Intransigence leads to fight against crime initiative | Editorial

The clear conflict between Newsom and the liberal Democrats who dominate the legislature and the sponsors of Prop. 36, who called their measure the “Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act” (though the connection to homelessness is unclear), has always been clear: Newsom’s side views Prop. 47 as largely successful in reducing repeat crime and treating the drug addiction that motivates many crimes.

But much of the law enforcement community views Prop. 47 as an abject failure that has increased crime by downgrading many past crimes to misdemeanors and setting $950 as the minimum value limit for thefts. They say official statistics suggest that crime rates in most cases are now near historic lows.

The hard side in this dispute had no trouble gathering more than 600,000 voter signatures to qualify their plan for the ballot. It would allow prosecutors to add up the value of goods stolen by a defendant and file a felony charge if the total value exceeds the $950 limit. It would also crack down on fentanyl users, dealers and manufacturers.

The obvious compromise could have been to aggregate the proceeds from thefts committed by individuals, but retain all of Prop. 47's drug-fighting benefits. Such a deal would have returned some crimes that Prop. 47 downgraded from felonies to that status, including burglaries of stores during business hours and forgery. At the same time, a compromise could have kept things like drug possession and writing bad checks as misdemeanors.

But there was no attempt at compromise. Instead, under pressure from Newsom, lawmakers passed a package of new laws that allow prosecutions for third-offense thefts, regardless of value. The new laws also allow judges to issue injunctions preventing “smaller” thieves from revisiting the stores where they stole, while eliminating time limits for prosecuting organized shoplifting, such as last year's highly publicized blitzes at major retail stores.

This allows the governor and his allies in the legislature to claim they have solved the problems associated with Prop. 47, which caused major companies such as Walmart, Walgreens and Nordstrom to close numerous stores in California – in part because of the huge losses caused by the thefts enabled by Prop. 47.

However, the laws they passed are not as strict as Prop. 36, which places extreme emphasis on shoplifting.

Some lawmakers who voted against the Newsom-related package of measures nevertheless insisted that the increased emphasis on repeat thefts would lead to an increase in mass incarceration of minorities.

“These measures exacerbate mass incarceration and run in the opposite direction of what Californians wanted to achieve with Proposition 47,” said Democratic Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas of Los Angeles.

Their statement continued: “Rising criminalization too often comes back to haunt Black and Latino Californians.”

Other Democrats opposed the bill, arguing that it created two new crimes that they said were already covered by existing laws: breaking into a vehicle with the intent to steal and possessing property stolen from a vehicle with the intent to sell it.

If it seems like the conflicts between the new bill and Prop. 36 are relatively minor, since both target alleged deficiencies in Prop. 47, that's because they are. That's why it was clear from the moment Prop. 36 came to a vote that it wouldn't really be necessary for lawmakers to pass new legislation that would achieve many of its goals.

They have now done so. This means that voters will waste their time and psychic energy if they get too caught up in the upcoming battle over the ballot measure.

The fundamental reality is that most of this effort and expense could and should have been avoided.

Thomas D. Elias is a freelance political journalist whose columns appear in newspapers throughout California. You can email him at [email protected].