s three-strikes law, and earlier this year he
battled legislation that would have placed a moratorium on capital
punishment.
Fighting gun control is "not part of any agenda of mine," Poochigian
said, noting that he voted this year to authorize civil penalties for
anyone who creates a nuisance by using assault weapons or
large-caliber rifles. Poochigian has also sponsored legislation to
boost penalties for criminals who use guns.
Though an opponent of prison reformers – he says they coddle criminals
– Poochigian was one of the few Republicans to support Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s unsuccessful plan this year to buff up rehabilitation
efforts in state penitentiaries. But more than anything, Poochigian
fashions himself as a champion of crime victims.
After his recent speech to the lunchtime gathering of the Fifth Annual
DNA Awareness Educational Forum at Cal State L.A., he talked about the
parade of shattered loved ones he has watched come to the statehouse
seeking legislative help.
"I want to be known as the A.G. who is aligned with their causes," he
said.
Mike Reynolds, father of the three-strikes law and one of California’s
most recognizable victims’-rights advocates, supports Poochigian, who
is a friend.
"We know Chuck Poochigian is solid on crime," Reynolds said. "The
question is: Do you roll the dice and take Jerry at his word that he’s
a born-again crime fighter?"
Brown has had his work cut out for him in a city long shackled by
California’s highest per capita murder rate.
Brown helped champion several high-tech initiatives at the Oakland
Police Department, among them GPS monitoring of high-risk parolees and
a "shot-spotter" system that triangulates the sound of gunfire to
speed the response to shootings. The fancy equipment arrived, Oakland
Police Cmdr. Pete Sarna said, because of Brown’s commitment "to spend
the money to do what it takes."
A few of the basics have been tougher to come by. The city has a
chronic shortage of street officers. And the department has been
criticized, as Poochigian said, for letting DNA cases slip through the
cracks.
Out in a squad car for yet another ride-along, Brown got a look at the
department’s latest weapon against crime. An infrared camera system
mounted on the cruiser records licenses plates as cars pass by, and
within seconds a computer spits out an alert for any stolen
vehicle. In the first 10 days of its use, police arrested 20 suspected
car thieves.
People might not associate Brown’s past with criminal justice, but
during his governorship the state’s inmate population jumped 40%, he
said. Brown also boasts about having signed the first measure
mandating prison for the use of a gun in a crime.
He admits mistakes. In 2003, Brown testified before a state watchdog
group that he regretted signing a sentencing law a quarter-century ago
that replaced the use of parole boards to judge an inmate’s readiness
for release with determinate, or fixed, sentencing.
Today the prisons are a revolving door, with 120,000 inmates leaving
each year – three-quarters of them destined to return. Though prisons
don’t fall under the attorney general’s purview, Brown says he would
use the bully pulpit to push for better education and skills training
for inmates, beefed-up drug treatment and tougher supervision outside
the walls.
Poochigian contends that his opponent is disguising a "radical
ideology" with a phony crime-fighter’s cape. Over the course of the
campaign, he hasnoted that Brown as governor pardoned seven
first-degree murderers and in 1976 vetoed a bill to provide
bulletproof vests for local law officers.
He also has cited Brown’s 1990 pronouncements on Bay Area talk radio.
Brown called the war on drugs a scam, opposed the execution of
"freeway killer" William Bonin, described lethal injection as a
"Nazi-style" form of sanitized execution and suggested that banning
capital punishment would elevate society to a "higher state of
consciousness."
"That somehow he can divorce himself from all that and serve in a way
that’s fair to victims of crime and tough to the perpetrators is hard
to accept," Poochigian said.
Such talk rankles Brown as he glides along in the police cruiser.
Ronald Reagan pardoned 40 first-degree murderers during his two terms
as California governor, Brown noted, all of them men or women who had
served their time and went on to live law-abiding lives outside.
And he may have vetoed state financing of bulletproof vests for local
police, but as governor, Brown signed a bill to buy body armor for the
California Highway Patrol.
As for his radio years, Brown said, it is a case of the medium as much
as the message.
"I was doing a talk show," he said. "There is a huge entertainment
factor in that. I’m not going to stand behind every remark I made."
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