Monthly Archive: August 2023
by Kent Scheidegger · Aug 22, 2023 11:55 am
Syndicated columnist Thomas Elias has this column with the above title on the consequences of California’s sentence-reducing ballot propositions of the previous decade, Proposition 47 of 2014 and Proposition 57 of 2016.
Here’s a reality that needs to soak into the consciousness of California lawmakers, the governor and voters who put them in office: This state needs far better analysis and vetting of new laws if it’s to avoid negative unintended consequences.
And when we get solid analysis and reliable predictions of some consequences, we need to pay heed, not ignore reality.
These facts of life are perhaps best illustrated by the 2014 Proposition 47, which ended felony status for thefts and burglaries involving less than $950 worth of goods and reduced some other felonies, like stealing a gun, to misdemeanors.
One unintended consequence has been closure of some stores, notably Walgreen’s and Whole Foods outlets that suffered constant shoplifting and no penalties for thieves caught red-handed. That’s an inconvenience making life more complex from San Francisco to San Diego.
Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · Aug 17, 2023 11:53 am
Last week illegal alien Cruz Garcia was charged with forcible rape and two related felonies in New York. Danielle Wallace of Fox News reports that Garcia was automatically released without bail in June after being charged with felony drunk driving and other related crimes. According to Delaware County prosecutors, on July 25th Garcia attacked a woman, strangling her until she nearly blacked out before raping her. As a sanctuary state, New York prohibits state and local law enforcement from notifying federal immigration authorities when an illegal alien is arrested. The state’s bail reform law, which took effect in 2020, required that Cruz be released without bail, enabling him to attack the woman a month later. Had his June arrest occurred in Florida, Cruz would have been held for federal agents, preventing him from committing additional crimes. Research documented by the Manhattan Institute and a separate study in California found that releasing arrestees without bail results in them committing additional crimes, including violent crimes.
by Kent Scheidegger · Aug 16, 2023 10:30 am
Gump’s is a high-end San Francisco store with a history stretching back to the Civil War. Last weekend the store’s owner denounced the city’s present misgovernance in a scathing full-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle. The letter denounced “a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”
Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · Aug 14, 2023 3:33 pm
Piling on to Kent’s recent post, out-of-control crime is not only destroying the quality of life in San Francisco. While homicides in Oakland have dropped by 14% so far this year, burglaries have increased by a whopping 41% and robberies are up by 20% according this CNN story. In late June a sixty-year-old retiree was shot and killed in broad daylight while doing yardwork. Responding to the almost daily shootings, burglaries and robberies, Oakland police are telling residents to buy air horns to alert neighbors to intruders and put bars on doors and windows. While city leaders are promising to find ways to prevent crime, some residents have had enough.
Continue reading . . .
by Kent Scheidegger · Aug 13, 2023 10:07 am
The WSJ has this article, with the above title, by Jim Carlton and Katherine Bindley. The article begins:
Local leaders are trying anything they can to keep San Francisco’s struggling downtown core afloat, including paying retired, unarmed police to keep an eye out for trouble.
In many cases, though, “local leaders” are the problem, not the people who are going to find the solution. Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · Aug 10, 2023 3:11 pm
An opinion piece by Rachel Ehrenfeld of Fox News focuses upon the dramatic increase in drug use in America. She takes us back to 1994, when 90% of Americans opposed the use of illegal drugs. That was about the same time that George Soros, the liberal hedge-fund billionaire, established his Open Society Foundation in New York. One of the foundation’s initial efforts to soften opposition to drug abuse was to distribute “safe smoking kits” to those using marijuana and hash. In the pursuit of legalizing drugs, Soros funded pro-drug organizations to lobby the public and lawmakers with assurances that marijuana was relatively harmless, non-addictive and was useful in treating depression and other conditions. They also promised that taxes on legal pot would generate billions in new revenue for state and county governments. After successfully targeting Colorado, California and Arizona for legalization, the campaign eventually won legalization of marijuana in 37 states In 2022 the Biden Administration copied the Soros program for users of harder drugs, beginning distribution “safe user kits” which come with clean needles, and crack pipes. Remarkably the Administration reported that this effort was implemented to promote racial equality by providing the drug use kits to “under-resourced populations such as racial, sexual, gender and ethnic minority groups.” Last year a Pew Research survey found that 88% of the U.S. population now support legalization of marijuana.
Continue reading . . .
by Michael Rushford · Aug 8, 2023 10:52 am
The defund the police movement is alive and well in Chicago. The first weekend in August was a bloody one in the windy city, as reported by the Sun Times, with 27 shootings and seven fatalities. Among the victims was an 8-year-old girl playing in front of her house. The suspect, who was tackled and held for police by the girl’s father, walked up and intentionally shot the child in the head. She died. A 14-year-old boy is in critical condition with two gunshot wounds in the head from a Saturday night shooting. Among the other victims was a 35-year-old man shot while sitting in his home. The Chicago Police Department has lost 1,700 officers since Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office in 2019. Newly elected Mayor Brandon Johnson has no plan to add more officers. Arrests in the city have dropped by 50% since 2019 and a suspect is arrested in only 5% of non-fatal shootings. Amid this bloodletting, uber-liberal Illinois Governor J.D. Pritzker is busy virtue-signaling, signing a new law that mandates the hiring of non-citizens as police officers. How bad does it have to get before state voters start electing people committed to cracking down on criminals.
by Michael Rushford · Aug 7, 2023 11:11 am
A Fremont, CA hardware store lost $700,000 from shoplifters in 2022, as reported by Jackson Walker of ABC News. The family-owned Dale Hardware provided security video of shoplifters pushing shopping carts full of stolen items out the door. The owners report that the consistent theft of hand tools like screwdrivers and wrenches are driving these losses. The story notes that the reduction of consequences for theft in California after the 2014 passage of Proposition 47, has created an epidemic of looting that has forced the closure of Bay Area stores including Walgreens, Nordstrom and numerous small retailers. Last year a San Francisco man was arrested for marketing $500,000 worth of items stolen from Bay Area stores on Amazon, eBay and Facebook Marketplace. Similar problems are occurring in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento and cities in the central valley. While most major retail chains forbid employees from confronting thieves, some smaller stores are fighting back. Last week CBS News reported that two Stockton, CA 7-Eleven employees took down a masked thief who was brazenly filling a trash can with cigarettes. One of the employees was beating the thief with a stick until a customer intervened and stopped him.
by Steven Erickson · Aug 3, 2023 5:26 am
As cannabis use becomes more commonplace, given state legalization efforts, a pressing issue is enforcement of impaired driving laws. A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry, however, suggests high false positives rates are a problem with field sobriety tests for cannabis intoxication. From an accompanying commentary:
In this issue of JAMA Psychiatry, Marcotte et al1 report that field sobriety tests (FSTs) as administered by highly trained police officers are insufficient to detect cannabis-induced impairment in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel randomized clinical trial involving a large sample of 184 cannabis users. Although the group receiving active doses of Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in cannabis, performed worse on the FSTs as compared with the placebo group; about half of the participants in the placebo group were classified as impaired. These findings are in line with previous placebo-controlled studies that also reported high false-positive FST rates under placebo. The legal implication of these findings can be major given that FSTs are currently part of the evaluation protocol in North America to detect drivers who are cannabis impaired. Yet, the lack of sensitivity of FSTs to detect THC-impaired individuals does not come as a big surprise, as FSTs have primarily been validated to detect gross alcohol impairment at high (more than 0.10%) blood alcohol concentrations. To add to this problem, there is no cannabis equivalent of a breathalyzer to verify exposure induced impairment, as trace amounts of THC in biomarkers correlate poorly with cannabis-induced behavioral impairment.
The need for a reliable method to assess cannabis intoxication is desperately needed.
by Michael Rushford · Aug 2, 2023 9:48 am
An ex-con who brutally murdered a 6-year-old girl in 2002 died peacefully via lethal injection last night in Missouri. David Lieb of the Associated Press reports that 45-year-old Johnny Johnson had been released from prison six months before he lured Casey Williamson, the daughter of a family friend, to an abandoned factory, attempted to rape her, then beat her to death with a brick when she resisted. Police found her body buried under rocks in a pit less than a mile from her home. At trial and on appeal Johnson’s attorneys argued that his schizophrenia prevented his understanding the link between his crime and his punishment. But just before his execution, Johnson disproved that claim by apologizing for the murder. A hail-Mary appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected with Associate Justices Sonja Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Katanji Brown Jackson voting to stay his execution. Sixteen murderers have been executed in the United States so far this year. Last year eight murderers had been executed by August 1.
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