Unbecoming Start for DA Candidate

Concerns about the effects of a potentially disruptive district attorney election were confirmed this week, when Deputy DA Worth Dikeman’s campaign took a puzzling turn.

Dikeman had called a press conference to draw attention to the county’s violent crime rate – which is looking comparatively good lately – but he took a questionable detour when he played a tape of an answering message left by his boss and election foe, District Attorney Paul Gallegos, more than three years ago.

This stunt accomplished little, as the tape is barely comprehensible over a steady stream of cell phone noise and its contents aren’t very damning when one considers the time it was recorded (shortly after Gallegos won a surprise victory over multiple-term DA Terry Farmer in the spring of 2002) and the tensions that had erupted during and after contentious election campaigns.

But the content of the tape is a marginal issue when considers that Dikeman has long said that he would carry out his campaign in a dignified manner that would strive to limit internal conflicts, including potential conflicts between himself and the DA. How the taking of a message off an answering machine and playing it for reporters several years later fits in with that pledge is beyond us.

We’re also disappointed in the way Dikeman has twisted the significance of recent crime statistics. During last week’s press conference, he condemned a 7.3 percent increase in the county’s 2004 violent crime rate and portrayed it as an aspect of “alarming trends.” But the 2004 rate increase is less alarming when one considers that its base of comparison is the previous year, which saw the rate hitting its lowest point in many years. Dikeman accused Gallegos of misrepresenting facts, but Dikeman himself conveniently neglected to acknowledge the truth – that the rate has gone down since Gallegos took office.

We don’t think that Gallegos or any one official can take credit or blame for something as complex as the incidence of crime. But the DA’s Office is indeed one of the key agencies involved. And a controlled crime rate is something the office’s employees – all of them – can feel good about along with the county’s residents.

So when Dikeman misrepresented the county’s crime levels when he addressed reporters, he was not only slighting the work of Gallegos, but of every attorney in the office whose efforts arguably contributed to the improvements reflected in recent crime statistics. And that is quite the opposite of what he said he would do in his campaign.