George Gascón

George Gascón (born March 12, 1954) is an American attorney and former police officer who is the district attorney of Los Angeles County.

Gascón was born on March 12, 1954, in pre-Communist Cuba.

Shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, his father lost his job for alleged anti-government activity, and his uncle, a union organizer, was jailed for over a decade.

Gascón served in the 64th Military Police Detachment, much of it in Germany.

In 1967, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Bell, California.

He joined the United States Army at the age of eighteen and became a sergeant.

After earning a Bachelor of Arts in history from California State–Long Beach, Gascón joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer.

During his tenure with the Los Angeles Police Department, he attained the rank of assistant chief of police under Chief William Bratton.

In 1967, Gascón and his family emigrated from Cuba to the United States.

The family settled in Bell, California, a suburb of Los Angeles.

At the age of thirteen, Gascón enrolled in Los Angeles Unified School District schools where he struggled to learn English.

He recalled: "I was spending hours translating everything with a Spanish-English dictionary. I started missing a lot of school."

By 1972, he dropped out of Bell High School.

Gascón joined the United States Army in 1972.

In the army, he earned his high school diploma and two years toward an undergraduate degree.

In 1975, he received an honorable discharge as a sergeant.

After the Army, Gascón completed a Bachelor of Arts in history from California State-Long Beach while working sales jobs.

In 1978, Gascón joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer.

After a three-year stint with the LAPD, he returned to work in business management.

He served as a reserve officer in the Hollenbeck Division of LAPD until 1987.

In 1987, he returned to LAPD as a full-time police officer.

During his time with LAPD, Gascón earned his J.D. degree from Western State College of Law in 1996.

In 2000, he took command of the LAPD training unit at the height of the Rampart scandal.

He was in command of the LAPD training unit, overseeing the LAPD Academy and in-service training, during the federal government's oversight of police reforms.

Even though there was a mandate for reform, then-Police Chief Bernard Parks did not allocate funding for additional training.

Gascón used a grant that had originally been funded to research community-policing strategies, and produced three hundred thousand additional training hours.

One of his first orders as training commander was to create an ethics training manual for the LAPD.

He also implemented problem-based learning and posted a copy of the bill of rights in every LAPD classroom.

Michael Gennaco, the former head of the United States Justice Department's civil rights division said at the time: "He fundamentally changed the way the LAPD teaches its officers about civil rights."

Upon his return, he rose through the ranks of LAPD as a Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Commander, and Deputy Chief in 2002.

In 2006, Gascón was appointed chief of police for the Mesa Police Department.

He had frequent clashes with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio over immigration sweeps targeting Latinos.

In 2009, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed Gascón as the chief of police for the San Francisco Police Department.

A member of the Democratic Party and a former Republican, Gascón served as the district attorney of San Francisco from 2011 to 2019.

Prior to his work as a prosecutor, he was an assistant chief of police for the LAPD, and Chief of Police in Mesa, Arizona and San Francisco.

Gascón was born in Havana, Cuba.

In 2011, after Kamala Harris was elected California Attorney General, Newsom appointed him to be the San Francisco district attorney.

He was subsequently elected in his own right in November 2011, and again in 2015.

In 2020, Gascón unseated incumbent Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey with a reformist agenda.

Gascón's liberal and progressive policies received backlash during his time in San Francisco and Los Angeles, leading to several recall attempts in the latter role.