Editorial | Who prosecutes the prosecutor?

When it comes to this year’s Orange County District Attorney election, we’re urging students to “swipe left” on current DA Todd Spitzer. Graphic by HARRY LADA, Art Director

If we had to outline our ideal candidate for Orange County District Attorney, we might say something along the lines of: intelligent, respectful, impartial, egalitarian.

And while there are plenty of words we could use to describe current District Attorney Todd Spitzer (most of them being explicit), those four do not make the cut. Instead, we might use terms like: merciless, combative, anti-homelessness and racist.

In recent weeks, allegations of racist comments by Spitzer ignited the press of Orange County, and in turn, fueled our fervent desire to see a complete upheaval of leadership within our local judicial system. 

One of the most notable allegations comes from former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, who was fired by Spitzer Feb. 10. A memo was disclosed to the Los Angeles Times following his termination from an anonymous source, which Baytieh had previously written in December 2021.

According to the memo, Spitzer said he knows “many Black people who get themselves out of their bad circumstances and bad situations by only dating white women” while talking about the case of a Black murder defendant with other prosecutors at an October 2021 meeting.

Orange County residents have also been criticizing Spitzer because of a newly resurfaced video from November 2019 where he repeats racial slurs during a speech he delivered to the Iranian American Bar Association.

Spitzer used the N-word during his speech three times — only one of which was directly prompted by a slideshow accompanying the presentation. Even so, the word was censored on the slides, meaning Spitzer either used the racial epithet deliberately or is so intrinsically bigoted that he used the word subconsciously — we don’t know which is worse.

Spitzer claims the uncensored words were necessary to his speech to truly demonstrate the ugliness of hatred. Though we couldn’t help but notice how Spitzer easily self-censored swear words like “f---” and yet seemed okay allowing racial slurs to spill off his tongue.

“There’s no kids here, so I’ll do it, I guess,” Spitzer said in his speech after already using the N-word in his prior sentence.

It’s painfully clear that in all of Spitzer’s extensive academic career — which was capped off with six years at Harvard University — no one ever told him the internet was permanent. We’d like to say we feel bad, but we don’t.

The surge of breaking news headlines come on the heels of a report recently released by the OC Sheriff’s Department, which showed that homicide rates have been the highest they’ve ever been in the county in 22 years, all under the guidance of Spitzer.

Ironic, considering Spitzer has based most of his reelection campaign this year on being “tough-on-crime.” 

This prompts the question: what kind of crime is he tough on? Clearly not the elevated homicide rates that occurred under his careless watch; nor the colossal increase in hate crimes — specifically toward the Asian American and Pacific Islander community — that characterize his term.

From our point of view, it’s the kind of nebulous “crime” used as an umbrella term by corrupt officials to disparately target and incarcerate marginalized communities. A Feb. 28 report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern and Northern California confirmed that Black people are much more likely to face criminal charges in Orange County than the rest of the population and are less likely to be offered diversion programs to avoid jail time.

When paired with campaign banners reading “#NoLAinOC,” this tough-on-crime stance points to a deeper issue of prejudice in the counties’ relations.

Even before Spitzer came along, OC residents seemed to find identity in separating themselves from Los Angeles — pinning the former as some sort of “paradise” on the other side of the train tracks. In contrast, the urban sprawl of Los Angeles was perceived as a problematic, dangerous metropolis always on the verge of collapse.

It’s almost as if Orange County is the rich, white neighborhood next door that uses Los Angeles as the regional lightning rod for everything it stands against. Spitzer didn’t start this narrative, but he certainly isn’t ending it; his campaign for reelection is rooted in fear-mongering, and essentially, centering whiteness.

Rather than providing help and resources to marginalized communities, Spitzer is taking advantage of the bigotry and gentrification that has festered in Orange County for decades, lighting calculated fires in certain corners to fuel the sense of division that his platform rests on.

However, recent demographics released by the census bureau reveal that Orange County is 35% hispanic and 20% Asian — meaning what some white residents might call “minority” (non-white) communities actually make up an over 50% majority of the county.

But when your county’s district attorney hops on a harmful narrative and rides it like a bull in a rodeo, what even are facts, anyway? 

Spitzer’s commitment to sweeping things under the rug follows a greater obsession with appearances and “cleanliness” that has been plaguing the county for years. His racist comments, which he continues to defend, are one such example. His dangerous campaign rhetoric is yet another, which harmfully depicts low-income, typically minority communities as dirty and dangerous.

The infamous Republican also published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in May 2018 defending his NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) stance — a precursor to #NoLAinOC — which has led to the systematic evacuation and cleansing of homeless encampments. Less than a month before, Spitzer was criticized by the Orange County Board of Supervisors for referring to people experiencing homelessness as “sex offenders and drug addicts” at a city council meeting.

Spitzer is purportedly a member of the OC Commission to End Homelessness, though other members quickly took notice of his habitual absence from meetings. Well over half of the commission’s meetings for the year of 2021 were canceled due to commissioners, such as Spitzer, failing to show up.

With his Facebook bio reading, “Solving homelessness, preventing crime and fighting for victims,” you’d think at least one of these triumphs would be embodied through Spitzer’s leadership. 

So ultimately, who holds the county’s top prosecutor accountable? 

Technically, it’s up to the California Supreme Court. And it wouldn’t be the first time a California District Attorney receives karmic retribution for misconduct in office; former Del Norte County D.A. Jon M. Alexander, now deceased, was prosecuted and recommended disbarment as a result of what the court considered to be acts of “moral turpitude.”

But until Spitzer, too, receives a long-overdue legal reckoning, the responsibility is on the residents of Orange County to protest for judicial change.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Baytieh disclosed a memo he had written in December 2021 to the Los Angeles Times. This memo was, in fact, submitted to the Los Angeles Times by an anonymous source.