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California: Crime a Key Issue in Race for Top Lawman

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  • California: Crime a Key Issue in Race for Top Lawman

    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."

    [email protected]

    http://www.l atimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-crime29se p29,1,4560238.story?coll=3Dla-center-politics-cal
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