Reisig and Rodriguez meet in the first Yolo DA Forum – Part 1
by Robert J. Hansen
Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig and his challenger in this year’s primary election Cynthia Rodriguez squared off in a debate hosted by the Yolo County Taxpayer Association Thursday night.
The contestants explained why they should be Yolo County’s chief prosecutor to the more than 100 attendees by answering several questions submitted that evening.
Taxpayers Association Secretary Timothy Blank hosted the event.
Q: “What will you do with homeless people who won’t accept treatment or services because they like living on the streets? »
Rodriguez: “I know a lot of people are worried because I’ve seen interviews or people on TV talking about loving their freedom. One of the things we have to realize is that living on the streets is very degrading and can be embarrassing, so some people will say they are happy to do it now because they like to sleep outside at night in the cold. I think there are a number who will be ready to enter the shelters, but I agree that there will be people who will be afraid of being under someone else’s control. What we need to do is turn to the experts and see what they have done with it. Many communities, especially on the west coast, have managed to set up successful programs to get people off the streets. None of these programs will solve everyone’s problems. We will always have outliers. But it can make a difference if we give them the help that experts have shown has worked before. I think this will deter most people from 
street because, as you can imagine, it’s not a desirable life.
Reisig: “For me it’s both personal and professional. I have a nephew whom I love very much and who has been homeless for nine years. He is addicted to heroin. He’s not in this county but he’s somewhere where I occasionally see him standing on the side of the road. It breaks my heart. So when I talk about homelessness, I’m talking about it as someone who’s seen it for 25 years from that side and also as a prosecutor who has someone who shares my name who lives on the street , who uses heroin every day, steals and creates victims every day to support his habit. Look at my plan. Go to my website. The first part of this plan concerns treatment. Here’s the problem: we don’t need to send these people to jail or jail because they’re homeless, that’s not the solution. But what are the root causes? What motivates him? What I’ve seen is that most of these people have a disease, a mental illness or an addiction, and addiction is a mental illness and they need help, they have need treatment. Governor Newsom is there right now trying to figure out how we can get these people through to treatment before they go out and victimize someone. Not all homeless people do this, but I’m sad to say that most do. So part of the plan mandates treatment. Every time they come into contact with the criminal justice system, and unfortunately they do a lot of it, we should be pushing hard to get them into a treatment program. My nephew, we tried and tried and tried, he’s not going to do it willingly. Someone has to tell him you’re doing this if you can’t just walk away.
Q: “Because of the $950 theft limit, Woodland now has a problem with theft, especially with high school students. Do you encourage the police to make arrests and victims to press charges or do you think that will wear off or be better handled by restorative justice programs? »
Prop. 47 reclassified some drug and theft offenses as misdemeanors from felonies in 2014.
Reisig: “The question seems to focus on children. If you have minors committing these crimes, we have an entirely separate juvenile system and it is non-punitive. It is not designed to be punitive, especially for lesser crimes like this. We are all focused on rehabilitating these young men and women. We don’t want to lock them. But that’s the biggest problem, the problem of retail theft is present throughout California and that’s what’s driving these breakages and foreclosures. As long as it’s less than $950, no one will go to jail because the law says those people get a ticket. This is a broken law,” Reisig said.
He went on to say that department stores told him they had stopped reporting thefts and were no longer calling the police.
“The under-reporting on this is epic,” Reisig said. “Let’s be honest, this law doesn’t work.
Rodriguez: “What are the facts? Do people have a lot of thefts that they don’t report, or don’t they report thefts because they don’t? Interestingly, we have a district attorney who tells us he’s been in charge for 16 years and yet these crimes are on the rise. I think that’s a problem. They say the same thing in Sacramento. They have a conservative district attorney, in charge of law and order, but crime is on the rise. I think the first thing it shows is that it’s not because anyone wants to show compassion for minors or even adults. I understand our level is lower than about 40 states that have an even higher amount than ours. I don’t think that’s the real problem. I think the real problem is what we are investigating. Do the juveniles do it or are there leaders? It seems unlikely to me that a few juveniles will start these giant rings of smash and grabs. It seems to me more likely that it is organized crime. We have prosecutorial tools that should be put to the test and figure out what’s going on there, prosecutors right now who should be doing that. You can’t arrest a few kids and let them take the blame while a mastermind gets away with it all. These crimes that we keep reading about seem a bit bigger than teens taking treats.
Q: “Your values include promoting transparency and fighting racial bias. Commons is one of your solutions. However, the website intended to make criminal justice statistics available to the public is inaccurate. How is Yolo County supposed to rely on your leadership for transparency when your solutions are unreliable? »
Reisig: “I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just wrong. I went to Measures to Justice, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization in Rochester New York, and told them that I wanted them to create a portal that lets people see anything they want. Guess what they said, they would love to. Measures for Justice met with community members and dragged them what they wanted to see and they built it. It was the first in the country. Measures for Justice does the checking and makes sure what they post is accurate. The reality is that this transparency portal is transformational. I believe in open government and people need to be able to look at it themselves because I don’t trust government, and if I say that, why would people trust me? Ultimately, we use this data in our office to inform policy. Review our policies and see how we can adjust them to address the disparities we see. »
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 can set their priorities, they can also decide what’s not priority and in my opinion, transparency should have been a priority from day 1. For the first time in 15 years, we have statistics. The problem with that is that we have always deserved to see what the “our taxpayers’ money was being spent. This is not the first piece of information released by a prosecutor’s office. Many have these presentations of all their information. On top of that, they have an analysis of all these statistics because the dry stats are what will rogers said there are lies and goddamn lies and stats just looking at the stats doesn’t tell you why something is happening we need to have an analysis that we don’t have not.Last year era, the public defender said that in our county we were 3% African American and 25% in our jail. At the time, she was ridiculed by our prosecutor saying that she was trying to attack the judiciary and the prosecution and was just quoting statistics. And we still don’t have an analysis of why. I want to make all the information available to you from day one, update it regularly and tell you what we are going to do about problematic things. You deserve to know what is done with your taxes. »
