by Robert J. Hansen
Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig and his challenger in this year’s primary election, Cynthia Rodriguez, faced off in a debate hosted by the Yolo County Taxpayer Association Thursday night.
The candidates made their case for why they should be Yolo County’s chief prosecutor to the over 100 attendees by answering several questions submitted that evening.
Secretary of the Taxpayer Association Timothy Blank moderated the event.
Q: “What will you do about homeless people who won’t accept treatment or services because they like living on the streets?”
Rodriguez: “I know a lot of people are concerned because I’ve seen interviews or people on TV talking about liking their freedom. One of the things we have to realize is that living on the streets is very demeaning and can be embarrassing, so some people will say they are happy to do it now because they like sleeping outside at night in the cold. I do think there is a number who will be willing to enter shelters but I do agree that there will be people who are afraid of being in someone else’s control. What we have to do is turn to the experts and see what they’ve done with that. There are many communities, especially on the West Coast that have been able to have successful programs to move people off the streets. None of these programs will solve everybody’s problems. We will always have outliers. But it can make a difference if we give them the assistance that the experts have shown has worked before. I do think that it will get most people off the 
street because, as you can imagine, it is not a desirable life.”
Reisig: “This is personal for me as well as professional. I have a nephew who I love very much and has been homeless for nine years. He’s addicted to heroin. He’s not in this county but he is someplace where I see him from time to time standing on the side of the road. It breaks my heart. So when I talk about homelessness I talk about it as someone who has seen it for 25 years from that side and also as a DA who has somebody that shares my name that lives on the street, that uses heroin every day, that steals and creates victims every day to support his habit. Look at my plan. Go to my website. The first part of this plan is about treatment. Here’s the deal: we don’t need to send these people to jail or prison for being homeless, that’s not the answer. But what are the root causes? What’s driving it? What I have seen is that most of these people suffer from an illness, mental illness or addiction, and addiction is a mental illness and they need help, they need treatment. Governor Newsom’s over there right now trying to figure out how we get these folks into treatment before they go out and victimize someone. Not all homeless do that, but I’m sad to say that most do. So part of the plan is mandating treatment. Whenever they come into contact with the criminal justice system, and unfortunately they do a lot, we should be aggressively intervening to get them into a treatment program. My nephew, we’ve tried and tried and tried, he’s not going to do this voluntarily. Someone needs to tell him you’re doing this if you can’t just walk away.”
Q: “Due to the $950 theft limit, Woodland now has a theft problem, particularly with high school students. Do you promote police making arrests and victims pressing charges or do you feel that this will burn out or be best handled through restorative justice programs?”
Prop. 47 reclassified certain drug and theft offenses to misdemeanors from felonies in 2014.
Reisig: “The question seems to focus on kids. If you have juveniles committing these crimes, we have a whole separate juvenile system and it’s not punitive. It’s not designed to be punitive, especially for lower-level crimes like that. We’re all focused on the rehabilitation of these young men and women. We don’t want to lock them. But this is the much bigger issue, the retail theft problem is across California and it’s what’s driving these smash and grabs. As long as it’s under $950, nobody is going to jail because the law says that these people get a ticket. That is a broken law,” Reisig said.
He continued saying that large box stores have told him they have stopped reporting thefts and no longer call the police.
“The underreporting on this is epic,” Reisig said. “Let’s be honest, this law is not working.”
Rodriguez: “What are the facts? Do people have a lot of theft that they’re not reporting or are they not reporting theft because they’re not having any? Interestingly we have a district attorney telling us he has been in charge for 16 years and yet these crimes are increasing. I think that’s a problem. They say the same thing in Sacramento. They have a conservative, law and order district attorney but the crimes are increasing. I think the first thing that it shows is that it’s not because someone wants to show compassion for juveniles or even adults. My understanding is that our level is lower than about 40 states that have an even higher amount than we do. I don’t think that’s the real issue. I think the real issue is what we are investigating. Are juveniles doing it or are there ring leaders? It doesn’t seem likely to me that a few juveniles are starting these giant rings of smash and grabs. It seems more likely to me that it’s organized crime. We have prosecutorial tools that should be put to the test and figure out what’s going on out there, prosecutors right now who should be doing that. We can’t arrest a few kids and let them take the responsibility while some mastermind is getting away with all of this. These crimes that we keep reading about, seem a little bit larger than teens taking candy bars.”
Q: “Your values include the promotion of transparency and addressing racial bias. Commons is one of your solutions. However, the website aimed to make criminal justice statistics available to the public is inaccurate. How is Yolo County meant to rely on your leadership for transparency when your solutions are unreliable?”
Reisig: “I don’t know where that comes from, that’s just wrong. I went to Measures to Justice, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization out of Rochester New York, and told them I wanted them to make a portal that allows people to see anything they want to. Guess what they said, they’d like to. Measures for Justice met with community members and sled them what they wanted to see and they built it. It was the first in the nation. Measures for Justice does the auditing and makes sure that what they’re publishing is accurate. The reality is that this transparency portal is transformational. I believe in government transparency and people need to be able to look at it themselves because, I don’t trust the government, and if I put it out why would people trust me? The bottom line is that we’re using that data in our office to drive policy. To look at our policies and see how we can adjust them to address the disparities that we’re seeing.”
Rodriguez: “Two of the many things I talk about frequently are DA discretion and transparency because I think they go hand in hand. A DA gets to set his priorities, she also gets to decide what is not prioritized and in my opinion, transparency should have been prioritized since day one. For the first time in 15 years, we have some statistics. The problem with that is we have always deserved to see what our taxpayer dollars were being spent on. This is not the first information put out by a DA’s office. Many have these presentations of all their information. On top of that, they have an analysis of all those statistics because dry statistics are what Will Rogers said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Just looking at statistics doesn’t tell you why something is happening. We have to have an analysis which we do not. Last year the public defender said in our County we have three percent African American people and have 25 percent in our jail. At the time she was derided by our DA saying she was trying to attack the judiciary and the prosecution and all she was doing was citing statistics. And we still don’t have an analysis of why that is. I want to make all the information available to you from day one, update it regularly, and explain to you what we’re going to do about problematic things. You deserve to know what is being done with your tax dollars.”
Just as several of us commenters have been saying while trying to set the record straight.
See Rodriguez’s response. Reisig’s answer that a misdemeanor is the equivalent of a ticket is ridiculous. Rodriguez correctly points out that forty states have more lenient felony thresholds than California. Somehow they are surviving. (Also Reisig wants to be a data guy but then uses anecdotal evidence to refute the data that they have).
Tell that to the people and businesses who are getting robbed.
That would be true even if the number was one. The issue is whether or not Prop 47 is causing the number to increase – and the problem is that Reisig doesn’t have the data to prove his point, so he shifts from data from anecdotal evidence.
Seems to me that an “analysis” might simply consist of what crimes are being charged, and whether or not they’re convicted. There’s your analysis.
The DA is not responsible for ensuring “equity” regarding differences in crime rates between different groups. The underlying assumption by those who think otherwise is a danger to society at large, including people of color who are also victimized.
And yet, every day – we’re told on the Vanguard that crime is decreasing.
If it’s increasing, might it be due to the changes in law (and early releases from prison)?
Compassion for those harming others? Has that ever worked? And, how would it manifest itself in regard to the DA’s job?
Name one.
And, was it under the parameters of the DA’s office?
So, she’s hoping that undefined programs will “change their minds”, and that they will do so voluntarily.
This is a valid question/point, by Rodriguez.
I suspect that the Home Depot in Woodland has experienced some uncontested shoplifting, based upon what I’ve observed. They have also shut-down one of their “self-serve” checkout lanes, to ensure that the remaining lane can be “watched”. One employee watching no more than two check-out registers, I’ve been told. I have yet to see the remaining checkout lane opened, since the policy was implemented.
It’s really irritating to have to “wait” for a self-checkout stand, as a result. Weren’t self-checkout stands partly-intended to reduce waiting?
But none of this mattered, when it seemed that someone simply bypassed the checkout lanes altogether, or so I suspect.
As far as I know, store security guards no longer attempt to detain anyone, anywhere in California. They simply observe. Not sure how/why this occurred.
Seems this would have been a good opportunity to mention some specific programs and experts.
Don’t we do that already? Seems that might be in the purview of the district attorney?
Neither of these answers is particularly satisfactory, probably because this is such an intractable problem.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/In-an-about-face-liberal-US-cities-target-16993799.php
She did. “I do think that it will get most people off the street . . . ” She said ‘it’. ‘it’ will solve our problems.
That is truly the issue: no one wants to face that these issues are not going to end, rather it’s how we deal with the fallout. It’s like asking DAs to solve crime, rather than dealing with aftermath of crime.
The winner of the District Attorney debate was the Yolo County Taxpayers Association. The loser was any preconceived notion about the simplicity of the DA race.
First the Taxpayers Association did themselves proud in holding a civil and welcoming event for Reisig, Rodreguez and decline to state voters. I left feeling about as good as one can feel about the state of our county’s democracy – way to go Yolo! And thanks to the folks in Yolo Taxpayer Association Woodland that hosted the event at the 1225 East Kentucky meeting hall.
Each candidate had a 10 minute opening, 3 minutes to answer 10 questions and a 2 minute closing. The audience clapped politely for both candidates and while there were some hoots and hisses – they were few and did not distract from the candidates having their opportunity to make their case to be Yolo Counties next DA.
If you walked in not knowing how important the District Attorney race is to our county, you had a much better idea after the opening remarks.
Kudos also to the Davis Vanguard for being the only local “print” media to start the content clock on the DA’s race. The transcript of the two candidates answers, to 2 of the 10 questions – 1,400 words. so I’m really looking forward to the next 4 parts. It’ll be a long read that is worth doing – consider how many people are counting on you who are facing tens of years in jail or who rely on the consistent use of law enforcement to keep them from being harmed.
The transcripts will show that there were many points of contrast between Rodriguez and Reisig. Reisig continues to send dire messages of epic failure of more progressive approaches to law enforcement; that have not become his approaches. Rodriguez is clear that she will be the heavy hand when needed but, for the portion of the community that disproportionately encounters law enforcement, she is a professional with a record of working for better systemic outcomes. Yes, she needs to supply more details.
Both candidates are law enforcement professionals and they are both very aware of the power and responsibility of the DA position. I don’t think they will be as functionally different – as in number of arrests/interventions, but the pattern of charges and convictions would likely change.
I think one of the most pronounced differences between the two candidates would be the extent to which the DA’s office integrates into other services and the community in the years to come. I think Rodriguez has the advantage here and the bulwark that has been Reisig’s DA administration, for so long, needs turnover.
It will be a close race.
Reisig wins easily, by a wider margin than his last election. The tide is changing, people are tiring of Progressive DA’s.
Thank you, S Steward, for a thoughtful post… refreshing change, for this forum…
I look forward to hearing of the entire transcipt… hopefully with a minimum of commentary, or ‘making book’ as some seem inclined to do…
If you don’t like the commentary there’s a simple solution, don’t read it!
Technically, that’s a “commentary on the commentary”.
And this (my) comment is now a “commentary to the third power”.
Mr. Olsen is overstepping any sense of proportion this commentary should allow any one person.
Would I have gotten the same response if I had said Rodriguez in a landslide?
Another thing, everyone is allowed the same amount of commentary, or proportion, as you put it. So if you want to say more go for it, no one is suppressing you.
Maybe not, but someone suppressed me. You know who you are. Though I don’t. Though I have two guesses.