In California’s major cities, homicides rose by roughly 17 percent in the last year. Homicides in Los Angeles reached their highest total in 15 years. (Photo: Eva Carre/Shutterstock)
California’s Latest Crime Events Prove Why Prop 36 to Reform Prop 47 is Essential
AB 109 was the prison ‘diversion’ law that released or dumped thousands of criminals from state prisons onto local jails
By Katy Grimes, September 5, 2024 8:00 am
California’s ongoing crime crisis is everywhere – no one is spared, except high ranking politicians and Hollywood elite who have security. Crime and rampant retail theft throughout California cities has caused thousands of small business and store closures. Escalating fentanyl overdoses are killing young Californians at a stunning rate. Voters want reforms immediately.
Crime impacts small, medium and large businesses. Crime hurts homeowners and renters. Crime strikes children and adults. Crime harms visitors and tourists, and now, even a San Francisco 49er.
These recent headlines tell the unmistakable story:
- San Francisco 49ers receiver Ricky Pearsall shot in attempted robbery
- 8-year-old girl gravely injured by stray bullet in San Francisco home
- SFC: Oakland freeway shooting: Two injured, portion of I-580 closed for hours
- Union Square visitors share concerns in wake of Ricky Pearsall shooting
- ‘It’s just a continuous battle’: Rio Linda businesses frustrated after string of reported vandalism
- SFC: Man shot in S.F.’s Mission District
- Burglary is rising in the Richmond. After break-ins, business owners want action
- Netflix chef describes being brutalized by racist attacker in downtown SF
How did this happen? How did one of the most beautiful states in the country devolve into third world status? And California be saved?
It started with AB 109 in 2011, Governor Jerry Brown’s “prison realignment bill.” Democrat lawmakers were unhappy with and actively undermining California’s “Three Strikes law,” which successfully dealt with recidivist criminals.
In 2011, Gov. Brown signed AB 109 called “Public Safety Realignment,” buried in a budget bill. This new “public safety realignment” prohibited prison sentences for virtually all property felonies, parole violations and even crimes like assault, revising this definition of a felony to include certain crimes that are punishable in local jail for more than one year – making the crime a local problem, rather than a state problem.
Thus the “changes in the state’s reporting practices.”
AB 109 bill analysis defined it: “This bill is related to the realignment of certain low level offenders, adult parolees, and juvenile offenders from state to local jurisdictions.”
AB 109 was the prison “diversion” law that dumped thousands of criminals from state prisons onto local jails, many subsequently getting released into the general public and committing crimes. Following passage of AB 109, the Legislature and Governor deviously passed Assembly Bill 1050, ordering the Board of State and Community Corrections to redefine “recidivism” in an obvious effort to manipulate recidivism statistics.
Michael Rushford with the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation wrote this for the Globe in 2022, explaining how California’s tough-on-crime laws were systematically undermined and destroyed:
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.
And this was the plan.
This is why voting matters, and why every vote counts – as long as the voter understands what he or she is voting for. This is why Proposition 36, the initiative to “Fix 47” and increase penalties for certain drug crimes by increasing sentence lengths and level of crime, is imperative if California is to be saved.
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October 26, 2023 -
Excellent article. All of what we’ve seen in the last decade or so of “legalizing crime” certainly looks purposeful, doesn’t it? A 5 year old could have predicted the disastrous outcome of public danger, death, and mayhem this group of laws would bring. Thanks so much for turning California to $#@%, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, George Soros and all of your many clones and henchmen. The result of your fine work is our present pit of criminal activity without consequence, blood running in the streets, fentanyl deaths, open air drug sales and use, severe mental illness, and on and on and on, run WILD. And we know that 80-90% of street homeless vagrancy is a direct result of the breakdown described above as the result of AB 109, Prop 57, Prop 47 & etc. Prisoner releases, catch and release, no jail time, no drug treatment, the list goes on and on. We must:
Vote YES on PROP 36
This reminds me of the Obama years when they reclassified the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood as a “positive” force in the Middle East, this led to the fawning media to describe the so called Arab Spring in that region of the world making it seem like peace had arrived in the Middle East. Using word semantics Democrats have papered over the nightmare crime scene that has become California.
Just a reminder to voters: Kamala Harris was California Attorney General from Jan 3, 2011, to Jan 3, 2017, which makes her one of the people responsible for our crime problem in California. I will make sure everyone I know, in California and in other states are aware of her record and that they get a link to this article.
The results of a one party system of government. George Soros and group should be treated like the insurrectionists that they are. Mega donors like him have turned our government into something akin to the CCP.
Now we have the likes of Kamala determined to make the federal government like the California government. If we have an honest election, that won’t happen. Hard to not lose faith in the system. Will those who turned prop 47 into a criminal enterprise actually vote for 36 to reform it? Questionable.
Yep, I went to Winco Foods in Stockton this afternoon and as we were entering there were two men carrying some items heading towards the entrance I just passed through. The lady that worked there was yelling at them to stop, but she told us that there was no way she would chase them like her coworker would have done. I told her I didn’t blame her and that those men were sealing their own fate. Laws need to change, we will all pay the costs of these losses or the stores will just end up closing.
Why is there no “Truth in Advertising” law that prevents mislabeling of any legislation or proposition? This kind of law would require that the “Inflation Reduction Act” be labeled what it REALLY is – “The Green New Deal”; or name “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” what IT really is – “The Decriminalization of Theft Act”.