Prosecutor Bobby Grace makes his play for L.A. district attorney

Bobby Grace was beginning to sort through football scholarships from small colleges and was plotting his path from San Bernardino to the pros when his father sat him down for a difficult but honest talk.

“Look,” Grace recently recalled his father saying, “you’re 5-foot-7, 145 pounds. You’re never going to the NFL. Education is going to be your key.”

The message was hard for Grace to process at first, but he eventually saw that his father was right. He reconfigured his life plan and went to UCLA, where he focused not just on education but on activism and campus politics. He became a social justice organizer and a coalition builder, and those qualities never left him. Through law school and during his more than two decades as a criminal prosecutor, friends and colleagues said Grace was destined for something big.

Now he’s making his play. He is one of six candidates to become Los Angeles County district attorney in the June 5 election.

He sees it as a natural evolution from his days as a high school football star, to a student activist against apartheid, a campaigner for Tom Bradley and prosecutor of predators like Chester Turner and dozens of other felons who terrorized Los Angeles County neighborhoods.

“I always thought of myself as fighting for the underdog,” Grace said. “What I liked about the D.A.’s office was that it represented real-life victims of crimes who in my mind became the underdogs that I always had been fighting for.”

The Times’ editorial board has met with the candidates -- not including John Breault III, who did not respond to several requests -- and discussed with them at length the issues and their platforms, attitudes and experience. This blog post and others like it are part of our attempt to share with our readers some of the candidates’ backgrounds, some of the issues and some of our thinking in advance of making an endorsement. We expect to conclude our deliberations and select a candidate to endorse this week, and to publish our decision in the coming days.

So where does Grace, 51, fall among the candidates? In some respects, he is typical. Except for Breault, they are all baby boomers, having grown up in Southern California through cycles of heady optimism and meltdown. Like Jackie Lacey and Danette Meyers, he is an African American in his early 50s. Hardly the first Los Angeles County black deputy district attorney to rise through the ranks, Grace nevertheless is in part a product of societal changes dating back more than half a century that today, for the first time, make it simultaneously noteworthy and unremarkable that there are three serious black contenders for the county’s top prosecutor post.

Like Alan Jackson, he grew up with a military heritage; his father served during World War II and in Korea and Vietnam.

He recalled being shaped during his UCLA years, when he joined with other students as part of, in late 1970s parlance, the Third World Coalition. “We took over student government,” Grace said. But acquaintances who were there at the time note that he also bonded, often over sports, with the fraternity students. Just a few years down the line the two factions were to battle politically and sometimes physically, but Grace brokered a distinctly nonconfrontational confrontation. As a student government leader, he protested UCLA football’s move from the Coliseum because of the impact on the South Los Angeles economy. He led the divestiture of student enterprises from apartheid South Africa. He worked to get more Latino students admitted to the university.

He attended Loyola Law School, he said, because he wanted to stay in Los Angeles and because, as a Roman Catholic, he found the Jesuit school to be the right fit. A summer internship with the D.A.’s office turned into a paid law clerk position, and soon, as a student, he was handling felony preliminary hearings and misdemeanor jury trials.

“I started doing that and just fell in love with it,” Grace said. He has been a Los Angeles County prosecutor ever since.

Grace has a very particular style. In arguments to a jury, and in conversation, Jackson and Meyers are somewhat reminiscent of a John Philip Sousa march: confident, steady, persistent. Brass and drums, with an occasional flourish from the flute section. Grace is more like a Beethoven sonata: a stirring opening, followed by passages so quiet, so soft, so contemplative, that the listener must strain to hear. But that’s the point. He draws his audience in and, before they realize it, they are captured -- hanging on each word and hungry for more.

Politically, he is an unabashed Democrat, and might even be described as a progressive. It is a curious but increasingly common juxtaposition for many Los Angeles County prosecutors who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s -- liberal and reform-oriented while unremitting in their quest to put away violent criminals.

Grace’s stance on the death penalty is similar to Meyers’ -- they oppose the way it is being used in California and want it scrapped -- but in the end not all that different from the view espoused by Carmen Trutanich, Jackson and Lacey, all of whom want to keep it.

“I don’t have a moral objection to the death penalty,” Grace said. “I’ve got a couple people on death row. These are definitely crimes that the person should go before a jury and have a jury decide whether that person should live or die.”

But it’s not working, he said, because no one sentenced to death is likely to be executed (see and hear Grace and the other candidates discuss their views of the death penalty and public safety realignment).

Grace gives every indication of taking the race for district attorney seriously, yet he has run the lowest-profile campaign. It’s not by design. He has had enthusiastic support from circles within the district attorney’s office and among African American politicos in Los Angeles. But so have Lacey and Meyers, and they have been able to broaden their backing beyond those groups. That’s less the case with Grace. His fundraising has lagged, and that in turn branded him as nonviable in the eyes of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California. The association has staged the only candidate forum to date that voters can find, watch and listen to on YouTube, not a small matter given the dearth of opportunities the typical voter has to find out about the race. Grace was not invited (neither was Breault, a sort of mystery candidate who has raised even less; Trutanich was invited but declined).

In addition to being one of the office’s top prosecutors, Grace said he’s the right choice for the job because he has watched and learned from a variety of managers. He also offers a distinctly insider view: He’s not on any team.

“I’m not endorsed by [former Dist. Atty.] Gil Garcetti or [current Dist. Atty.] Steve Cooley,” he said, “and that’s been the dominant theme in the office going back 16 or 18 years. Those two camps. My candidacy reflects an opportunity to break from the past and bring a new approach, a new fresh set of ideas that are not influenced by any one administration.”

ALSO:

Political corruption and the D.A.

First open seat for D.A. Since 1964

D.A. candidates discuss the death penalty