Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger’s Newsmagazine | 29.03.2003 16:49

Recently elected San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis — “openly Gay, Jewish, a woman and a Republican,” in her own description — spoke to the largely Queer San Diego Democratic Club March 27 and got quizzed on such touchy topics as police shootings and Proposition 36, which mandated treatment instead of prison for nonviolent drug possession offenders. She explained why she’d initially opposed 36 despite supporting its overall purpose, the problems in implementing it, and the difficulty of prosecuting police officers who kill. She claimed that the people who spoke at a recent community forum in Ocean Beach about a police shooting there all stated “facts” about the incident she knew were not accurate.

DA Bonnie Dumanis Speaks to Queer Democrats March 27

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2003 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

Despite the handicaps of being — as she put it — “openly Gay, Jewish, a woman and a Republican,” Bonnie Dumanis squeezed out a victory in last November’s election for San Diego County District Attorney against incumbent Paul Pfingst by 3,500 votes out of 570,000 votes cast. But her real challenge, she told the San Diego Democratic Club March 27, came when she took office in the face of the overwhelming stage budget crisis and its direct effect on San Diego County.

“It’s been an interesting time being district attorney,” she told the club. “When I took office crime was on the way up, the office was fractured, and shortly after I took office the county told me I had to take out $20 million from my $92 million budget. So as you can see, all the things I talked about on the campaign trail have sort of taken a back seat to what am I going to do so I don’t have to lay off anyone in the D.A.’s office.”

The internal divisions in the D.A.’s office, Dumanis explained, were of long standing and resulted from the “vindictiveness and favoritism” with which former D.A.’s Pfingst and his predecessor, Edwin Miller, made promotions. Dumanis, a highly regarded superior court judge before she ran for D.A., resolved to change that. She reached outside the D.A.’s office and tapped another judge, Jesse Rodriguez, to be her second in command. Then she insisted that all 86 assistant district attorneys eligible for positions as division chiefs be considered. “We took a serious look at everybody,” she said.

Despite the budgetary constraints, Dumanis said she’s determined to expand the number of special units in the D.A.’s office. “We’ve started a special unit for rape and other crimes of sexual violence,” she said. “We’ve started a narcotics unit to crack down on trafficking and also do prevention. We’re setting up a unit on political corruption and a cold homicides division. We’re looking at consistency of case resolution throughout the county, so if you do something in South Bay or East County you’re treated the same as anywhere else in San Diego.”

Dumanis made a brief presentation and then threw the meeting open for questions. The questions ranged from how the D.A.’s office plans to deal with gang violence and what use it’s making of DNA testing to drug law enforcement and shootings by police officers. Two club members, including former president and veteran community activist Jeri Dilno, grilled her on the police shootings issue.

Dilno said she’d served on two city of San Diego task forces on the police use of force — one in the late 1980’s and one just two years ago — and she said that many of the recommendations made in the late 1980’s were still valid and yet had never been implemented by the San Diego Police Department. The other club member who raised the issue noted that many victims of police shootings have been mentally ill and accused the San Diego Police Department of practicing “medication by bullet.”

“We’re reviewing every incident,” Dumanis said. “The D.A. is not statutorily required to review police shootings, but we started doing so because of public concern.” Regarding the commonly heard complaint that the D.A.’s office makes only a cursory investigation and then whitewashes the police action, Dumanis said, “We treat every person who is killed as a homicide and investigate accordingly,” but she added, “Our determination is not whether they should have used a gun, but whether it was within the law for a criminal prosecution.”

Dumanis mentioned the community forum in Ocean Beach in which she, San Diego police chief David Bejarano and City Councilmember Michael Zucchet participated to discuss the recent shooting of a mentally ill homeless man by a police officer. She told the Democratic Club — as she had told the audience in O.B. — that since the case is still under investigation she could not comment specifically on it, but she said she would speak in O.B. again once the investigation is completed. “One of the problems with reviewing police shootings is that the facts are not generally known,” Dumanis told the Democratic Club. “In O.B., none of the ‘facts’ I heard from the public at that community meeting were accurate.”

Regarding Proposition 36, she said that her initial opposition to the measure was that, unlike the drug courts she had helped set up in San Diego County, it offered too many carrots and too few sticks to drug users seeking treatment as an alternative to prison. The authors of 36, Dumanis explained, “took away all the ability to hold drug users accountable and give them consequences, including up to one week in jail for using again after entering treatment,” she said.

Now that Proposition 36 is law, Dumanis explained, the biggest single problem with implementing it is that the proposition didn’t create enough funding. “The proposition provided $120 million for the entire state, including $5 million for San Diego County,” she said. “The total cost will be $22 million and we simply don’t have the treatment facilities available. … The problem is we’re dealing with people with long histories of substance abuse who need residential treatment, not the part-time outpatient treatment the authors of 36 had in mind.” However, she added, “I would hate to see 36 fail because then the message would be, ‘Treatment doesn’t work.’”

Other issues Dumanis discussed included DNA testing, identity theft, same-sex domestic violence and a recently reported case in which a Gay pornographer was killed by a 19-year-old model. The killer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder after his attorney raised the so-called “Gay Panic” defense that his client had acted out of shock and horror at being the object of a sexual advance from the victim. Dumanis said that no one in her office would refuse to prosecute a murder case involving a Gay victim to the maximum allowed by law. “I have made it a point to emphasize diversity and I haven’t seen any overt prejudice,” she said. “The defense is just doing their job and we can’t hold that against them.”

Dumanis closed with a brief discussion of her relationship with the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, at least two of whose five members have express strong prejudices against Queers. “My relations with all of them have been great,” she said. “They have to deal with me. Aside from [anti-Queer talk show host] Roger Hedgecock wanting to recall me before I took office and now wanting me to arrest one of my deputy D.A.’s, I haven’t had any real political problems. [Rival talk-show host] Rick Roberts has had me on regularly, and if I have any problems with anybody, I just tell them I won.”

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net
Homepage:: http://