Category: General

On November 5, 2024, California voters overwhelmingly adopted Proposition 36, the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act, a modest reform to restore consequences for thieves and drug dealers and require treatment for addicts.  It’s adoption was a complete rebuke of Proposition 47, the so-called Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act adopted in 2014 with major funding from the ACLU and socialist billionaire George Soros. That measure decriminalized theft and drug crimes. It’s important to note that Proposition 47 was supported by then Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature. Ten years later, these same politicians opposed Proposition 36, although millions of democrats voted for it.

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The head of the New York City Police Department spoke out Wednesday demanding that state politicians repeal the 2020 bail reform laws that have turned the criminal justice system into a “revolving door.” Michael Dorgan of Fox News reports that NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch told attendees to an annual breakfast meeting that “your cops are out there doing their jobs, and in 2024, they made the most felony arrests in 26 years. But before they can even finish that paperwork, they are immediately returned to the neighborhood and the people that they just victimized.”

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The movement to defund the police is not new. While it gained traction in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, it has been the mantra of civil rights groups and race-hustlers for decades, and is rooted in the fiction that the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist.  One of the alternatives to police pushed by progressive academia has been to replace police officers with “violence interrupters.” For the past several years cities controlled by democrats including Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles have diverted funds from police departments to non-government organizations (NGOs) which employ ex-gang members to interact with local street gangs, supposedly to counsel for non-violence and “restorative justice” programs. Restorative Justice is an alternative to punishment which involves putting crime victims and the criminals who attacked them together with counselors to help them heal emotionally and forgive each other. In places that have diverted funds to these programs law enforcement decreased while crime increased.

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An Austin, Texas man charged with the October 2024 murder of a 20-year-old with a gunshot to the back of the head, was released on $200 bail last Saturday. Brian Slupski of the Lawyer Herald reports that a judge reduced Stephon Martin Morson’s bail from $800,000 to $200 based on a Texas law that allows reduced bail if the District Attorney fails to bring an indictment against a violent offender withing 90 days of arrest.  Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza has not yet indicted Morson, who was arrested for the murder on November 6, 2024.  Garza is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America whose campaign was largely financed by socialist/progressive billionaire George Soros.  Failing to indict an accused murderer and thereby allowing his release is a profound dereliction of a district attorney’s obligation to enforce the law.  Stepheny Price of Fox News reports, elected leaders outside of Austin are outraged.

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Two murderers, both who killed multiple victims, were put to death Thursday.

Michael Dorgan of Fox News reports that Richard Tabler mouthed the words “I’m sorry” to his victims’ relatives just before he was executed by lethal injection. Tabler was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2004 Thanksgiving Day murders of two men in Killeen, Texas. He lured the co-owner of a club (where he once worked) and the co-owner’s friend to a remote area on the pretense of buying stolen stereo equipment. Both were shot to death. Two days later, Tabler killed two teenaged girls (an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old) who worked at the club because he thought they would tell police that he murdered the two men. He admitted to killing the two teen girls to police after his arrest. While his attorneys argued that Tabler was mentally incompetent for execution, he had repeatedly asked the court to stop the appeals. Continue reading . . .

Fourteen years after Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 109, so called “Public Safety Realignment,” into law and began dumping ex-cons and thousands of new felons on county probation departments, LA County is no longer able to handle the volume of serious offenders. Louis Casiano of Fox News reports that the state Probation Chief recently sent an urgent request to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services asking for an additional 150 police officers to take over supervision of both adult and juvenile offenders sentenced to probation, rather than jail or prison. Adding to the shortage of officers, on January 1 dozens of officers were suspended at the county’s Juvenile Hall due to alleged offenses.

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The Sacramento County District Attorney’s office has filed argument in support of a lawsuit brought by the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation to block the Newsom administration’s illegal early release of violent criminals from prison.

In 2017, Governor Jerry Brown authorized the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to adopt new regulations increasing sentence reduction credits (called “good time” credits) for inmates that it determined had behaved well and participated in rehabilitation programs. The Governor believed that Proposition 57, adopted by voters a year earlier, empowered the CDCR to award these credits without limits in order to shorten the sentences of inmates. In 2021 Governor Gavin Newsom directed CDCR to increase the number of inmates eligible for credits and the number of credits awarded to further expedite early releases.

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The U.S. Attorney General’s memorandum Reviving the Federal Death Penalty and Lifting the Moratorium on Federal Executions, February 5, is available here.

With the latest data showing that violent crime is increasing and property crime remains the highest of any California county, San Francisco leaders emphasized last week that it would continue to be a sanctuary city. Chase DiFeliciantonio, and Molly Burke of SF Gate report that at a rally last week,

“Officials including Mayor Daniel Lurie, City Attorney David Chiu, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, union leaders and the entire Board of Supervisors took turns reiterating their commitment to San Francisco’s sanctuary policy, which restricts the city’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The policy is intended to afford people the confidence to interact with city police and other public safety agencies without fear of their immigration status being called into question.”

The rally, called by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leader Olga Miranda, in response to an attempt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to enter a city government building with a warrant to arrest an illegal alien, either charged with a crime or with one or more prior criminal convictions.

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California’s sanctuary policy and Los Angeles County’s former soft-on-crime DA George Gascón enabled an illegal alien from El Salvador to murder his girlfriend in front of her 3-year-old daughter last month. Norma Riveiro and Lorena Bourdevaire-Casillas of NBC News San Diego report that police identified Herbert Nixon Flores as the person who shot 35-year-old Karen Ruiz in the Pacoima suburb of Los Angeles County on January 8. Flores had committed multiple crimes since entering California illegally in 1990, including drug trafficking, theft, illegal possession of firearms and identify theft. He had been deported 10 times. Flores was arrested last August for severely beating Ruiz, but under Gascón’s policy of not holding criminals charged with assault, he was released days after his arrest. Under California’s SB 54, a 2017 law called the California Trust Act, local police are forbidden from holding arrestees like Flores for deportation by federal authorities.

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