Marisa Lagos: Los Angeles Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer is here with us in studio. His district includes South Central L.A. and he’s chair of the Assembly Public Safety Committee, where much of the hotly debated criminal justice and fentanyl-related legislation met its fate this year. We’re going to talk with him about how his life has informed his leadership here in Sacramento. Assemblymember, welcome to the Breakdown.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Great to be here this morning, thank you.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, thanks for being here. You know, we would like to talk a little bit about your life before we get into your policymaking, because I think it’s really informed how you have governed. I know you were born in Little Rock, Arkansas, where your family had a pretty deep history. Tell us a little bit about your family there and their kind of involvement in the civil rights movement, really.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: So I usually tell the story of when I finally got to college, I was having a really, really good time. I’m talking about a really good time. I’m talking academic probation, good time and about to get kicked out of USC. And I had to go sit at the foot of my grandmother, and my grandmother would have a ladle in her hand. If it was in her left hand she wanted to talk, if it was in her right hand that meant the beatings were going to start. And I started telling her because she didn’t graduate from elementary school. And I try to tell her, you know, she’s talking about her national champions. I’m going to this fancy school. I’m you know, I’m in a fraternity and everything. So the ladle went from the left hand to the right hand. That meant “shut up.”
And so she told me the story and she said, Look, when you were a baby, I was born in 1957, the same time my uncle was entering Little Rock Central High School with the Little Rock Nine, who were trained in nonviolence with Martin Luther King and Reverend Lawson. And she said she got a phone call one day while she was cooking and a voice was from the Klan. And the Ku Klux Klan told her to get her son out of school or your grandson will never make it to school. She said “That grandson was you. You have absolutely no right to give up this education. And in fact, you had to leave Arkansas because we knew something was better for you away from here.”
Marisa Lagos: Wow
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Ever since then, I was on the dean’s list, and I never look back. And so I attribute that to them telling me those stories about being able to change history. And if you talk to any one of the Little Rock Nine during that time, they just wanted to go to school.
Marisa Lagos: They were kids.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: They were kids. Think about it, they were 15, 16 years old. They had to send the 101st Airborne down to protect them, to go to school every day. They were kicked. They were beaten. They were called the N-word almost every day. And they had to endure it for a year. And there’s a picture of my uncle standing next to a fence post where they forgot to pick him up one day, and the group of kids surrounded him and started, you know, needling him and giving me a hard time. And there’s a famous picture of him standing by this lamp post. And across the street, you can see all the racists yelling at him. And he’s not moving. He’s not moving at all. And my when they finally got to him, they realized he was in shock because they surrounded him. When I asked him, how did you survive it? And he said, “I never gave them any hate back. I never let them give me any fear.” And he said there was a kid there that came over and said, “Leave him alone.” And everybody dispersed. The next day, he said, “Hey, why did you why did you come help me? Must be really Christian person. It was really great.” And the guy said, “Well, my family is atheist. I just did it because it was the right thing to do.” And ever since then, I realize no matter what the controversy is, just do the right thing and things will work out.
Guy Marzorati: I mean, I can imagine not just the toll him but on his family, siblings.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Yeah, my mother. Another story I’ll tell you real quick. My mother, I remember, I asked her what she’d do during that time because they’re eight kids and everybody had a job. And she said, “I washed your uncle’s shirt every night.” And I made, you know, you know, 15, 14 years old. “That means you didn’t do anything.” And my uncle heard me grab it by the scruff of my neck. And he said, “Let me tell you something. Every day I went to school, somebody either picked something on me, urinated on me, took a marker on this white shirt. Every night your mother stayed up all night to make sure that shirt was white as it could be. She bleached it, she did everything she could. So when I went back every day, they saw me in the same white shirt, clean as a whistle. And that was my flag to say, you’re never going to stop me no matter what you do. You can’t stop me. Your mother did that. That was her job. Your mother probably had a more important thing to do in this struggle than anybody else.”
Marisa Lagos: Well, you mentioned that you did end up at USC, but I know before that, even after moving to L.A., you had a tough childhood. You’ve talked about that your mother was abused by your father. Can you just tell us a little bit about, you know, your experiences as a kid and kind of what you what you carried with you from those?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: I’ve learned that a lot of things that happen to young people when you’re traumatized. And that’s why I do a lot of work of getting money for people with childhood trauma so they can get beyond it. Many don’t. And they end up in the criminal justice system because of early childhood trauma. And so living in the projects, you see some things that no young kid should ever see. And whether or not a domestic violence that my mother experienced, that our family experienced, you know, I was molested as a kid with a babysitter. My uncle was stabbed seven times in front of his family members and killed in front of my aunt. And I have an uncle, not an uncle, but a cousin who was transgender and which we didn’t know what that was back then. So Julius became Jules and was going through the procedure. And one day somebody killed Jules and violated that body that they had. And I mean all of that.
Marisa Lagos: How did you kind of make it out of that?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: So one of the things that I think really helped is I for some reason I got involved with a mental health professional who, as we went through a lot of the pain and the hurt and talked through it, one, I realized none of it was my fault. And I took a lot of blame onto myself, that to know that that, you know, there are some things I heard as far as the domestic violence that I did. I was so, you know, you’re six or five years old. I wanted to go help my mother, but I was in shock and I didn’t do anything. And so I always carried that guilt. There were things that happened with my uncles that I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t do anything. Again, I had that guilt and I wanted to lash out and that anger was in me. They taught me to not only release it, but to talk about it.
But I still never really talked about it in public, I think for a lot of African-Americans, especially African-Americans in my community, especially African-American males, we don’t talk about the pain and hurt that we experience. And I’m noticing that even with in my work with public safety, there are a lot of people, firefighters, police officers, prison guards and others that experience some of the most horrendous types of scenes that you could possibly deal with and they’re not releasing or feeling a place that they can get released at. Some of us use substance, substance abuse. And that’s why you see so much out there on the street, substance abuse because we’re not able to heal ourselves. You know, when you have a mental crisis, it’s not like having a cold. Then you go get some cough medicine or somebody give you a shot to help you cure yourself. This is something that you can’t see but you but it just as damaging anything else. Stress is a killer like you wouldn’t believe. Yeah, and I don’t think people understand that.
Guy Marzorati: Do you see at all your path in public service that you ended up pursuing as a way to take action, a way to take back kind of empowerment and a way to kind of take forward the experiences that you went through as a child?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: So I don’t know how I got here. I kind of do, but I really don’t know. On December 22nd, 2022, I had a minor operation and I died. I literally died and I was brought back to life by the nurses who took quick action. During that time I saw a lot of things. I was out for about 4 hours and when I finally came to, I saw my family around me and I asked them, you know, only takes — it was a one day operation and it only takes one of you to drive the car. Why is everybody around me? And that’s when they told me I had passed away. One of the things I tell people is I was able to see my five-year-old grandson graduate from college. And one of the things that I saw, I saw a lot of things and it made it clear why I am here right now, that there’s some things that I need to do. There were some challenges that I’m meeting now that I actually saw during that time, that if I had said something, I think people thought I would think I was a little nuts.
I mean, there’s we have a history of people who experience life and death situations and they come back and tell you what they saw and people kind of look at you funny. Well as somebody that’s been through that, I believe that sometimes God has a way of saying, “I need to talk to you for a little bit.” Because when I went back to my hospital and said, Why did I die? Why did I have a cardiac arrest? I had a cardiac arrest on the 22nd? What caused it? And to this day, nobody knows how it cause it. But when I went to went to my church and they pointed up to the sky and said, I know, they said “God just needed to talk to you for a little bit.” And right after that, I’m starting this new journey of why I need to to do more, to not only help my people, but to make sure that everyone has a society that works best for them. And for the first time, I realize I’m in a position to really kind of help people, especially disadvantaged people, especially homeless people, especially people who don’t have a voice. That’s why I’m here.
Marisa Lagos: Alright, hold it there. We’re going to take a very short break and when we come back we’ll continue talking to L.A. Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer. You’re listening to Political Breakdown from KQED Public Radio.
Marisa Lagos: Welcome back to Political Breakdown, I’m Marisa Lagos here this week with Guy Marzorati. We are talking with Los Angeles Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer. So we mentioned you had a pretty traumatic childhood. You ended up at USC. I know you spent time working in college at the morgue during the crack epidemic, and then you go on to work in L.A. city government for decades. And I kind of want to jump forward because we only have so much time. You were elected to the Assembly in 2012, and this was really right after the Supreme Court had ordered the state to lower its prison population. Lawmakers and the governor were really grappling with how to do that, how to do that while ensuring public safety. And you end up getting tapped to work on the Public Safety Committee pretty soon after to lead it. How did that kind of come to be and was that something that you welcomed or thought you might be doing when you got up here? I know you ran on more of the kind of economic job creation platform.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Yes. And as I worked for the city for 25 years, I did real estate. I ended up Director of Real Estate when I retired from the city. And so when I first got here, I wanted to change the criminal justice system from the courts. And so I decided that since they were during the time when we didn’t have any money, we had kind of. It’s about $1,000,000,000 that the court system was in the hole. And so I made a concerted effort to restore that money. But I wanted to restore that money so that they would have diversion programs and they would have drug courts and juvenile courts and homeless courts and courts that it would help people divert from the prison population. And when I first started, the judges told me that I couldn’t do that. That one, I wasn’t a lawyer. I didn’t know what I was talking about. And I said, Well, that’s fine. But right now I’m in charge of the purse strings.
Guy Marzorati: Do you want to get out of this deficit or not?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: [laughs] And so I worked really hard over two or the next five years, one to restore that billion dollars so they could run efficiently. So people would have access to justice from the criminal justice system. But at that time, we had three strikes. We had sentences that were predetermined no matter what happened. Judges could only do that. And so we started to move the courts to where judges were able to actually look at the holistic individual and figure out a way what is best for, say, public safety. And then they make the decision.
Guy Marzorati: You’ve had a decade now in the legislature, I think seven years chairing this public safety committee. Where would you point to as kind of, maybe your greatest mark on public safety, on the criminal legal system in California?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: So when we looked at ways we can ensure that people didn’t recidivate and lowering the number of people who recidivate back into prison, we made a conscious effort to make sure that they were trained, they had jobs, better educated, got off of drugs, and if they had mental health problems when we started to focus like a laser on those things, there are fewer and fewer people coming back into prison, because it was like a revolving door. And so the prison population obviously ballooned to about 160,000, now it’s about 96,000 people who are incarcerated. That means we have an opportunity to close prisons. And this year, I asked that two of the savings, or two of the prisons that the governor is closing will result in $230 million of annual savings that I want to plow it back into programs that help people with mental health in the communities that better education Boys and Girls Clubs on Saturday night basketball, things that keep kids out of out of problem areas so that we don’t refill the prisons again and that we have productive citizens.
Marisa Lagos: Well, and I think if you look at the data, I’m looking at recent numbers from the money that’s been saved from Prop 47, one of the reforms, the recidivism rates are just so low if people actually complete these programs. But as you know, there was a lot of reforms that happened. Realignment, Prop 47, three strikes reform, Prop 57. And there’s been some backlash. And I just wonder, is there any argument we went too far too fast? When you talk to people who are worried about public safety these days, do you ever feel like, okay, maybe we, you know, should have been a little bit slower on some of these changes?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: So we went too far too fast when we did three strikes and other things and then we’re trying to adjust.
Marisa Lagos: You mean the tough-on-crime era?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: The tough-on-crime era and when you do an adjustment because there is no law that is perfect. And like I usually tell people, and I’m an elected official, so I can say this. It’s never legislation. It’s always implementation. And so if we had implemented it to its fullest, if we had people totally involved in making sure it got corrected, we would not be in the situation where — the example I will give you, I did AB 1065 organized retail theft, that was done 2018. That little small unit of CHP and DOJ have resulted in $30 million brought back over 1800 convictions or places where they’ve actually arrested people. Been unbelievably successful. We did that with Jerry Brown.
Then when Governor Gavin Newsom looked at the statistics, he gave it another $200 million to expand it because it was so successful. And now when you actually look at the number of people who are being arrested now on a smash and grab, it’s based on the organized retail theft law that I instituted. And what it does is, it charges people with felonies so that they not only get several years in jail, but Attorney General Bonta is also charging them with federal crimes which could get up to 20 years in jail. So that way you go after the organizers of it and get them off the street. But you still have an opportunity to deal with people who you can give some services to. That’s the kind of combination we needed to do, and we needed to spread it and expand it to make Prop 47 better. That’s where we’re at. We got to make Prop 47 better and not eliminate it. That’s the struggle right now. It’s either ying or yang.
Guy Marzorati: Because there is this sense, and I think, in large part driven by viral videos, that sense of lawlessness or that you could get away with shoplifting. How do you respond to those kind of criticisms?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: It’s difficult. One of my early political mentors once told me “perception is reality.” The chief of police of LAPD, Los Angeles police department can tell you every day that violent crime is down. He can tell you that crime is down. But if you see those videos on TV, you feel—
Marisa Lagos: What do you feel?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Yeah. And then the other thing that which I think is also distressing that we have to come to grips with, that there’s a racial aspect to it. So when you see homeless people out on the street and, you know, you see African-American homeless people out in the street, there are people who are not African-Americans who then are fearful of black people anyway, clutching their purses when they get on the elevator. And then that’s exacerbated when you walk out every day and you see a homeless person out there. And so that just that subconsciously is giving the impression that everything is worse. How many times do you hear that because of the homeless situation, “This looks like a third world country,” and statements like that. And so we’ve really got to come to grips with our own, what we feel and just try to focus like a laser on how to resolve that, because that that’s part of it. Because perception is really reality for a lot of people.
Marisa Lagos: I want to ask you really quickly before we talk about fentanyl, the other law that got passed to kind of tweak 47 was to allow folks to aggregate charges, DAs to aggregate charges, right? So that if you are a repeat, you know, shoplifter, even if you’re not part of a big ring, you can get charged with a felony, even if the dollar amount, you know, doesn’t get to that felony threshold. I’ve been doing some research. I have not been able to find any examples of this law being used. One DA says he’s never had police present that sort of case. Others have told me they think it’s just difficult for law enforcement to build these cases. What’s your response to that kind of, you know, reaction? Because we hear a lot of kind of hating on 47 from law enforcement.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Right. And that’s been, that’s been a real problem. And that’s why I talk about, for example, on fentanyl I said we need to unite the fight on fentanyl. We need to unite the fight against criminals, to unite to fight to protect citizens, because we can’t pull it all together. Collaboration is the only way we’re going to ultimately be able to get this done. If law enforcement is not doing a job because they think Prop 47 is preventing them, when in fact we do have laws on the books that they can, think about it: If the attorney general and the CHP can aggregate and do it, that means other law enforcement officers can do that.
We need to put down all the rhetoric and then come together to get this done. No one, no one Republican, Democrat, moderate, progressive, no one wants to get let criminals get away with anything. And that is a fallacy whatsoever. And so there are laws on the books that you can actually prosecute. When I hear from a business owner that says, “I see someone in my store, I call the police. Three hours later, they show up and said they don’t really come to these because of Prop 47.” Well, that’s not true. If you catch somebody in your store burglarizing it, you can prosecute them and you can prosecute to the fullest. So somehow we’ve got to have a collaborative conversation to where we’re all working together to do what we need to do to to give people a perception that criminals are being prosecuted.
Guy Marzorati: I want to ask about fentanyl. There’s been a number of bills that moved through the Public Safety Committee this year dealing with increasing sentencing for dealing fentanyl that were voted down, some of them even brought by Democrats. And I wonder, you know, in Sacramento, you often get bills that get kind of a courtesy ‘aye’ vote in committee. Members might not completely support the idea, but they want to see the bill move forward. They want to see negotiations or kind of compromise continue. Why did you feel, I guess, that those bills were legislatively irredeemable? They couldn’t move past your committee.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: So when those bills come up, the committee as a whole try to figure out a way so that they can pass. It is usually up to the author whether or not they accept amendments. Probably 90% of the time, maybe close to 100% of the time, the reason they don’t get out is because they refuse any kind of amendments. They want it to go through purely as the way it is. There is no legislation that doesn’t have some kind of change so that we can move forward with it. And so even when we don’t vote on something, meaning if some of the legislation that goes through where the committee does a no vote, they just don’t vote at all. That means they want to do more research and look at it and then hopefully it’ll get passed in January. Well, that was looked upon as a no vote. It’s not a no vote. It’s look, let’s get back past the rhetoric, let’s get past the politics in the press and let’s get into the policy of what we really need to do. Because once you get to the root of what you’re trying to solve, because that’s what we —
Marisa Lagos: Well, what do you think we need to do around fentanyl? I mean, it is a crisis. It’s horrific what’s happening.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Well we have a $5 billion bond.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, tell us about that. That we, the Democrats, put together a group of law enforcement, medical professionals, psychiatrists, drug abuse specialists. They all came together and we had a hearing. And whether it was a judge, a DA, law enforcement, each of them said we needed a public health solution to fentanyl and that tough-on-crime measures did not work. So I believe we could stop the opioid epidemic if we had better education, we went to the schools. Also making sure we had Narcan. That’s what my bond does, make sure we had Narcan in every school or in places so we can stop the overdose, especially in Skid Row, where my district is that we can stop it.
Guy Marzorati: And so this bond, November 2024, that’s what you’re pushing for, is that right?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Yes. We were trying to get it on, obviously wanted to get it on the March.
Guy Marzorati: But the governor has other things going on
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: There was a bigger name [laughs]
Guy Marzorati: We’re running short on time. The last thing we want to ask you about is reparations. You were involved on the task force multiyear process, came out with the final report this summer. It sounds like most of the legislative action is probably going to happen starting next year.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: Correct.
Guy Marzorati: Bills getting introduced that came ideas from the report. If we’re sitting here in a year, what does success look like to you on reparations over the course of the next year?
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: And so the main the two main people who are going to be involved in it is Senator Steven Bradford and myself, we ill be pushing both legislative and budgetary recommendations moving forward through both houses and to the Governor. For us, with this being our last year, obviously we would like to get everything done, but we’re going to try to get as much done as possible, knowing the reality may be a multiyear process.
Guy Marzorati: Of course, yeah.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: But we’ve got to at least set up the initial parameters, especially the easy things, like an apology letter should not be something that’s ultimately controversial. Looking at ways we can ensure that that African-Americans, especially young kids, can get into higher education. The law school at UCLA, the numbers are abysmal. If we just worked real hard to figure out a way we can get more and more of our kids there, and then we’re really seriously looking at innovative ways to be able to close the wealth gap. And it’s even harder now with the housing crisis and the housing being so expensive. But that is, if you look at what is the wealth gap between white and African Americans it is the home. And if we can start to own land, then we can go to the next step. Owning a business or stocks and bonds. But it’s a gradual thing. But the first thing we got to start is financial literacy and being able to get people to start to own and buy homes and remove those barriers from us being able to access property.
Marisa Lagos: All right. We’re going to have to leave it there. Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, thanks for coming in.
Guy Marzorati: Appreciate your time.
Reggie Jones-Sawyer: All right, thank you. Thank you both, this was great.
Marisa Lagos: That’s going to do it for this edition of Political Breakdown, we’re a production of KQED Public Radio.
Guy Marzorati: Our engineers today are Brendan Willard and Christopher Beale, I’m Guy Marzorati.
