Accountability for Crime in California?

The Right Message, Wrong Messenger Award for today goes to the owner of several San Francisco retail businesses, who said this:

My biggest gripe right now in San Francisco has been, frankly, we’re not enforcing existing laws … we’re not prosecuting the law breakers. Judges, DAs, the whole panoply — I want to see people held accountable for breaking the law.

Notice that the California Governor is missing from the list. So why is this person the wrong messenger?

Because he is the Governor. Germania Rodriguez Poleo has this story in the Daily Mail:

California governor Gavin Newsom has decided to double the presence of state police to deal with San Francisco’s crime and fentanyl crises, as he admitted that his own businesses have been burglarized.

The Democrat said the open-air drug dealing in the city is ‘unacceptable,’ and that his own wine and hospitality businesses have been robbed at least half a dozen times as the city goes through a crime and fentanyl epidemic.

Newsom’s PlumpJack Group company, founded in 1992, owns three restaurants, wineries, a boutique hotel, and bars in San Francisco. The city’s former mayor put the company in a blind trust when he became governor, which bans him from any involvement in its operations.

One of his wine shops, the PlumpJack Wine & Spirits store, was targeted by burglars at least four times in 2021.

‘My biggest gripe right now in San Francisco has been, frankly, we’re not enforcing existing laws … we’re not prosecuting the law breakers. Judges, DAs, the whole panoply — I want to see people held accountable for breaking the law.’

KTVU reports:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he is doubling the number of California Highway Patrol officers deployed to San Francisco as part of efforts to crackdown on the city’s fentanyl crisis.

California’s Legislature has been passing one bill after another to reduce accountability for crime, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has been signing them. Even worse, his own prison department has been pumping out regulations to hasten the release of inmates from state prison. The lower tier of felons was shunted off to county jails beginning in 2009, so state prisons now house the hard core. Even Jerry Brown’s Corrections Secretary understood that the best candidates for rehabilitation were already gone, and that hastening the removal of those that were left endangered public safety. Newsom is now enacting policies that even Brown fought against in federal court.

A major source of problems for crimes against retail businesses is Proposition 47 of 2014, which reduced many felonies to misdemeanors. Guess who supported Prop. 47.

Neither story reports the present number of CHP officers deployed, so it’s not clear exactly how many “double” is. From a statement by the Governor’s office quoted in the Mail story, I gather it’s around 100. An extra 100 CHP officers, doing duty that has little relation to patrolling the highways, will provide a bit of help to a police department that is short-handed at 1878 (as of June 15), but it is no cure.

So what do we really need?

The police need adequate staffing and public support. The “defunders” and all those who denigrate the police generally (as opposed to legitimate criticism of the few bad apples) need to be booted out of office.

Once the police arrest criminals, the judicial system and the prisons and jails need to impose serious consequences on those who commit serious or repeated crimes. The myth that any “non-violent” crime is not serious needs to be fully repudiated. Drug dealing, burglary, and theft corrode the structure of our society. These are serious matters and need to be addressed seriously.

We need to expand county jail capacity so that genuine consequences can be imposed for serious and repeated misdemeanors. By dumping its prison overcrowding problem on the counties, the Legislature impaired their ability to do their original job. The state needs to pony up the funds to make local punishment meaningful again, instead of blowing money on, for example, a bullet train that will only go from Bakersfield to Merced, not LA to SF.

CDCR needs to rescind its prison credit regulations and grant “good time” and program credits only as authorized by statutes. The Legislature needs to keep most, if not all, of the current prison capacity.

The bills of recent years that water down the consequences of committing crimes need to be repealed. Proposition 47 needs to be at least pruned back, if not repealed altogether.

We legalized marijuana, but drug leniency needs to stop there. Trafficking in opioids needs to be dealt with severely. Users can be offered treatment, but there need to be consequences to keep them in it.

Most of the soft-on-crime agenda is just wrong, and the long-term consequences to society are dire. We need to wake up to that.