The city attorney’s office is charged with prosecuting a wide array of misdemeanors, including drunk driving, public intoxication, petty theft, trespassing and other lower level crimes.
Roy, 34, has promised to place a heavy emphasis on the legal process known as diversion, which allows defendants to avoid incarceration and instead obtain court-supervised social services, such as anger management or addiction counseling. In cases involving nonviolent crimes, diversion is more likely than jail to keep people from becoming repeat offenders, she said.
“It makes not only the person whole, but the community safer,” she said.
Ashouri, 43, said she is the only candidate to work within the city attorney’s criminal branch, handling cases involving guns, drunk driving and domestic violence. During a one-year stint as a reserve deputy city attorney, she concluded that too many minor cases were heading to trial.
“We need to focus on cases that are harming people,” she said. “Los Angeles is the capital of hit-and-runs. The city doesn’t take vehicular crimes seriously.”
McKinney, 58, pointed to his lengthy history prosecuting felony offenses, many of them homicides. In an interview, he argued that the city is not properly prosecuting quality-of-life crimes, which has in turn left the city feeling less safe.
“It looks dirty. It looks dingy. It looks chaotic. It feels chaotic,” he said.
McKinney criticized Feldstein Soto for dismantling specialized units in her office, including those focused on domestic violence and gangs and guns.
Feldstein Soto, 67, cast those changes in a different light, saying she carried out “a strategic rebalancing” of the criminal branch that redistributed the office’s workload. She said the office’s gang unit “lost its primary mission” in 2021, because of a legal settlement that effectively ended enforcement of the city’s 46 gang injunctions.
On the campaign trail, Feldstein Soto has highlighted her work fighting sex trafficking on the city’s notorious Figueroa Corridor and, more recently, nearby Western Avenue. She said the city has shifted emphasis away from arresting sex workers and toward the prosecutions of the johns.
The city attorney said she also has worked to expand “restorative justice” programs, including one that holds outdoor court proceedings on Skid Row.