After a week of getting hammered in the media, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon took the time to do a softball interview on (campaign supporter) Rev. Al Sharpton’s MSNBC show, PoliticsNation.

Sharpton spent the first few minutes praising Gascon’s policy to essentially end cash bail for those accused of crimes in Los Angeles County even for those charged with felonies, as long as they’re “non-serious” and “non-violent” felonies, regardless of the offender’s prior record. Then he switched gears, mentioning the “resistance” Gascon’s facing from LA County judges and even from within his own office and asking what Gascon’s plan is going forward. He replied:

First of all, we…have to stay focused. We’re on the right side of history…and I believe it’s important that we do not lose sight of that what we’re trying to do is the right thing.

Number two is, continue to educate the public and educate people within my office. I’m seeing increasingly more and more people coming over and saying hey, how can I be helpful? How can I join this effort?

Gascon then claimed that he has “a tremendous amount of community support,” and blamed the backlash on those who “benefit…from mass incarceration” before making a wild accusation:

What you’re seeing outside, quite frankly, is a move, pushed often by police unions and prison guard unions and, you know, the bail industry, and basically people who have benefited both economically and politically from mass incarceration for the last three or four decades. And, you know, they don’t want to give up. So we understand that many of that is coming from that angle. Even though they may use a victim or maybe somebody else as a proxy, really where the money and the push is coming in is from that place. 

And we…our team, our movement, we need to continue to stay focused and do the right things.

So, according to Gascon, the resistance isn’t really coming from crime victims who are now being revictimized as their attackers are being released from prison or jail early, being resentenced, or being immediately released on bail to attack others; it’s coming from a web of unions and industries who profit from mass incarceration who are simply using the victims as pawns.

Well, that’s one way to piss off the victims even more.

Curiously, when Sharpton tweeted the interview, that part was cut out of it. The interview’s not on YouTube or on MSNBC’s site; you can only access it by logging in to NBC.com through your cable provider and watching the entire episode. (If you don’t have cable, NBC allows you 3 “credits” a month that you can use to view their content.) It’s almost as if they don’t want people to see that part of interview, which is understanding, because it’s offensive as hell to crime victims.

George Gascon is the new Los Angeles county district attorney, on his first day as DA he eliminated bail and announced sweeping policy changes. Gascon joined me on #PoliticsNation to discuss how he plans to lead California’s largest city, and more. pic.twitter.com/WoUMnacprO

— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) December 20, 2020

Would Gascon have the huevos to tell the women who confronted him in Pomona on Friday that they were being used as proxies to fight battles for police unions? He already called them uneducated, so why not go further?

Since Friday, dozens of crime victims and their families have posted their stories on the Recall George Gascon Facebook page, and they’re as heartbreaking as they are infuriating. Victims of violent rapes, child abuse, domestic violence, gang murders and more are distraught as Gascon and his “team” are casting them aside as acceptable losses in their quest to “reimagine” criminal justice from a “trauma-informed” perspective that places the criminal’s childhood trauma over the trauma inflicted on victims of violent crime.

UPDATE: The full video is on Sharpton’s Facebook page, but not his show’s page or MSNBC’s.