Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced deployment of “new California Highway Patrol crime suppression teams to work directly with local law enforcement in major cities and regions across the state.” Over the Labor Day weekend, the governor missed an opportunity to speak out on a crime in the major city where he served as mayor.
A year ago in downtown San Francisco, in broad daylight, an armed robber confronted San Francisco 49ers first-round draft pick Ricky Pearsall and demanded his watch. Pearsall declined to give it up, and in the ensuing struggle, the robber shot the 49er in the chest. The bullet hit no vital organs, and Pearsall miraculously survived.
News reports described the shooter as a 17-year-old high-school senior from Tracy, California, about 70 miles away. The armed robber was not identified, and his booking photo was not released. Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta made no public statement on the attack that reporters were able to find, not even to denounce a case of “gun violence.” In a similar style, the August 31 anniversary passed with no statement from the governor.
The mysterious shooter was charged with attempted murder, assault with a semiautomatic weapon, and attempted second-degree robbery, but there was a problem. The 2016 Proposition 57, passed when Newsom was lieutenant governor, took away prosecutors’ ability to try juveniles as adults, with some exceptions.
“There are five crime types for 16 and 17-year-olds, for which we would consider potentially seeking to transfer them to adult court,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told reporters. “Attempted murder is one of those charges. And so again, it was for consideration.” Even so, no trial date was announced, and by early September, news stories on the shooting ground to a halt.
Newsom’s crime suppression plan proposes no reforms to Proposition 16, hardly the only obstacle to public safety in the Golden State.
One year later, with the NFL season at hand, Californians find no news of a trial or sentence, no identification of the shooter, and no statement on the case from their governor or attorney general.
In effect, the delay tells juvenile criminals they can rob and shoot people with complete anonymity, and possibly escape prosecution that fits the crime. Newsom’s crime suppression plan proposes no reforms to Proposition 16, hardly the only obstacle to public safety in the Golden State.
In September 2019, Newsom’s mentor, Gov. Jerry Brown, signed Senate Bill 1391, which bars all prosecution of criminals under age 16 in adult court. As a result, anyone under age 16 could rob and murder the entire San Francisco 49ers team, be tried only in juvenile court, serve time only in juvenile prison, and gain release at age 25.
“The opposition of certain crime victims and their families is intense,” Brown said in his signing message. Those included the families of Oliver Northup, 87, and Claudia Maupin, 76, murdered and mutilated by 15-year-old Daniel Marsh in Davis, California, in 2013. Brown said the victims’ testimony “weighed on me,” but signed the measure anyway and has since expressed no second thoughts.
In 2021, California’s Supreme Court upheld the measure, which Newsom never challenged and his new crime-suppression campaign ignores. The plan includes teams of 15 crime fighters, including canine units, in major cities. Reporters asked the governor if his escalation was a response to President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles.
“He is de facto militarizing American cities,” Newsom told reporters, “Is this America? Are we losing our grip with reality? People that don’t look like me fear they are being racially profiled. Authoritarian tendencies and actions of this president cannot be normalized. We are putting a mirror up to the lunacy of this president. (RELATED: The Two Americas)
Newsom claims he is only extending the “Public Safety Plan” he initiated in 2019 and expanded in 2021. None of that prevented the robbery and attempted murder of Ricky Pearsall in downtown San Francisco last year, or facilitated the prosecution of the criminal. By all indications, he remains unidentified, untried, and unsentenced. If Californians thought that justice delayed is justice denied, it would be hard to blame them.
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