Tim Arango

The winds, known as the Santa Anas, loom large over the collective psyche of Southern California. They have also been the defining antagonist in this season of fire, a sinister reminder that wind has the power to provoke fear and present danger in an instant.

“Devil winds,” said Peter Sanders of the Los Angeles Fire Department, referring to a popular nickname for the Santa Anas, which reached hurricane-level speeds in parts of the region Wednesday and made fighting fire almost impossible.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, firefighters and police officers stood guard near a wall of glass that protects the plane President Reagan used as Air Force One. Yards away, a ridge was lit up by bright-red encroaching flames and gray plumes of clouds, as aircraft flew low, dropping water and powerful retardant.

The blaze threatening the library was the latest to ignite in more than a week of fierce wildfires that have burned up and down the state. As it crept close, thousands of residents in the valley had to flee their homes nearby.

Firefighters spoke of the gusts with a sense of fatalism, an act of nature they cannot get ahead of, and certainly cannot control. The fire near the library, known as the Easy fire, was at 5% containment Wednesday afternoon. “We can’t get in front of it because it puts us in harm’s way,” said Brian McGrath, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

On the hillside at the library the wind was a terrible companion. To walk meant to move hunched over, slowly, both hands holding your hat. Shouts became whispers, drowned out by the hissing of flags flapping, and tree branches bending and cracking. A sign for the visitor parking lot, secured by sandbags, had easily toppled over.

The winds were pushing the smoke to the west, moving like gray mist across the blue sky — and making it possible to breathe — as firefighters and police officers watched the flames crackle through the dry, brown brush. When a helicopter appeared, buzzing low, and dropped its payload of water, a rainbow bloomed like a halo over the bruised landscape.

Up north, strong winds, known there as Diablo winds, flamed the Kincade fire, which had spread to more than 75,000 acres Wednesday.

With multiple fires burning, meteorologists and residents were looking at forecasts with a sense of foreboding: Predictions called for some of the strongest winds in a decade, and at least in Simi Valley those fears were well-founded.

Though the Santa Anas are an annual occurrence, this year they were proving to be far worse and many residents said they felt different. With the effects of climate change combined with fierce fire seasons, the winds now seem more ominous.

For Karin Feldshuh, who moved to Los Angeles from New York last year, the feel of the wind triggers an emotional reaction.

“Anxiety,” she said Tuesday. “I know with the fires brewing that embers can flow and wreak havoc.”

Seeing the wind forecast Tuesday, McGrath said the department put in place bulldozers and fire crews to be ready in case of wildfire. Helicopters, which were flying Wednesday near the library, had been on standby all night. Fixed-wing aircraft had been grounded off and on Wednesday morning, as the winds shifted.

Robert Santos, a meteorologist for Spectrum News 1, a cable channel, said big temperature drops in the mountains and high desert would create cold, heavy air that would push out like the opening of a freezer, creating strong gusts toward the ocean.

The National Weather Service issued a rare “extreme red-flag warning,” saying the winds could trigger “extreme fire behavior.”

The Santa Anas have always had a grip on the literature and pop culture of the region. Most famously, writer Joan Didion mused on the Santa Anas in her essay “Los Angeles Notebook.”

“It’s a fact of life for Angelenos, and for people who are newer to LA or Southern California it’s a favorite thing to comment on or complain about,” said Nathan Masters, a historian and writer at USC Libraries and the host of “Lost LA” on KCET, a public television station. “I think the reason is the Santa Ana winds are the dirty little secret behind the notion that LA has perfect weather.”

Masters produced a show on the history of the Santa Anas in 2012, and found that the winds — which have been blowing this way for thousands of years — were first described in print as the Santa Anas, named for a canyon southeast of Los Angeles, in a newspaper in 1880. He likened the winds to a bill that comes due every year for all those days of great weather.

“We have how many days of sunshine a year?” he said. “More than 300? And yet, from roughly October through January we can count on half the days being somewhat uncomfortable because of the dry air.”

Julien Kinori, 35, a writer in Los Angeles, brought up Didion on Tuesday, saying she talks about how “they’re these warm winds that are seemingly innocuous but there’s a certain darkness to them. Also a madness associated with them, that they make people go crazy.”

Officials with the Los Angeles Fire Department said they were monitoring the wind forecast and deploying fire crews all over the city and the San Fernando Valley, where the winds could be the strongest.

“The forecasted winds are as bad as we’ve ever seen, supposedly,” said Graham Everett, a deputy chief and chief of staff of the department.

Everett, 53, who has been with the department for 30 years, said the department had identified which canyons — the spaces where the winds can be the most furious — in Los Angeles have not burned in a long time, and could light up at any point.

In the area of the Getty fire, which erupted early Monday in a wealthy enclave of western Los Angeles — burning down several multimillion-dollar homes near the Getty Center and its priceless artworks — fire crews were patrolling neighborhoods, looking for spots that were still smoldering.

“Because we do know the winds are coming in,” Everett said.

While many Angelenos this time of year feel that pinch of anxiety when the winds kick up, for firefighters it is a different emotion, he said.

“I wouldn’t call it dread,” he said. “It’s anticipation. It’s what we do. It’s game day. We prep for this.”

The winds could reach 50-80 mph in the areas of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, putting them, possibly, at the “upper end of people’s historical experience,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He said he predicted more heavy winds through Thursday. “There’s still a pretty long period of winds still to come,” Swain said.

As the day wore on in Simi Valley, firefighters were confident the blaze would not threaten the Reagan library, where a helicopter peered out from the glass enclosure as the fires raged outside, and the flags of the presidents hissed in the wind.

This article originally appeared in

'Devil Winds' Drive a Fire Threatening the Reagan Library

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The downsloping gusts that begin inland and blow toward the ocean in autumn and winter bring with them warmth and dread in equal measure. They howl through the canyons of Santa Monica and whip the palm trees that line the streets of Los Angeles, driving up dust and fraying nerves.

'Devil Winds' Drive Southern California Fires

They have also been the defining antagonist in this season of fire, a sinister reminder that wind has the power to provoke fear and present danger in an instant.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, firefighters and police officers stood guard near a wall of glass that protects the plane President Reagan used as Air Force One.

The fire near the library, known as the Easy fire, was at 5% containment Wednesday afternoon. “We can’t get in front of it because it puts us in harm’s way,” said Brian McGrath, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

The winds were pushing the smoke to the west, moving like gray mist across the blue sky — and making it possible to breathe — as firefighters and police officers watched the flames crackle through the dry, brown brush.

Up north, strong winds, known there as Diablo winds, flamed the Kincade fire, which had spread to over 75,000 acres Wednesday.

With multiple fires burning, meteorologists and residents were looking at forecasts with a sense of foreboding: Predictions called for some of the strongest winds in a decade.

The winds could reach 50-80 mph in the areas of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, putting them, possibly, at the “upper end of people’s historical experience,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He said he predicted more heavy winds through Thursday.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The downsloping gusts that begin inland and blow toward the ocean in autumn and winter bring with them warmth and dread in equal measure. The winds, known as the Santa Anas, loom large over the collective psyche of Southern California.

On Monday morning, with a backdrop at the hulking Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, a symbol of the city’s place as the nation’s largest jailer, Gascon said he was finally entering the race, setting up what activists have described as the most important district attorney’s race in the United States.

Promising a “safer, more humane, more effective and far less expensive criminal justice system” for Los Angeles, Gascon, in his announcement, cited his record in reducing jail populations in San Francisco.

“The way the criminal justice system operates must change, in the face of overwhelming data and scientific evidence that shows that we have been doing things for the past 40 years that are not only inhumane but expensive and also has not made us any safer,” he said.

As cities across America, like Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, have elected progressive prosecutors promising to end mass incarceration, Los Angeles has resisted the trend, twice electing Jackie Lacey, a get-tough-on-crime prosecutor who has earned the support of much of the city’s political elite.

Gascon’s entry into the race, regardless of who wins, will surely reshape the conversation around criminal justice in Los Angeles County, a vast area of 88 cities that is home to 10.3 million people and the nation’s largest jail system and prosecutor’s office. Because of the county’s size and its relatively high incarceration rates, The Los Angeles Times wrote in a recent editorial, “There is a strong case to be made that aside from the presidential race, the most important item before voters in 2020 will be the race for L.A. County D.A.”

“There are a lot of eyes on this race and for good reason,” said Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization that promotes reformist prosecutors. “LA hasn’t embraced new thinking that other urban areas are trying to push forward.”

She described the race as “really a test of where leaders will stand in Los Angeles.”

As district attorney in San Francisco, a post he resigned from this month to move to Los Angeles and consider a challenge to Lacey, Garcon drew national attention for diverting more young adults up to age 25 away from prison, automatically expunging past marijuana convictions and lowering incarceration rates.

“I think to some extent he was out there by himself for a number of those years doing things that were courageous, and it probably helped that he was on the left coast,” said Larry Krasner, the district attorney in Philadelphia, who was elected in 2017 on a platform of reducing mass incarceration.

In Los Angeles, it has been a different story: Under Lacey, Los Angeles, which accounts for almost a third of the state’s prison population of close to 130,000 inmates, has sent people to prison or jail at more than four times the rate of San Francisco. Yet in both cities, crime is at historical lows, with the fewest murders in nearly a half century last year.

California has passed several measures in recent years to reduce prison populations and change the criminal justice system.

Gascon joins two other candidates, both prosecutors, who are also challenging Lacey from the left: Richard Ceballos, 57, a former defense lawyer who now focuses on prosecuting organized crime cases; and Joseph Iniguez, 33, who was a schoolteacher before he became a prosecutor.

Voters will have their first say March 3, when California holds its presidential primary. If one of the candidates receives more than 50% of the vote, then he or she will win. If not, the top two finishers will advance to a general election in November 2020.

“I have a tremendous amount of passion for what happens in LA, and for the last few years I have become increasingly more uneasy seeing the backwardness of the criminal justice system in LA,” Gascon said in an interview last week, before he announced his candidacy.

Gascon, a Cuban émigré, moved to Los Angeles with his family as a boy. He attended Bell High School there but dropped out and entered a three-year stint in the Army, where he earned his high school degree.

Gascon was a beat cop in South Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s — he eventually rose to assistant chief of the department — a time of soaring crime rates, gang violence and the crack epidemic, and a time when Los Angeles and the nation were locking up more and more people, particularly black men.

Gascon, who was appointed district attorney in San Francisco in 2011, replacing Kamala Harris, and then was elected twice, referred to himself as having been a “lock-’em-up guy in the ’80s and ’90s.”

He said, “I am not proud of some of the things I did in the past and I want to figure out a way to do it differently.”

Lacey, who prefers to portray herself as a crime fighter, a more traditional approach for a prosecutor, has lately moved to divert more mentally ill people from Los Angeles’ jails, which have been described as the nation’s largest mental health system.

Lacey spent her formative years in turbulent South Los Angeles, where she grew up and saw her neighborhood become consumed by drugs and crime. And, like many in law enforcement, she said there was no easy answer to why crime rates have fallen so sharply: Have they dropped because of mass incarceration, or in spite of it?

“Things did get better, and I wish I knew the secret,” she said in an interview earlier this year, pointing out the importance of keeping crime low as Los Angeles prepares to host the Olympics in 2028.

“I really want to keep it that way. I want to keep people safe. I want businesses to come here. If the city wants to host the Olympics, I don’t want there to be a discussion about what we do about crime,” she said.

“On the other hand, I realize, probably because of my own personal experience, is that a lot of people did get caught up in the drug trade and they can reform and they can come out. And there does need to be a shift in our thinking about addiction and mental health.”

George Gascon Enters Race for District Attorney in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES — For months, George Gascon, a former beat cop, police chief and then district attorney of San Francisco, has weighed a run for the same job in Los Angeles.

The experience shaped his views on mass incarceration and the devastation it inflicted on black communities, and guided him as he shifted from police officer to prosecutor and led reform initiatives to keep people out of jail as the district attorney of San Francisco.

For Jackie Lacey, who is black, growing up in South Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s showed her how gangs and drugs could ravage neighborhoods. Bars went up over windows, and doors were fortified with iron gates.

As a prosecutor and as the current district attorney of Los Angeles, Lacey has taken a tough line on crime, sending people to prison at a rate far higher than in San Francisco.

Now, those two views on criminal justice that were nurtured in the tumult of South Los Angeles — locking up criminals versus finding ways to keep people out of prison — are likely to be at the center of one of the most widely watched local elections next year.

Gascón said on Thursday that he was resigning as district attorney of San Francisco to prepare to challenge Lacey in the race for district attorney of Los Angeles.

In a note to his staff, Gascón, 66, said he would leave office on Oct. 18. He wrote that he and his wife, Fabiola, “are returning to Los Angeles to rejoin our family and explore a run for district attorney. Making our communities safer and more equitable remains my life’s work, and I’m simply not ready to slow down and put public service behind me.”

Gascón has told associates and activists who have been urging him to run that he was likely to officially enter the contest soon, possibly within a few weeks, once he moves to Los Angeles, where his mother and two daughters live.

A race between Gascón and Lacey would be another important test for the criminal justice reform movement, which has swept progressive prosecutors into office in cities from Philadelphia to Chicago to Boston, as well as in Brooklyn. National activists have long eyed the seat in Los Angeles County, calling it the most important campaign in the country, both because Los Angeles has the nation’s largest criminal justice system — it has the largest jail and the biggest prosecutor’s office — and because its incarceration rates are still relatively high.

For Californians, such a campaign would display competing approaches to criminal justice from its urban poles, San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are both defined by their liberal politics. While violent crime has fallen considerably in both places since the 1990s — last year Los Angeles had its fewest murders in more than a half-century — Los Angeles sends people to state prison at four times the rate of San Francisco. (In 2017, Los Angeles sent 608 people per 100,000 to state prison, compared with 126 per 100,000 for San Francisco, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.)

Gascón has supported several statewide measures to reduce prison populations, some of which Lacey has opposed. She is also among the prosecutors who have pursued new death penalty cases after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on executions in March. Gascón’s office has never prosecuted a capital case.

Lacey, 62, was first elected to the office in 2012, becoming the first woman and first African American to hold the job. Liberals once viewed her as an ally, but in office Lacey has been an aggressive crime fighter, resisting efforts to more drastically reduce prison populations. The approach alienated liberals who once supported her, as well as Black Lives Matter activists who protested when she refused to prosecute police officers for shooting civilians. But it was popular enough to help her win two elections.

In the 2020 race, she already faces two opponents from the left, both prosecutors from her office: Joseph Iniguez, 33, a prosecutor in Alhambra; and Richard Ceballos, 57, who prosecutes organized crime cases and would be the county’s first Latino and first openly gay district attorney. But Lacey has much of the city’s political establishment behind her, with endorsements from Mayor Eric M. Garcetti, four of the five county supervisors, state officials and local congressional representatives.

“Time and time again, Jackie Lacey has demonstrated her ability to protect the public, fight crime and ensure justice for all the people of Los Angeles County,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat from Los Angeles who is leading the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, said in a statement.

Lacey has pushed back against her critics by emphasizing her duty to protect citizens, pointing to her upbringing in crime-ridden South Los Angeles.

“It felt like a dangerous time,” she said in an interview this year, referring to her youth. “I can remember my parents’ home getting burglarized and everything getting wiped out while they were at work. And it seems like after that they put bars on the windows and had the iron-gate door. And I really thought everybody in LA was doing it because all of the neighbors were doing it.”

It was not until she went away to college at the University of California, Irvine, in suburban Orange County, she said, “that I realized, wait, people don’t even lock their dorm rooms and they have valuable stuff in it. And you could drive down the street and you don’t see bars.”

Lacey joined the district attorney’s office in 1986, at a time of soaring crime rates. “There was no shortage of homicides, homicide cases available for young lawyers to cut their teeth on,” she said. “It just seemed like a very violent time, gangs were full blown.”

For months, Gascón has been weighing a challenge to Lacey, visiting Los Angeles and meeting with local activist groups that have opposed her. In those meetings, Gascón has touted his record in San Francisco, where he has reduced prison and jail populations and taken measures to reduce racial bias, such as scrubbing demographic information from documents prosecutors use to make decisions about filing charges. He instituted a system to automatically expunge past marijuana convictions, which served as a model for other districts, and established a young-adult court to divert more people away from prison.

This week, a coalition of activists started an advertising campaign in Los Angeles called “Run George Run.” It features a billboard alongside a freeway near downtown Los Angeles, where Lacey works, that associates her with mass incarceration, locking up young people and supporting a “racist death penalty.”

Shaun King, founder of the influential Real Justice PAC and a prominent critic of mass incarceration, said his organization would support Gascón financially and with grassroots organizing, the kind of work it has done in other district attorney races around the country.

“In spite of it being a relatively progressive city it just hasn’t had a progressive legal system, and this is a chance to move it in that direction,” he said. “If there is any system I would classify as a failed system it’s the system there in Los Angeles.”

Gascón, a Cuban émigré who was a teenager when he moved to Los Angeles with his family to escape Fidel Castro’s government in 1967, rose from beat cop to assistant police chief in the Los Angeles Police Department. He later served as police chief in Mesa, Arizona, and San Francisco before being appointed district attorney in San Francisco in 2011 by Newsom, who was then the city’s mayor. He took over the district attorney’s post from Kamala Harris, who had been elected California’s attorney general and is now a senator running for president. Gascón was then elected twice to the position.

Like Lacey, Gascón spent his formative years in South Los Angeles when tough state and federal laws were sending large numbers of people to prison, but the two law enforcement officers came away with vastly different perspectives on criminal justice.

“One of the things that became very obvious to me was that we were now arresting the second or third generations from the same families,” Gascón said of his days as an officer.

He said that he saw how incarceration broke “the family nucleus and communities” and that the observation “started to lead me to believe that the system really needed to be redesigned.”

Referring to Los Angeles and its relatively high rate of incarceration, Gascón said: “It really breaks my heart. I think there are a lot of good professionals in LA doing some really hard work.

“Unfortunately I still see a lot of the 1980s and ’90s type of enforcement efforts and attitudes,” he added. “Especially with the district attorney, the practices are still very much along the lines of the 1990s.”

Los Angeles Election May Put Rival Views of Criminal Justice on Ballot

LOS ANGELES — Walking the beat as a cop in the Watts neighborhood of South Los Angeles in the 1990s, George Gascón found himself arresting multiple generations of black men from the same family.

The sicker Ady Barkan gets, the more famous he becomes.

“That’s the paradox of my situation,” he said this week. “As my voice has gotten weaker, more people have heard my message. As I lost the ability to walk, more people have followed in my footsteps.”

Three years after a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease that slowly takes away nearly every physical function while keeping the mind intact, Barkan, at 35, is essentially paralyzed from the neck down. A few remaining abilities — to mumble or grunt to get a point across, to eat some soft foods like yogurt or soup — went away this week, after surgery to install a breathing tube to counteract his slowly paralyzing diaphragm.

“I guess I should have a Last Supper tonight,” he said the day before the surgery, on a bright afternoon at his cozy, light-filled cottage in Santa Barbara, California. His wife, Rachael King, a professor of English literature who is pregnant with a daughter, was at his side, and their 3-year-old son, Carl, was at day care.

“Yogurt with rib-eye flavoring,” he joked.

Before ALS, Barkan was an energetic but relatively anonymous foot soldier for progressive causes like rights for immigrants and workers, ending mass incarceration and reforming the Federal Reserve. After getting sick, he became a hero of the left: Politico has called him “the most powerful activist in America,” and he is a social media star and host of presidential candidates. In April, the last time he traveled to Washington, he testified before Congress in support of Medicare for All, a cause he has become more passionate about after fighting with his insurance company to cover the thousands of dollars a month it costs to manage ALS. And this month, he published a memoir.

“Even through his vocalizer, Ady’s powerful words forced an urgency and moral clarity that members could not look away from or ignore,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wrote in the prologue, referring to his testimony. “I saw their discomfort at issuing the usual excuses, and Ady also would not tolerate them — even with many physical capacities gone.”

Barkan’s memoir, “Eyes to the Wind,” was named for a song by the War on Drugs, an indie rock band. It joins several titles in recent years by 30-something authors facing a grim diagnosis and early death, and to which his book has been compared: “When Breath Becomes Air,” by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who learned he had metastatic lung cancer at 36; “The Bright Hour,” by Nina Riggs, who died at 39 of breast cancer; and “The Unwinding of the Miracle,” by Julie Yip-Williams, a lawyer who received a terminal colon cancer diagnosis at 37.

The difference is that those books were published posthumously, while Barkan could live for many more years. Typically, sufferers of ALS live three to five years after diagnosis. But others live longer. Stephen Hawking, the physicist, lived for more than 50 years with the disease.

“A long time, for sure,” he said, when asked how long his surgery could prolong his life. “Some folks live for a decade or more. ALS is a death sentence, but no one gives you an expiration date. Which is scary.”

It was in a villa in Italy, where he and King were on vacation in late 2017 and when he could still walk and type, where Barkan started writing his book. He typed the first two chapters himself, dictated the rest and worked on edits with the same technology he now uses to communicate — by using his eyes to hover over letters and words like a cursor on a Microsoft tablet. (To interview Barkan requires submitting questions in advance so he can consider his responses and upload the answers, which are read by a computerized voice.)

The book, as much as anything, he said, is an inheritance for his son, Carl, and his daughter who is due in November.

“I hope someday Carl and his sister read it and feel proud of me,” he said. “In large part, I wrote it for them to remember me by.”

Before getting sick, Barkan was skilled in the art of garnering publicity for an issue. He came to national attention in 2014 by bringing a group of activists to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Federal Reserve governors were holding their annual gathering. Since then, he has very deliberately decided to use his disease to attract attention to his progressive causes. He has turned to civil disobedience, and was arrested several times at protests in Washington the past few years.

One early confrontation was with Flake, in December 2017, over the Republican tax bill, which Barkan was speaking out against because he believed it could lead to steep cuts in social services like health care. “You can save my life,” Barkan told Flake, who was then an Arizona senator. “Remember this conversation.” (Flake voted for the bill, but the episode, on video, became a sensation.)

“The way that I have tried to make meaning out of my ALS is to turn it into a weapon for struggle, so that it becomes more than merely tragedy,” he said. “More than merely loss.”

Barkan grew up in California, in Claremont and Pasadena, the son of Israeli immigrants who became history professors. After reading “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a boy, he decided he wanted to be a lawyer. But while clerking for a federal judge in New York after law school, he was drawn to the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan and decided to become a full-time activist, joining a Brooklyn-based organization called the Center for Popular Democracy.

He said he was still guided in many ways by the guilt of white privilege, of the many opportunities he says his solidly middle-class upbringing afforded him: an Ivy League education at Columbia University and Yale Law School.

“One of my professors said that I should hold on to the discomfort and use it as a spur to action,” he said.

In the first days and weeks after his diagnosis, he turned to spiritual thinkers, like Buddhist writer Pema Chodron, and secular works, like Kalanithi’s book, for solace. He developed a meditation practice, which he discussed with Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who is running for president, in their conversation for his video series with candidates called “Uncovered,” part of his political action committee Be a Hero.

As the disease progressed, that fell away. “I actually don’t meditate anymore.”

He added: “The activism is my practice. When ALS gets me down I focus my anger at racism and capitalism.”

As Barkan lives with his disease, there are two conflicting impulses he wrestles with — the “radical acceptance,” in his words, that his disease demands, and the refusal to accept things as they are that is at the core of political organizing.

He can no longer hold Carl, but technology has allowed them to share books and videos. Each day he and King are sure to “carve out some quiet moments.”

“A lot of this is about compensating for not being the father and husband I want to be,” he said, of his activism.

Barkan is clearly pleased with how he has helped shape the debate on health care during the Democratic presidential primary race. He has not endorsed anyone, other than saying he hopes the nominee is “someone other than Biden,” the only candidate who has not agreed to meet him. He praised Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont for their support for Medicare for All, and said of Booker, “I was more impressed than I expected to be.”

In a presidential debate in July, Warren referred to Barkan, saying he “has ALS and it’s killing him. Ady has health insurance, good health insurance, and it’s not nearly enough.”

She continued, “this is somebody who has health insurance and is dying. And every month he has about $9,000 in medical bills that his insurance company won’t cover.” (After his tracheotomy, King said that figure could be $15,000 to $20,000 per month because he will need round-the-clock care.)

So has he learned anything about living and dying that he wants people to know?

“Well, I don’t want to give away the secrets that are in the book,” he says. “Folks should pony up if they want some dying-man wisdom.”

Ady Barkan Won't Let Dying Stop His Activism

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — First there was the viral video from an airplane, where he confronted former Sen. Jeff Flake about the Republican tax bill. Then he was arrested, in his wheelchair, in the rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building protesting the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. And in the past few months, Democratic presidential candidates have flocked to California to sit down with him and discuss “Medicare for All.”

As the scope of the disaster became clear, family members gathered on the coast at a family support center at a local fairground awaiting news about their loved ones. A makeshift memorial to the victims, with flowers, candles and notes, was erected at the harbor in Santa Barbara.

The deadly fire was the worst maritime disaster in California in recent memory and was another tragedy endured in recent years by the coastal community around Santa Barbara, which faced a devastating wildfire in 2017 followed by deadly mudslides.

Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County said at a news conference Tuesday morning that 20 bodies had been recovered and that divers had seen between four and six additional bodies in the wreckage but were not yet able to recover them. Five crew members were able to escape and were the only ones to survive, including the captain. The boat had a total of 39 people on board: six crew members and 33 passengers.

“Sadly no additional survivors have been found,” Brown said.

Brown said that among the 20 bodies recovered, 11 were women, and nine were men. He said investigators were in the process of identifying the victims and collecting DNA samples from family members to help match the victims with loved ones.

Bob Hansen was sleeping in his fishing boat just a few hundred feet from the 75-foot scuba vessel, named the Conception, when he was roused by panicked crew members who had escaped.

“I could see the fire coming through holes on the side of the boat,” Hansen said. “There were these explosions every few beats. You can’t prepare yourself for that. It was horrendous.”

Even as divers continued to look for the bodies of the missing, investigators were trying to determine the cause of the fire on the boat, which the Coast Guard said Monday had been in compliance with safety regulations.

Among the victims were reportedly at least two students from the Pacific Collegiate School, a local charter school for grades seven to 12, and two parents, according to local news reports.

The Conception had been anchored off the shore of Santa Cruz Island, the largest of the Channel Islands, a national park of caves and coves off the Southern California coast. The passengers had been on three-day diving expedition and at the time of the fire were sleeping below deck in double-stacked bunk beds, which were tightly packed in one room, according to the website of Truth Aquatics, the Santa Barbara-based company that operated the vessel and for decades has taken passengers on diving trips around the islands.

A distress call that went out at about 3:15 a.m. Monday — less than an hour before the passengers were to be woken up for the day’s diving — was recorded by a Ventura County Marine radio channel: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” a man’s voice yelled. “I can’t breathe!” he screamed.

Later in the morning, as the sun rose, the boat, moored in Platts Harbor on the north side of Santa Cruz Island, was smoking but still afloat, according to a photograph posted by the Santa Barbara Fire Department. Later in the morning, it sank, just 20 yards from shore.

Numerous federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Park Service, and local law enforcement departments were involved in what officials said Tuesday had become a recovery operation. Rescuers Tuesday were planning to raze the boat and bring it to shore, to investigate what had caused the blaze.

Bodies of 20 Victims Recovered in California Boat Fire

Officials Tuesday said they had called off a search for survivors of a devastating fire that engulfed a commercial scuba diving vessel off the coast of Southern California after recovering 20 bodies.

And there has not been a death penalty case in San Francisco in decades, while prosecutors in Los Angeles are still seeking new capital cases after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a moratorium on executions.

San Francisco and Los Angeles may share a similar brand of liberal politics. They are both led by mayors who see it as their jobs, in part, to push back against President Donald Trump’s agenda, and both cities are trying to bring liberal solutions to bear on some of the same problems, like homelessness and housing.

But when it comes to criminal justice, the two cities could not be more different.

“They are polar opposites,” said Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.

Now, those competing approaches — pushing to reform mass incarceration versus a more traditional get-tough-on crime tact — are likely to clash in the race for district attorney of Los Angeles. George Gascón, district attorney of San Francisco, is weighing a return home to Los Angeles, where he was a police officer in the 1990s, to challenge Jackie Lacey, Los Angeles’ incumbent top prosecutor, setting the stage for what activists and experts say will be the most important district attorney’s race in America.

Gascón would not confirm that he is joining the race, though an associate with knowledge of his plans said he was likely to enter. In an email, Gascón said, “I am both proud and humbled that so many Angelinos have encouraged me to bring a data-driven vision of public safety and racial equity back to my hometown of Los Angeles.”

As he weighs the decision, Gascón has been visiting local activist groups in Los Angeles, including Black Lives Matter. In meetings, he has touted his record in San Francisco of reducing jail and prison populations and tackling bias by keeping demographic information about suspects from prosecutors as they decide whether to bring charges.

Activists in Los Angeles, as well as national figures who have backed, with campaign cash and grassroots support, liberal district attorney candidates across the country in recent years are pushing Gascón to run.

“This race is a huge opportunity,” said Anne Irwin, a lawyer and director of Smart Justice California, an advocacy group. “Los Angeles has the biggest prosecutors office, and affects more lives, than any other prosecutors office in the country. Electing a reform-minded prosecutor there will change the criminal justice landscape nationally,” she said.

Groups that have successfully supported reform-minded prosecutors pushing to end mass incarceration in places like Philadelphia, Chicago and Texas have zeroed in on Los Angeles as the ultimate prize for their movement because of its size — it has the biggest jail system and the largest prosecutors office in the country. At the same time, politicians on the national level have begun to reverse the nation’s incarceration boom of the 1980s and 1990s, and last year, Trump signed the First Step Act, which reduced some federal sentences.

Cullors, who is also the California director of the Real Justice political action committee and this year published an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times with the headline, “Criminal justice reform is sweeping the country. But not LA County,” called the upcoming election “the single most important DA race in the country.”

Cullors said that Gascón has, in their meetings, “been very clear that he wants to end mass incarceration in Los Angeles. He’s been very clear that he wants to hold law enforcement accountable. He has been very clear that he does not want to lock up people with mental illness.”

As Gascón canvasses community activists in Los Angeles, Lacey has been racking up endorsements for her reelection campaign from the city and region’s political establishment, including eight congressional representatives, several state officials, four of the five members of the county board of supervisors and Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Garcetti, in a statement, said, “She’s smart, tremendously effective and cleareyed. And she always puts the mission of advancing justice for all above everything else.”

When Lacey was elected district attorney in 2012, she became the first woman and first African American to hold the office, and she was embraced by liberal activists as someone they hoped would take a new approach to criminal justice. But in office, she has spoken out against statewide reforms of recent years aimed at reducing prison populations and put herself forward as an aggressive enforcer of the law, an approach that won her two elections.

She has lately touted a new mental health diversion program, aimed at steering people away from jail and into housing and treatment, which has won praise from city leaders who hope it will help end the revolving door between the city’s jail and Skid Row. But she has angered many liberal activists with her reluctance to prosecute police officers for shootings.

She has also pushed back on a new state law that changed California’s felony murder rule, which allowed for early release of inmates who had been convicted of murder while involved in a felony even though they weren’t the actual killer.

And this week, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report of Lacey’s handling of the death penalty, calling it “shameful” and riddled with racial bias. The report found that all of the 22 people sentenced to death in her tenure were people of color. And while Newsom in March announced a moratorium on executions, Lacey has said she remains supportive of capital punishment, noting that it is still the law in the state and that voters have backed the penalty. Her office continues to pursue new death cases.

In a written response to questions, Lacey said, “My values are a reflection of my experience growing up in the Crenshaw district. Growing up, we witnessed gang violence, poverty and difficult relations between the police and community. From the Watts riots, to overcrowded prisons, to seeing people I knew going to jail and becoming victims of crimes, I don’t come from the privileged background of a typical county DA.”

Lacey was unapologetic about being tough on crime, writing that her goal is to create an environment “where children in disadvantaged communities have the opportunity to thrive and not live in fear.”

She continued, referring to her position on the death penalty, “My job as district attorney is to enforce the law, not make the law.” On the issue of not prosecuting officers involved in shootings, which has drawn the most criticism from activists, she said, “A district attorney should not be prosecuting based on politics,” adding, “Whether the case involves a police officer or anybody else, my job is to enforce the law as it is written.”

According to data from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice in San Francisco, using statistics from 2017, Los Angeles sent 608 people per 100,000 to state prison, much higher than San Francisco’s rate of 126 per 100,000 and higher than the state rate of 487. San Francisco has seen a sharper drop than many places in its incarceration rate, which declined by nearly 57% between 2009 and 2017, using data from the center and the Vera Institute of Justice. That compares to a 28% decline for Los Angeles, which accounts for roughly a third of the state’s total prison population of almost 130,000 inmates.

These days, each Wednesday, Black Lives Matter activists hold rallies outside Lacey’s office at the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles, to protest her tenure in office and demand her removal. But how much success they will have remains to be seen.

“There’s just a really stark contrast,” said Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, referring to San Francisco and Los Angeles. “I guess the huge unanswered question is, are LA voters ready for someone who’s more progressive?”

Los Angeles and San Francisco, 'polar opposites' on criminal justice

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles has the biggest jail system in America and sends people to state prison at almost four times the rate of San Francisco, even though violent crime has fallen in both cities.

The killer stalked his victims, ingratiating himself as a repairman and then killed them in a spasm of violence. One victim was nearly decapitated; another’s breasts were slashed off. One of the women, a former girlfriend of the actor Ashton Kutcher, was found in a pool of blood on the stairs. The gruesomeness of the killings and the celebrity connection have earned the perpetrator the tabloid-style moniker of The Hollywood Ripper. Prosecutors are asking jurors to deliver a death sentence.

Nearly 400 miles to the north, in Sacramento, prosecutors have come together to seek a death sentence for Joseph James DeAngelo, the man accused of being the so-called Golden State Killer, who terrorized communities up and down the state in the 1970s and 1980s before an arrest was made last year with the help of a genealogy website.

And several other capital cases are underway in California, including the trial of a man accused of killing an officer in Sacramento and a suspect described as a serial killer in Los Angeles County. A prosecutor may also seek a death sentence for the man charged in the recent synagogue shooting near San Diego.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, issued a moratorium in March on executions in the state, which has more death row inmates than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. But that decision has not stopped local prosecutors from seeking new death sentences, underscoring the divide in the state between conservative prosecutors and liberal reformers like the governor.

And as liberal as California voters are generally, as recently as 2016 they rejected a ballot measure that would have abolished capital punishment and approved another one to fast-track executions.

These divisions, experts say, are setting the backdrop for what could be a contentious fight as Newsom takes new steps beyond the moratorium to abolish capital punishment.

For now, the moratorium amounts to temporary reprieves for each of the 737 men and women on California’s death row, which will last for the duration of his time as governor.

“It’s got to be really confusing for the average citizen who sees both things going on and doesn’t understand how all of the above can be occurring,” said Michele Hanisee, the president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles County. She is seeking a death sentence in one of her cases: the man accused of being a serial killer, Alexander Hernandez, who is charged with killing five people in a shooting rampage in the San Fernando Valley in 2014.

“The simple answer is this: The district attorneys of the state of California took an oath to uphold and follow the law,” Hanisee said. “I think the governor probably did too, but he doesn’t care.” The governor, she added, does “not have the legal authority to tell them not to seek death or not to follow the law.”

New death sentences in California have declined in recent years — 2018 was a record low, with five new sentences. The drop aligns with a national trend, as public support for capital punishment has waned and juries have been reluctant to impose death sentences in the face of evidence of racial disparities and high-profile exonerations. Before Newsom’s moratorium, 20 other states, including most recently Washington and Delaware, had abolished the practice.

Public support for capital punishment across the country has dropped substantially since the 1990s, according to polling data from Gallup.

California, while maintaining a large death row, has not executed anyone since 2006. There were long-standing legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol that had halted executions even before Newsom’s moratorium.

Many supporters of capital punishment say that while the system can be reformed to reduce racial disparities, and thus produce fewer death sentences, the penalty should remain an option for prosecutors and juries in the most heinous of crimes, including some of the cases underway in California.

“The case for the death penalty is the moral part of it,” said Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, an organization in Sacramento that favors the death penalty and supported a ballot initiative in 2016 in which voters approved fast-tracking executions. “For the very worst murderers, nothing short of execution is adequate.”

Research that shows racial disparities in the capital punishment system — that black and Latino men are disproportionately sent to death row — has led to an acknowledgment that the system is flawed and is at the heart of calls for abolition. But in California, supporters of the death penalty argue that white men are charged with committing some of the most egregious crimes, including Michael Gargiulo, the Hollywood Ripper suspect, or DeAngelo, who was once a police officer.

“Gargiulo is a white dude,” Hanisee said. “Golden State Killer, he’s a white guy who was a cop.” She also noted that many of the 24 death row inmates who have exhausted all of their appeals — and would be next in line for executions if they were proceeding — were white men.

“Of the 24 or so who are presently eligible for execution, half of them are white men,” she said. “So let’s execute them.”

In an interview, Newsom said that his administration was considering several new steps to dismantle the state’s capital punishment system and that his moratorium was a first step on what he hoped was a path that ended with abolition. He said his advisers were studying how he could commute the sentences of current death row inmates to life without parole. Newsom has the power to commute sentences in which the inmate has only one felony, but more than half of the death row population has at least two felonies; to commute those sentences would require approval from the state Supreme Court.

Newsom’s advisers are focusing on the Supreme Court’s decision to block several pardons or commutations — though not for death row inmates — issued by Gov. Jerry Brown before he left office in January. Those rejections were the first time in decades the court had blocked a governor’s commutations, and Newsom has asked the court for an explanation.

He hopes the explanation will offer some guidance “that will allow us to form better judgment on next steps if we want to look to commutations on the capital punishment side.”

“Life without the possibility of parole. We are not releasing anybody. We are by no means pursuing that,” Newsom said.

He also said he was discussing with the attorney general’s office what role the state could play in blocking prosecutions of new death sentences. But legal experts say this power is limited: The state could decline to defend capital cases on appeal, but it does not have the power to order district attorneys, who are elected at the county level, to not seek death.

“He does not have the authority to tell prosecutors or even the attorney general what the policy is going to be with respect to individual prosecutions,” said Shilpi Agarwal, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco. “As long as the death penalty is on the books they are free to seek it in any individual prosecution.”

One possibility is that the attorney general could take cases away from local prosecutors. But experts say that is unlikely and would be unprecedented.

“I have not seen any indication from our attorney general that they want to impose the governor’s view and take cases away from us so that we cannot seek capital punishment,” said Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney, who is part of the prosecution in the Golden State Killer case.

Schubert added that, “Capital punishment is the law in California, and just because Gavin Newsom has a personal opposition to it doesn’t mean that we as prosecutors abandon our obligation to enforce the law in the appropriate cases. I’m not this zealot about the death penalty, but it is the law.”

Those who oppose capital punishment, like Newsom and Agarwal, say that no matter how gruesome a particular case is, it does not justify perpetrating a system they see as biased, with the possibility of wrongful convictions. Almost immediately, Newsom’s moratorium had an impact nationally, with candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 coming out against capital punishment.

“When you are putting a moratorium on the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere, it’s going to have an impact, we believe, on the national debate,” Newsom said. “This was not just about California. It’s not just about the situational nature of prosecutions in this state. It’s about a deeper question about our values and who we are.”

All of this appears to be heading to a new ballot initiative in California, perhaps as soon as 2020, about whether to keep capital punishment.

“The deeper question is, when is this ripe for reconsideration at the ballot?” Newsom said.

If there were to be another fight at the ballot over capital punishment, Californians would most likely hear a lot about the Golden State Killer and other terrible crimes.

“We will talk about the facts of these cases and what these people did,” Hanisee said. “And if the California voters vote to get rid of the death penalty, so be it. But it needs to be an honest debate.”

LOS ANGELES — In Courtroom 106 in downtown Los Angeles, a jury has begun hearing testimony in the long-awaited trial of a man accused of stabbing to death two women in their homes at night.

Tim Arango

Articles written by the author

'Devil Winds' Drive a Fire Threatening the Reagan Library

'Devil Winds' Drive Southern California Fires

'Devil Winds' Drive Southern California Fires

George Gascon Enters Race for District Attorney in Los Angeles

Los Angeles Election May Put Rival Views of Criminal Justice on Ballot

Ady Barkan Won't Let Dying Stop His Activism

Bodies of 20 Victims Recovered in California Boat Fire

Los Angeles and San Francisco, 'polar opposites' on criminal justice

Grisly killings shape a battle over executions

California Has a Moratorium on Executions. Prosecutors Want New Death Sentences Anyway.

A real estate mogul seeks to expand his influence over Los Angeles

A Real Estate Mogul Seeks to Expand His Influence Over Los Angeles

A Real Estate Mogul Seeks to Expand His Influence Over Los Angeles

Nipsey Hussle Was Hailed as a Hero. But to California Officials, He Was Still a Gangster.

Democrats rethink the death penalty, and its politics

Democrats rethink the death penalty, and its politics

After soul searching, Gov. Gavin Newsom will halt executions in California

California Has a High Rate of Police Shootings. Could a New Open-Records Law Change That?

California Has a High Rate of Police Shootings. Could a New Open-Records Law Change That?

LA Mayor Eric Garcetti decides against presidential bid