Budget Cuts Would Curtail Prosecutions, D.A. Warns

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office will have to abandon prosecution of all felony auto theft, burglary and narcotics cases--as well as most other cases involving nonviolent crimes--if a proposed 16% budget cut is adopted for the 1993-94 fiscal year, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti said Thursday.

The plan to strip $25.7 million from the district attorney’s budget--outlined during recent discussions with the county administrative office--also would mean a virtual end to the district attorney’s role in prosecuting misdemeanor crimes, Garcetti said. Such cases, which number about 300,000 a year, include a broad range of crimes from petty theft to vandalism and shoplifting.

With county supervisors aggressively lobbying Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature to retain property tax and sales tax revenues that may be lost next year, Garcetti made public the potential impact on his department at a news conference. The effects were also detailed in three-page memos circulated among the office’s 925 prosecutors.

“There is no question that (the cuts are) a very real possibility,� Garcetti said after emerging from a late-afternoon meeting Thursday with County Administrative Officer Harry Hufford. “It appears there is no money in the county--and I believe it--to enable us to prosecute literally thousands and thousands of cases that should be prosecuted.�

Earlier, he had described the proposed cuts as “more than personal threats to each of us as employees of this office; they threaten the very viability of Los Angeles.�

County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who was in Sacramento on Wednesday rallying support for greater funding of local programs, said such cuts “could be devastating.�

“You just can’t have people not prosecuted for some of these crimes,� she said. “You’re talking about drunk driving, shoplifting, some drug sales.

“Obviously, we are going to have to keep putting pressure on the governor.�

Garcetti, who was instructed in March to begin preparing for possible cuts of 8% to 25% within his office, said more recent discussions indicated that the minimum reduction would be 16%. If that occurs, the district attorney’s office will be forced to eliminate 377 positions--251 prosecutors, 98 staff members and 28 investigators, he said. The office would close its operations at 13 municipal courthouses throughout the county, he added.

Prosecutors who received the memos said they had heard rumors of cuts for months but were alarmed at the extent of the possible reductions.

“If I were just a lay person and I heard the D.A.’s office would have to stop prosecuting misdemeanors, I would be shocked beyond by wildest imagination,� said Steve Katz, 29, a three-year deputy district attorney working in Whittier. “It’s unfathomable that this would happen, but I think Mr. Garcetti is facing facts here. He’s left with no (other choice).�

Kim Santini, another prosecutor who works in Whittier, described morale as quite low because of the possible cuts.

“We’re all very scared, obviously . . . frightened for own jobs,� she said. “But also . . . if criminals know they’re not going to be prosecuted, need I say more?�