California’s Latest Crime Events Prove Why Prop 36 to Reform Prop 47 is Essential

So during a period of years with rising violent crime and auto thefts, the number of offenders arrested or serving time on probation has been steadily declining. How can this be?

California Governors, legislators and Attorneys General have been aggressively working to reduce the consequences for crime since 2011 when Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 109, the Public Safety Realignment Act into law. Passed on a straight party-line vote with no committee hearings, that 425-page law transferred responsibility for all but the most violent criminals from state prisons to county jails, effectively reducing their sentences. In 2013 Brown signed AB 4, the Trust Act, to prohibit local police departments from contacting federal immigration authorities to take custody of illegal alien criminals. As a result, they were released back onto the streets.

In 2014, the ACLU and groups funded by billionaire George Soros pooled roughly $10 million to fool state voters into passing an initiative called “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.” Proposition 47 converted many drug felonies and all property crimes valued at $950 or less to misdemeanors, with few if any consequences. The growth of California’s drug-addicted homeless population, the epidemic of fatal fentanyl overdoses and smash and grab robberies are directly tied to Prop. 47. The reason state data shows that most property crimes are down, is because the public no longer reports them to police, and with no consequences for offenders, police are not arresting them. That initiative and decisions by local politicians to defund police departments in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, explains why arrests are going down.

In 2016 Governor Brown qualified Proposition 57, The Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016, for the November ballot. With millions of dollars from Brown and Soros, the initiative was advertised as providing nonviolent offenders a chance for early release and rehabilitation.

Fooled again, voters passed Prop. 57 despite warnings from district attorneys and sheriffs that the measure would allow habitual felons, with priors for rape and murder, to gain early release. The Governor denied this, but in 2018, a Los Angeles appellate court and a Sacramento judge both ruled that the warnings were correct.

In 2017 Governor Brown signed SB 620 into law. That bill eliminated the mandatory sentence increase for the criminal use of a firearm, allowing judges to give gun-wielding criminals shorter sentences. A year later the Governor signed SB 1391, which prohibits juvenile murderers, aged 14 and 15, from being tried as adults, and SB 1437, which abolished the felony murder rule, allowed hundreds of accomplices to murder during the commission of a felony to get an early release from prison.