This Los Angeles Democrat is a ‘New Testament kind of guy’ — and one of California’s most powerful voices on criminal justice
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LOS ANGELES – The man — tall and gaunt, slightly bedraggled, carrying a plastic grocery bag — nodded to Reggie Jones-Sawyer as he ambled down the sidewalk.
“Hey, Reverend,” he drawled.
In his crisp blue suit, with matching baby pink striped shirt, tie and pocket square, Jones-Sawyer didn’t flinch.
“I get that a lot,” he said. “Anywhere I go in this community looking like this, people ask me what church I’m at.”
Jones-Sawyer is many things — a six-term Democratic state Assemblymember from Los Angeles, the founder of its reconfigured and ascendant progressive caucus, chairperson of the Assembly Public Safety Committee — but a minister is not one of them.
On this busy block of Vermont Avenue in South Los Angeles, as he headed to a local nonprofit organization to present a recent state budget earmark, he was simply trying to explain his rehabilitation-centered approach to criminal justice.
After seven years leading the public safety committee, Jones-Sawyer has found himself under fire this session like never before, increasingly at odds with Republican opponents and even some of his own Democratic colleagues as he held off legislation to increase penalties amid rising anxieties about crime. Sustained public outcry over his handling of measures dealing with the fentanyl crisis and a child sex-trafficking bill unexpectedly thrust Jones-Sawyer into the spotlight and left him scrambling to respond.
The mistaken identity on a city street seemed to strike him with new insight. Some minutes later, after touring a healthy community market and presenting its director with an oversized check, Jones-Sawyer offered an unprompted Biblical analogy.
“I’m really a New Testament kind of guy — that God believed in forgiveness,” he said. “That’s what we balance with public safety.”
Reggie Jones-Sawyer never intended to be the criminal justice guy at the state Capitol.
He worked for decades in Los Angeles city government, including as a deputy to Republican Mayor Richard Riordan in the mid-1990s and later overseeing its sprawling properties. After an unsuccessful bid for city council and three terms as secretary of the California Democratic Party, Jones-Sawyer ran for the Assembly in 2012 on a platform of job creation and economic growth, including a plan to lease out vacant state-owned land.
“I wanted to go back to my roots,” he said during an interview at his district office in Exposition Park, steps away from the California Science Center and the Memorial Coliseum. “I was director of real estate. I wanted to do economics. I wanted to do general services.”
But then-Assembly Speaker John Pérez had other ideas, Jones-Sawyer said. If he wanted a leadership role in the Legislature, it would have to be as chairperson of the budget subcommittee on public safety — primarily, according to Jones-Sawyer, because he was from a safe Democratic district and could take difficult votes without significant political risk.
The opportunity taught Jones-Sawyer about the power of the purse in state government, as well as the ins and outs of a whole new issue. He pursued funding for body cameras for California Highway Patrol officers and for programs to keep former inmates from reoffending, as well as legislation to no longer require jail time for drug convictions, to make it a crime for police to tamper with video evidence, to ban people convicted of hate crimes from possessing guns, to eliminate cash bail, to raise the minimum age for police officers, to regulate bounty hunters and even to replace the term “at-risk youth” with “at-promise youth” in state law.
“The policies he’s pursuing, the general direction, are where we want to go as a society,” said Anthony Rendon, the former Assembly speaker who in 2016 appointed Jones-Sawyer chairperson of the public safety committee, the first stop for any bill dealing with the California Penal Code.
Jones-Sawyer, who is African American, has been strenuously conscious of not returning to an earlier tough-on-crime era, when the state’s prisons were so overcrowded — disproportionately with Black and Latino men — that the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to reduce the inmate population. In an interview, Rendon commended Jones-Sawyer for relying on data and successful ideas from other countries to guide his leadership on criminal justice and police accountability, while standing firm against pressure to revive failed policies of mass incarceration.
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