This fall's race over anti-crime Proposition 36 guarantees to be some of the costly and unnecessary ballot campaigns California has ever seen, as zealous supporters of 2014's Proposition 47 fight to maintain it alive in greater than name.
It's a political fight that Gov. Gavin Newsom and the many prosecutors and major supermarket chains behind the brand new ballot initiative could have avoided relatively easily. They could have (and will have) used a decades-old process that permits initiators to succeed in agreements with lawmakers who oppose their measures, resulting in latest compromise laws after which the withdrawal of the initiatives in query.
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 at all times 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 previous crimes to misdemeanors and setting $950 because the minimum limit for the worth of stolen goods. They say official statistics suggest that crime rates generally are actually near historic lows.
The hard side on this dispute had no trouble gathering greater than 600,000 voter signatures to qualify their plan for the ballot. The proposal would allow prosecutors so as to add up the worth of products stolen by a defendant and launch a felony prosecution if the whole value exceeds the $950 threshold. It would also crack down on fentanyl users, dealers and manufacturers.
The obvious compromise might have been to aggregate the proceeds from thefts committed by individuals, but retain all of Prop. 47's drug-fighting advantages. Such a deal would have returned some crimes downgraded from felonies by Prop. 47 to that status, including crimes resembling burglary during business hours and forgery. At the identical time, a compromise could have kept crimes resembling drug possession and writing bad checks as misdemeanors.
But no attempt at compromise was made. Instead, under pressure from Newsom, lawmakers passed a package of recent laws that allow prosecutions for third-offense thefts, no matter value. The latest laws also allow judges to issue injunctions stopping “lesser” thieves from revisiting the stores where they stole, while eliminating cut-off dates on prosecuting organized shoplifting, resembling last yr's highly publicized blitzes at major retail stores.
This allows the governor and his allies within the legislature to assert they’ve solved the issues related to Prop. 47, which caused major corporations resembling Walmart, Walgreens and Nordstrom to shut quite a few stores in California – partially due to huge losses brought on by the thefts enabled by Prop. 47.
The laws they passed, nonetheless, aren’t as strict as Prop. 36, which places extreme emphasis on shoplifting. Nevertheless, some lawmakers who voted against the Newsom-linked package insisted that the increased emphasis on repeat theft would result in a rise in mass incarceration of racial minorities within the United States.
“These measures exacerbate mass incarceration and run in the opposite direction of what Californians (intended to achieve with Proposition 47),” said Democratic Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas of Los Angeles. In her statement, she added that “increasing criminalization too often falls on the shoulders of Black and Latino Californians.”
Other Democrats opposed the bill, arguing that it created two latest crimes that they said were already covered by existing laws: breaking right into a vehicle with the intent to steal and possessing property stolen from a vehicle with the intent to sell it.
If the conflicts between the brand new legislative package and Prop. 36 seem relatively minor, since each goal alleged deficiencies in Prop. 47, that's because they’re. That's also why it was clear from the moment Prop. 36 got here to a vote that it will be essentially unnecessary for lawmakers to pass latest laws that achieves a lot of its goals.
They have now done so. This implies that voters will waste their time and psychic energy in the event that they get too caught up within the upcoming battle over the ballot bill. The basic reality is that the majority of this effort and expense could and will have been avoided.
Send Thomas Elias an email at tdelias@aol.com and skim more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.
image credit : www.mercurynews.com