Author: Michael Rushford

A report released yesterday by WalletHub ranked California as the best state in the country for police officers. The report compared training, salaries and job hazards among the states to establish the ranking.  However, the surveyors did not actually take the time to talk to police officers. Josh DuBois of KTLA reports that the state’s police officer associations are having none of it.

“We don’t see any of these metrics in this ‘study’ but that is the reality law enforcement officers face in California,” he added. The unions also took issue with the report’s findings on officer compensation, saying WalletHub failed to consider the high cost of living in the state, especially where housing is concerned,” said the President of the Los Angeles Police Protective League.”

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Another example of the effect of reducing the consequences for criminal behavior is playing out across America.  Over the past several years, as part of the progressive criminal justice reform movement, the penalties for drunk driving have been reduced.  Like commercial burglary, shoplifting, simple assault and drug dealing, drunk driving is considered a “low level” crime in most states.  Scott Calvert of the Wall Street Journal reports that while the number of fatal accidents involving drunk drivers are the highest in 20 years, arrests for drunk driving have plummeted.

“Though the risk of arrest is widely considered a key deterrent to drunken driving, DUI arrests in recent years have sunk to multidecade lows, Federal Bureau of Investigation figures show. They dropped from just over a million in 2019 to about 780,000 in 2020. The FBI said there were 788,000 such arrests in 2022, the latest data available.” Continue reading . . .

In New York City, under District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a repeat offender who randomly attacks women is more than likely going to be released without bail just a few hours after his arrest.  The charge against him is likely to be dropped, or if he is convicted he will be sentenced to probation.  Bragg, who was elected with financial support from pro-criminal socialist George Soros, considers most assaults which do not involve weapons as non-violent crimes.  In late March New York’s ABC affiliate reported on multiple random attacks of women including a man who punched a 27-year-old woman in the face in Greenwich Village at 2 p.m. on March 25, and on the same day, a 36-year-old woman was punched in the back.  Shortly after noon on March 26, a 24-year-old woman was slugged in the head. On the 23rd a 23-year-old woman was slapped in the head on West 42nd street.  On the 19th a 30-year-old woman was slugged on Delancey Street.

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California’s “Racial Justice Act” adopted by the Legislature and signed into law three years ago is the logical result of decades of a national indoctrination campaign by race hustlers and the major media.  The narrative driving that campaign is that the American criminal justice system is systemically racist, intentionally singling out blacks for arrest, prosecution, and sentencing, while allowing other races who commit similar crimes to go unpunished or be subject to lesser punishment.   As proof of this, they cite state and federal crime data that indicates that blacks are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system.  The problem with this claim is that it ignores the undisputable fact that blacks commit much more crime than other races in the United States.  An article by attorney Hans Bader at Liberty Unyielding, focuses on the recent disqualification of a California judge for stating this fact. Continue reading . . .

The Alameda County Registrar of Voters announced last week that the recall effort against District Attorney Pamela Price had turned in enough signatures to force a vote. Natalie Hanson of Courthouse News Service reports that that campaign had turned in over 123,000 signatures to meet the 73,000 requirement to hold a special election. Price was elected in 2022 with major support from progressive billionaire George Soros, who has contributed millions over the past several election cycles, to elect racist, pro-criminal activists to district attorneys offices across the country.  Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, Chicago’s Kim Fox, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles DA George Gascon were all elected with unprecedented support from Soros front groups. Price, the first black female district attorney in county history has presided over a major increase in crime in Oakland as she has refused to prosecute black arrestees and undercharged some of the city’s most violent offenders.

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Proposition 47, a 2014 California ballot measure that decriminalized theft and drug dealing, may be significantly revised when voters go to the polls this November 5.  Evan Simon of the California Globe reports that the Californians for Safer Communities Coalition has turned in 900,000 signatures to the Secretary of State to put the “Fix Proposition 47” initiative on the ballot. This is more than enough to meet the state’s 547,000 signature requirement to qualify the measure.  Since Proposition 47—called “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” by its pro-criminal sponsors, including the American Civil Liberties Union and socialist billionaire George Soros—was adopted, California retailers have been looted by brazen gangs of thieves who clear off store shelves and sell the loot on-line with impunity. Under Proposition 47, any theft of $950 or less is considered a petty offense with no consequences for the thieves. While daily news video from security cameras show the crimes in progress, because the criminals are not arrested or prosecuted, most thefts are not even reported. The same holds true for drug dealing.  Downtown areas in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego have become 24-hour flop houses, where drugs are openly sold and users lay blacked-out on sidewalks.

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The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizer whom a lower court held liable for a police officer’s injury during a protest he organized.  Brianna Herlihy of Fox News reports that during a 2016 BLM protest in Baton Rouge, initiated by organizer Deray Mckesson, a police officer was hit in the head by a rock thrown by a protester, knocking out his teeth and leaving him with a brain injury.  The officer sued Mckesson who organized the event that resulted in his injury.

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The following article was published on April 12 in the California Globe: 

A review of the book DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (Max Felker-Kantor, The University of North Carolina Press) in the May 2024 issue of Reason Magazine looks back 42 years to the launch of a Reagan Administration’s effort to convince school children that taking drugs was a bad idea. The article by Joe Lancaster describes Professor Felker-Kantor’s view that the DARE program, which brought police officers into classrooms to discuss the dangers of drug use, and the First Lady’s “Just Say No” campaign, which utilized public service announcements and school curriculum to convince kids to avoid illegal drugs, were both failures.

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The habitual criminal sentenced to death for the kidnap, rape and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas in 1993 went before a Sonoma County Judge last week arguing that state law requires that his sentence be overturned. John Woolfolk of the Mercury News reports that Richard Allen Davis was on parole for the earlier kidnapping of a woman, when he snuck into a little girl’s bedroom, tied up her sleepover friends and kidnapped Polly at knifepoint. Nearly two months later Davis was arrested for a parole violation and when confronted with evidence tying him to Polly’s disappearance, he led police to her body in a shallow grave. In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom granted a reprieve to Davis and 736 other condemned murderers to prevent their executions during his time in office. Then in 2021, as Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports , Governor Newsom signed a bill into law giving Davis a chance to overturn his death sentence.

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A habitual felon released in 1993 after serving 11 years of a 30 year sentence for murder, has been charged with killing two additional victims while on parole. The Associated Press reports that in 1982, Raul Meza Jr., was sentenced to prison for the rape and murder of 8-year-old Kendra Page, whose body was found in a dumpster near her school in Austin. The sentence was the result of a plea bargain which dropped the rape charge, but the judge added 16 years to Meza’s sentence for a prior armed robbery conviction. Despite facing 46 years in prison, Meza was released early under then-Governor Ann Richards’ prison reforms, which granted him generous “good time” credits for participating in prison programs.

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