Darrell Park

What made you decide to run for Antonovich’s seat?
I’m running to raise the quality of life of everyone in LA County. Local government should serve everybody, not just the rich and powerful, not just the people that control things now, it should serve everybody and I strongly believe that our region deserves progressive representation, it deserves representation that looks like the district, that thinks like the district, that acts like the district, not professional politicians, not folks that have their own interests that are different than what the residents of LA County and the residents of the 5th District believe and see and understand.
Traditionally this district has been Antonovich-aka Republican. How does it feel being a democrat in this time-honored Republican basin?
It feels amazing because there’s 93,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans, the issues that are important are the ones being raised by Democrats and by the Democratic Party. Feinstein won by 20 points, Obama won by 16 points. There was a Republican district way back in the day when Antonovich got elected the first time, it was sort of the early days of the Republican, sort of Reagan revolution, and then effectively you get, what I would call subtle corruption, where if someone names something after themselves over and over and over, and you have a relatively down-ballot race, what you end up with is people who voted for the higher offices and they vote for a bunch of ballot initiatives and then as they start to get tired going through their ballot they say, “oh I recognize that name.” If you are Bill Gates and you can have the money, because you sold software or whatever, to build a building or an overpass or underpass or whatever, you can name it after yourself. If you are a lady who fought for years with the PTA to get something done, to get a playground built, and all the people on the PTA in the neighborhood say, “yes, name it after her.” Great that’s wonderful, it should be named after her. If you’re the person that’s collecting the tax revenue and being responsible for spending that tax revenue and you name it after yourself, that’s a really subtle, but horrible form of corruption. It influences the voters in a negative way, it denies people the ability to have their tax dollars spent in the most fair and upstanding way possible. And it’s just not right so one of the things that were proposing, and everybody in LA County, all 10 million people, get to be a member of this re-naming commission or proposing that anything that’s been named, these folks have the right to say, “hey, I would like to propose this name,” and it would be names from our history and when you look at what has been named in Southern California and LA County specifically, the amazing women in LA County’s history have been way under-represented. Every sign, every building, every historical landmark is an opportunity to educate ourselves and our children and our children’s children. Every one of those things should tell us about our history, tell us about something we didn’t know about. Honor somebody who did something important and to have thing after thing after thing be named after one person because that person is doling out money is unfair and it’s wrong and we will fix it. And I invite all the residents of LA County to think about who they would want to have on these signs. Especially who are the women in California history that they would like to see honored. And we’ll go through that process and it will be a very fair, open, and transparent process, but it will be a process that includes everybody.
Antonovich seems to have his name on many things in Los Angeles.
Yeah, there’s a lot of things in this district that are named after him. That the average person says, “whatever,” but if you look at it, as a public servant, you should not be doing that. If some member of Congress does something good and all the other members vote to name a building after that person, that’s a different situation. But if you’re responsibly spending people’s money, people’s hard-earned tax dollars …
I would argue the fair word would be “many” things that are named after him and my personal belief is that, if you’re the public servant who’s responsible for spending that money, even if somebody else where to say, “hey we’re going to name this after you” and we’re not talking one street or one high school football field, were talking about a whole lot of relatively high profile things that raises an important question as to who’s working for who and why they’re doing it.
Other policy issues ?
Great, so I worked for a little less than 10 years in the office of management and budget in DC and the parallels to my time there and to what’s happening now in LA County are amazing. You have revenues being relatively high at a time when a large portion of folks aren’t seeing the benefit. You get folks at the top that are really enjoying all the benefits and a good portion of the rest of society is just not seeing that benefit. By being really thoughtful about what the government does and how they do it, there’s a real ability to turn things around, and we even have a better advantage … one of the concrete examples I ending homelessness. You look at what Ottawa, Canada did in getting folks into housing, the same thing in Utah, Utah’s not exactly a pro-government sort of place and they reduced their homeless population by 91 percent. You look at even a place like New Orleans, maybe not the place you hold up as the ideal government example, they got all their homeless veterans off the street and into housing. What they find in these places is it’s just not a nice humanitarian things, it’s that, but it’s also a crazy money saving thing as well because a lot of the money you’re spending in trying to care for the homeless, you’re spending trying to track folks down, you’re trying to make sure that they’re taking medication on time, that they’re doing all the things that you want them to be able to do. I’m not talking about a fancy beach house, I’m talking about a pretty modest apartment, but it’s safe, it’s got a lock on the door, it’s got a clock on the wall, people can take their medication when they need to and then all the services you’re trying to provide for them become substantially less expensive and substantially more effective because they can have what the rest of us have, which is a safe roof over our heads. Right now there’s a patchwork of services and people work really hard to help folks. From the things that the country provides to the volunteer organizations to a whole bunch of other groups, and if you can focus that energy into helping somebody rebuild their life and get the care that they need, once they’re in a house you find that a portion of those folks can be productive within 60 days. I’m not saying that someone’s going to run out and start the next Google just because you have them a small cinderblock apartment, but they can start to do what they need to do, and for those folks who are really struggling, who need a lot more care, that need a lot more therapies, that need other sorts of services like rehab, at least they’re in a safe place for that. So the money can be much better spent and we get something that helps the business the community, everybody’s quality of life is raised, you get the homeless of the street, you get the person that’s driving home from work and doesn’t have to feel bad because there’s a homeless person in the median and you get the small business owner who doesn’t have to worry about lost revenue because some folks don’t want to enter a shop because there’s a homeless person outside. This benefits everybody and it allows us to sort of get to the place where we as a society want to be. And the money is there to do it. We’re in a pretty good situation with revenues, and once we have these savings then we can use them to fix some of the other problems. Everybody wants to end homelessness, it’s not like this is a controversial thing and because we’ve been presented with solutions from other places, there are experts we can rely on. We have sort of things that we can apply to us because we’ve seen them in other places.
Another thing is getting our healthcare system the way it needs to be in hospitals, using competition among different teams in the hospitals to sort of get better performance. We’ve seen this in other places where you have a green team, a red team, and a blue team. You can do things to improve not just the quality of life of the patients but the quality of life of the doctors and the nurses and the other staff. They like working there, because it’s fun and competitive, they’re doing what they want to be doing, rather than being stuck in a bureaucracy that’s not helpful.
One other thing that is very near and dear to my heart is the foster care system. My parents took in 19 foster care kids over my lifetime. Some of them stayed through weekends, some of them stayed a lot longer, at least one stayed for years. And I saw a foster care system that worked in certain ways really well, in other ways not so well, but if you’re in a situation where the kids are treated as the most important thing, not the parents, not the workers, but the kids are the most important resource, then you get the outcomes you want to see. It was very satisfying for me as an adult to watch some of the kids my parents fostered come back and thank them. There are so many volunteers in that situation, so many people supporting, this was before computers, that the process was setup in a really supportive way. We can do that here, and I’ve seen personally what it should look like and we can get there and I’m committed to that.
Where was that?
Fairfax County Virginia. A lot of the things that I want to do are modeled after things that Fairfax does, that’s not to say that they do everything perfectly, because nobody does, they have certain advantages that LA doesn’t have. But we also have things that they don’t have that we can build on. And we can use their best practice help us get better at things we need to get better at.
Another one of the things very near and dear to my heart are justice reforms. You should not have a non-violent offender end up in our jail system. If somebody’s done something in a non-violent way, what society needs to get out of that person is restitution. They need to know that that person has served their time and paid their debt to society, you don’t pay that debt by sitting in jail watching tv, or sitting in jail trying not to get assaulted. You pay your debt by putting on an orange vest, painting curbs, picking up trash, doing landscaping, there’s 1,000 tasks that this county and this district need. We have the opportunity to make this like Iceland or one of these Scandinavian countries where there’s not a piece of trash.
What happens if there’s no trash, what happens if every curb is painted, what happens If every street sign is new, what happens if all those things can be done by people who need to prove to society that they know they messed up and they’re willing to change and that society deserves some benefit from that. And that’s less than a third of the cost of having them sit in jail. It doesn’t make sense for us, we can no longer afford what we’re doing. And there’s too much connectivity between the foster care system and the juvenile justice system and the adult justice system. If we can break that cycle by improving each one of those things, not only have we made a higher quality of life for everybody …
One of the other things that’s very near and dear to my heart is community policing. I’m raising the world’s cutest 9-year-old-son who we adopted from Ethiopia when he was 2-and-a-half and I honestly have to say that I live in fear of what happens when he gets his driver’s license. He’s a great kid, he’s so caring, so loving, he’s got amazing leadership abilities, he’s the kid that all the other kids turn to when they need something and yet I’m worried about what happens when he gets behind the wheel, simply because he’s an African-American male. It doesn’t matter all these things that he’s done that are amazing, how he’s viewed is a real concern. The sheriff’s department paid out $45 million last year. And there’s a general, unfortunate, happiness with that because it’s less than in year’s past. That’s not good, think about all the people who have been traumatized, who don’t feel like society is fair to them. That the Sherriff’s department isn’t there to protect them and from my perspective, if you’re not going after the people you’re supposed to be going after, you’re misappropriating funds. If you’re stopping somebody because they’re Latino or African-American, that’s clearly misappropriation of funds. And the fact is that the majority of the sheriff’s department’s deputies are great people doing this for the right reasons, but we have not incentivized the boundaries that we need to create. There’s a really sad parallel with what happened with pedophile priests, the vast majority of priests are amazing people doing what they do for the right reasons, but society holds priesthood in such a high esteem that there weren’t the right check and balances to be there to protect the kids, unless they saw something wrong, then they turn around and hid it, because they couldn’t believe, they didn’t want to believe, or they just couldn’t face the embarrassment to the organization and horrible, horrible things were allowed to continue for decades. The parallel with the Sherriff’s department is similar, you have these cases that even when they go to jury they don’t always end up with justice being done in the way the victims would like to see. We’ve got a society that really, appropriately values our law enforcement, as it should, but we need to build in the checks and balances that protect and award honest, great, amazing officers and weed out, from day one, the corrupt and the bad and the abusive ones. It starts with something as simple as an honor code. Most colleges have an honor code. Right now the deputies are incentivized to keep their heads down and get their badge and go on with their badge, and if they’re training with somebody who’s abusive or doesn’t know what they’re doing, their incentive is to just not rat out their fellow office and keep their head down. That has to change. There’s lots of amazing examples, some of the European forces are absolutely incredible with this. We have to change how we recruit, how we train, and how we reward good officers. We have to change how we create checks and balances so that the good officers are protected and the bad ones are, you know, you put sunshine on those folks so everybody can see what’s happening.

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