This L.A. Democrat is a ‘New Testament kind of guy’ — and one of California’s most powerful voices on criminal justice

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.” Read more >>>