Author: Michael Rushford

A CBS News poll released last Friday indicates that crime is one the top three issues concerning Californians.  1800 state residents were inverviewed for the survey which found that wildfires were a considered the most important issue by 77%, with the corona virus second at 73% and crime ranking third with 68%.  Only 50% felt protected by the police and 8% said they felt threatened by them.  The constant “police are racists” drumbeat in the national media, coming from groups like Black Lives Matter and Democrat political leaders is undoubtedly responsible for the 8% who feel threatened.  California laws reducing or eliminating the consequences for most crimes and progressive prosecutors in two of the state’s largest cities, who refuse to prosecute criminals, have convinced half of the state population that police cannot protect them.

Major crimes in New York City jumped by almost 60% last month compared to February 2021,  yet the new Mayor elected to clean things up seems to be dragging his feet.  The city saw unprecedented increases in shootings, homicides, burglaries and car thefts in 2020 as new state and city policies eliminated bail for most arrestees, instituted pandemic releases of thousands of offenders, abandoned proactive policing and lowered the consequences for repeatedly committing crimes.  Continued increases last year fueled the election of ex-cop Eric Adams as Mayor after he campaigned on the promise to crack down on criminals.  But after more than 2 1/2 months in the Mayor’s office little has changed.  Emma Tucker and Mark Morales of CNN report that murders, robberies, major theft, rape and transit crimes are all up.  The criminals don’t seem very concerned that Mayor Adams is going drop the hammer on them.

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A Sacramento man, who on February 28 killed his three daughters and a chaperone before shooting himself, was an illegal alien  protected from deportation by SB 54, California’s sanctuary state law adopted in 2017.  The Associated Press reports that the shooter, David Mora was in California illegally on an expired visa and had been released from the Merced County Jail a week earlier, when he murdered the three girls ages 9, 10, and 13 and chaperone Nathanial Kong with an illegal firearm during a supervised visit in a church.  On February 23, 2022, Mora has been arrested for drunk driving, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.  While under federal law Mora qualified for deportation, SB 54 prohibits police from notifying immigration authorities or turning over illegals who commit crimes to ICE.  Because of this and other California laws that have reduced the consequences for these crimes Mora was released on bail the day he was arrested.  Mora was under a five-year restraining order for multiple assaults on his ex-girlfriend and the mother of the three girls and ICE had issued a detainer requesting that he be held until they could take him into custody.  “This unspeakable tragedy highlights the true cost, unintended or not, of sanctuary policies that prevent law enforcement from protecting its citizens,” said Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones.

The five member Los Angeles Police Commission has announced a new policy, effective immediately, which prohibits officers from making traffic stops for violations like failure to signal for a turn, a broken taillight or expired registration, unless the officer can present evidence that a more serious crime has occurred.  Kevin Rector of the Los Angeles Times reports that the new policy, which ignores state law, is meant to prevent “pretextual stops” where an officer pulls over a suspicious vehicle for a minor traffic violation in order to determine if the driver is currently wanted, or is carrying an illegal firearm or drugs.  It is legal under state law for police to pull over a vehicle for a traffic violation and look for evidence of a more serious crime.  According to Commission President William Briggs there “is no data that anyone can point to that establishes pretextual stops  curtail violent crime in our city.”  Briggs and others supporting the policy said it was needed to reduce racially biased policing.

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In the struggle to achieve racial justice, New York and California have set the pace for the rest of America.  Over the past several years the Governors, state legislatures and Attorneys General of both states have promoted and implemented criminal justice reforms attempting to create equal outcomes among “marginalized racial groups.”  To create equity both states have effectively decriminalized certain offenses deemed non-violent, such as selling illegal drugs on the street, using drugs, traffic offenses, drunk driving, most theft, vandalism, some domestic violence, assaults, resisting arrest and illegal firearms possession.  Bail has also been eliminated or sharply reduced for all but the most violent offenses including car theft, commercial burglary, strong armed robbery and vehicular manslaughter among others.  Progressives tell us that reducing the arrest, prosecution and punishment for these crimes is necessary because people of color are disproportionately targeted by America’s systemically racist criminal justice system for committing them.   This is the kind of one-dimensional reasoning children use.  New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exhibited it Monday, opining that the spike in crime in her state is because “the child-tax credit just ran out, on December 31st, and now people are stealing baby formula.”  She has 12 million followers on twitter.

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Alvin Bragg, the new Manhattan District Attorney who began the year promising not to prosecute property criminals did a 180 last week and says he will now get tough on thieves.  As reported by Tamar Lapin in the New York Post, after video of a thief walking out of a Trader Joe’s with an armful of steaks was released, Bragg told reporters “We have amongst us opportunists, who are repeat players, who are just taking goods…..We are brainstorming about how to respond to that.”  Brainstorming?  How about enforcing theft laws and giving jail sentences to repeaters?  How about getting rid of zero bail and holding thieves accountable?  None of this require much deep thinking.  A brief look at recent history indicates that consequences matter.  Holding property offenders and other so-call “low level” criminals accountable also helps reduce violent crime.  Many of the violent crimes occurring in cities run by progressive politicians are committed by repeat offenders who would have been in jail or prison prior to the “reforms” pushed by these politicians and groups like Black Lives Matter.  The Seattle man who clocked a woman with a baseball bat in broad daylight last week was one of those “low level” offenders progressives policies kept on the streets.

With America experiencing the largest single-year increase in homicide ever recorded in 2020, and data indicating another double-digit increase last year, it appears that many politicians including the president are confused about the cause.  During a New York  visit with the Mayor Eric Adams last week, President Biden pledged to address the city’s out-of-control crime with help in getting illegal guns off the streets.  Adams, a former cop, along with mayors in Baltimore, DC, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and St. Louis among others believe the most effective approach to violent and property crime is to try and remove guns from the hands of criminals.  Rebecca Rosenberg of Fox News has this piece discussing the fallacy of focusing on the weapon rather than the progressive policies that have enabled criminals to stay on the streets and prey upon the public.   Cully Stimson, a former prosecutor and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation calls the focus on “gun crimes” a red herring.

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In 2019 rich liberals, most of whom do not live in Southern California, including George Soros (New York), Patty Quillin  & husband Reed Hastings (San Francisco), Elizabeth Simons (San Francisco), M. Quinn Delaney (Oakland), Cari Tuna (San Francisco), Susan Pritzker (Oakland), Kaitlyn Krieger ( San Francisco), Nicole Shanahan (San Francisco), Dorianna Blitt (New York), Anne Devereux (New York), and Anne Rosenbaum Irwin (San Francisco), gave $12.4 million to George Gascón’s campaign for Los Angeles District Attorney.  Immediately after taking office, Gascón announced that he would not be prosecuting most property and drug criminals and that most arrestees would be released without bail. He also pledged to seek the shortest sentences possible for criminals convicted in Los Angeles County, including murderers, rapists and other violent offenders.  While progressive state sentencing reforms (read reductions) along with Governor Newsom’s pandemic emergency orders for inmate releases and zero bail had been fueling crime increases before Gascón was elected, his new policies exacerbated this trend.  The Los Angeles County Sheriff reports that homicides increased by 94% and auto thefts by 59% over the past two years.  News footage of the daily “smash and grab” robberies across LA and the recent Beverly Hills home invasion and murder of liberal philanthropist Jaqueline Avant and the brutal killing of UCLA student Brianna Kupfer in exclusive Hancock Park, both by habitual felons, was a reality check for LA area liberals.

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Progressive California District Attorneys who have chosen not to prosecute offenders who commit so called “low level” crimes are violating the state Constitution according to Hasting’s law professor Zachary Price.  In a piece published in SCOCA blog, a joint project of the U.C. Berkeley and Hastings Schools of Law, Professor Price asserts that while district attorneys such as San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles DA George Gascón ran for office promising not to prosecute drug users and small-time dealers, trespassers, shoplifters, traffic offenders and those resisting arrest among others, the state constitution

specifically limits local district attorney discretion by imposing an affirmative duty on California’s attorney general “to see that the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced.” And although state law provides for elected district attorneys in each county and obligates them to “attend the courts, and within his or her discretion . . . initiate and conduct on behalf of the people all prosecutions for public offenses,” the state constitution requires supersession of local prosecutorial functions when the attorney general determines that local enforcement is inadequate.

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