Nike Closing Flagship Portland Store Due to Crime

by · Sep 12, 2023 9:51 am

The Oregon-based sports shoe giant Nike has announced it will close its flagship store in Portland for safety and security reasons.  Kristine de Leon of the Oregonian reports that last February Mayor Ted Wheeler turned down the company’s request to dispatch off-duty police officers to the store, which opened in 1984, to beef up security in the crime-ridden Northeast Portland business district.  Wheeler said that an officer shortage at the city’s police department was the reason.  Portland was at the center of the defund-the-police movement spearheaded by Black Lives Matter during the George Floyd riots in 2020.  Since then officers have retired or moved to other counties leaving the city with the smallest police force in 30 years.  Crime in the city has skyrocketed since the riots, setting homicide records over the past two years.  Nike was a major contributor to Black Lives Matter.

The Conversion of an Anti-Police Activist

by · Sep 8, 2023 2:41 pm

A Minneapolis Democrat party leader who demanded that the police department in her city be dismantled in 2020, has now become a tough on crime advocate.  What happened?  She got mugged by reality on Tuesday.  Lindsay Kornick of Fox News reports that the next day Shivanthi Sathanandan posted on Facebook that she was “violently carjacked” by “four very young men, all carrying guns.” She said they assaulted her in front her children outside their home in broad daylight. She also included a photo of her head injuries and reported having a “broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising and cuts” around her body as well as feeling “rage” against the lack of accountability against criminals.

“These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse. I’m now part of the statistics. I wasn’t silent when I fought these men to save my life and my babies, and I won’t be silent now. We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM. PERIOD.  Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS,”

Continue reading . . .

CA Lawsuit to Stop Early Inmate Releases Moves Forward

by · Sep 7, 2023 1:13 pm

The California Globe published CJLF’s press release on last Friday’s favorable ruling in the lawsuit to end the state’s early releases of prison inmates.

On Friday, September 1, a Sacramento judge rejected California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s attempt to throw out a lawsuit challenging the Newsom Administration’s scheme to grant early release to tens of thousands of prison inmates. The suit, brought by the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation (CJLF) on behalf of crime victims and their families, argues that administrative regulations authorizing the inmate releases, adopted in 2021 by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), violate numerous state laws and ballot measures that specify when and how a prison inmate qualifies for credits to gain early release and when those credits may be used to advance a minimum eligible parole date. The Foundation is seeking a writ of mandate to halt the releases.

Continue reading . . .

New York’s Sanctuary for Illegal Alien Criminals

by · Sep 6, 2023 1:39 pm

The impact of New York City’s Sanctuary City and soft-on-crime policies have created an environment where citizens are being repeatedly victimized by the same criminals who should not even be in the country.  29-year-old Daniel Hernandez Martinez, an illegal who arrived in the Big Apple from Venezuela two months ago is a case in point.  Tina Moore of the New York Post reports that Martinez has been arrested five times for thefts and assaults with an additional arrest for theft in Brooklyn.  “He’s been wreaking havoc,” a cop with more than 20 years on the job said. “This is not an isolated incident. These migrants are getting arrested quite often here, and we really don’t know who they are. They really don’t have ID. They’re not being vetted properly, but some of them are committing some of the most violent crimes here.”

Continue reading . . .

Defining “Violent”

by · Aug 31, 2023 3:44 pm

One would not think that defining “violent crime” is all that difficult. Yet in both federal law and California law, there are definitions of “violent” that are excessively narrow, excluding crimes that everyone with sense would consider violent. Dan Walters has this column at CalMatters, titled “California law treats some violent crimes as nonviolent, letting offenders off the hook.” He has an extended quote from this column by Emily Hoeven at the SF Chronicle (behind a paywall).

From Walters’ column:

Hoeven noted that earlier this year, the Assembly’s (perhaps misnamed) Public Safety Committee rejected a Republican bill to classify domestic violence as a violent crime, thereby making it easier to keep offenders behind bars.

This outrageous situation results from a 2016 ballot measure, sponsored principally by then-Gov. Jerry Brown and passed by voters, that purported to give those who commit nonviolent crimes chances to earn their way out of prison.

However, it was deceptive. Proposition 57’s indirect definition of a nonviolent crime was that it did not appear on a specific Penal Code list of 23 violent crimes.

That list only referred to particularly heinous crimes and omitted many offenses that ordinary folks would consider violent, including some forms of rape and domestic violence. The result is that those who commit some unspeakable crimes, including battering one’s spouse, are given kid gloves treatment in the penal system.

How did the definition get so screwed up? The problem in California is, in substantial part, the result of lazy drafting. (The federal problem is a topic for another post.) Continue reading . . .

Victims Pushing Back on Pro-Criminal Policies in Austin, Texas

by · Aug 31, 2023 2:54 pm

Austin, the capital of Texas, has become the San Francisco of the southwest.  In 2021 the city set an all-time record for homicides, had twice the national rate for burglary, and vehicle theft, and a third higher rate for robbery and assault.   NBC’s KNXN reports that the city is currently on track to meet or exceed last year’s second highest number of homicides.  Austin also rivals San Francisco on homelessness, with 10,000 people living in 168 different homeless camps according to the New York Post.  While the city passed an ordinance to prohibit camping on pubic property, it is not enforced.  In 2020, responding to the George Floyd riots, the progressive City Council cut the police budget by one-third.  That cut, and the city’s woke law enforcement policies have driven officers to take jobs in other counties or retire, leaving the force short by 400.  Austin’s progressive, Soros-bankrolled District Attorney Jose Garza, who has never prosecuted a criminal case, typically undercharges or plea bargains criminal cases, including those involving murder.

Continue reading . . .

SB 94 – Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics – Murderers do not “Age Out”

by · Aug 30, 2023 4:35 pm

Steve Smith of Pacific Research Institute has this post on a bill that is exceptionally bad even by the California Legislature’s low standards. The bill  would make a large number of murderers sentenced to life without possibility for parole eligible for parole.  Smith notes:

SB 94 is based on the simplistic and poorly researched premise that, based on arrest statistics alone, criminals age out of crime. The bill’s author, Senator Dave Cortese, argues that “research overwhelmingly shows that people age out of violent crime….”

Both [Sen. Cortese’s] press release and the study [it cites] suffer from a glaring omission. Neither make the connection between age and the crimes for which the offender was sentenced. Continue reading . . .

Regrets of a Proposition 47 Supporter

by · Aug 30, 2023 1:38 pm

“I had supported Proposition 47, which basically said you wouldn’t prosecute —the crimes were much different at the level of up to $950. I thought it was a good idea at the time because I thought, we need to give people an opportunity, we need to give people a chance,” David Canepa said to CBS News Bay Area.  Canepa is a San Mateo County, California Democrat who sits on the  Board of Supervisors.  Kristine Parks of Fox News reports that in the wake of out-of-control theft in the Bay Area, Canepa has changed his mind about Proposition 47: “I made a mistake, it was a big mistake, and you have to acknowledge your mistake,” he confessed. “By doing this, what we’ve done is we’re letting people take thousands and thousands of dollars. And why should people be subjugated?”  With counties essentially helpless to crack down on thieves under Proposition 47, Camepa is now calling on the Governor and state Legislature to reduce the dollar amount of thefts that qualify as a felony.  Two bills to do this, one authored by a Democrat and the other by a Republican died in the legislature last year.

Under the Radar: How Gov. Newsom Uses Clemency to Engineer Parole for Recidivist Felons and Murderers

by · Aug 29, 2023 10:58 am

Ron Matthias has this op-ed in the California Globe with the above title. The subtitle is If it were up to Newsom, the public would learn nothing more about those prisoners and their claimed rehabilitation. Here is the first paragraph:

Gov. Gavin Newsom is big on demanding transparency and accountability from others, such as school officials and social media companies. But from himself, not so much—and especially not when it comes to using his clemency powers to engineer the future release of recidivist criminals, including some who’ve been convicted of murders so heinous they’re not even eligible for parole. Continue reading . . .

Mental Health Response: The Devil Is In the Details

by · Aug 25, 2023 10:51 am

Finding the best way to respond to mental health crises is a continuing search. One thing we can be sure of is that proposals under the “defund the police” banner are bad ideas. See Michael Rushford’s post yesterday. We need more police, not fewer, regardless of what we do about mental health calls. Beyond that, alternatives need to be well thought out and adequately funded and supported. Too often, they are not. Scott Calvert and Julie Wernau have this report in the WSJ, titled “‘No Hose, No Gun’: Police Alternatives for Mental-Health Crises Fall Short: New units designed to avoid violent and often deadly encounters lack both funding and institutional support.”

Dispatchers at the 911 center in Mesa, Ariz., have three levers to pull: fire/medical, police or mental health. The last one is a relatively new addition, adopted by dozens of police departments around the country and aimed at avoiding violent and often deadly confrontations between police officers and the mentally ill.

“No hose, no gun,” said Mayor John Giles. “Just somebody with a clipboard and an argyle sweater who wants to ask how your day is going.”

Now there’s a disaster waiting to happen, if the person is so far gone as to be a danger to himself or others. Continue reading . . .