California Democrats are treating crime as a political game, not a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
California Democrats are playing legislative games to try and tank the effort to allow voters to potentially repeal Proposition 47. Prop 47 prevented prosecutors from charging grand theft, shoplifting worth less than $950, and drug possession as felonies, even for repeat offenders. It thus allowed shoplifters to raid stores and pharmacies without serious threats of jail time and prevented prosecutors from leveraging charges to get drug addicts with criminal charges into treatment programs.
Among the many upset with the predictable effects of this law are retailers, who have pushed to get a repeal of Prop 47 on the ballot this November. For all his newfound tough talk on crime, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) wants to keep this pro-criminal policy on the books, so he and the California legislature are proposing half-measures that would “fix” the retail side of crime and get the retailers off of the state’s back.
This is all clearly a game because state Democrats have included “inoperability clauses” that render their new laws inactive if Prop 47 is repealed. The message to retailers is that they can have Prop 47 repealed or they can have specialized laws that would allow police to issue citations to people without permits selling commonly stolen items and create a new crime category for serial theft. It is a blatant attempt to bribe retailers to abandon their financial and political support of the repeal proposition.
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If you needed any evidence that Newsom’s tough-on-crime act was a political charade to keep heat off of him from voters, this would be it. Newsom and his legislative allies aren’t seriously interested in keeping criminals off of the street or cracking down on the organized retail theft that has plagued communities up and down the state. They want to splinter a political coalition pushing Prop 47 repeal instead, with promises of citations for the career criminals who are tormenting not just retail giants but small businesses and residents living in crime-ridden communities.
If given the choice between the status quo and putting career criminals in jail, Newsom and California Democrats would choose the status quo. This is all a game to them and nothing more, no matter how many peoples’ lives and livelihoods are put at stake by the career criminals they refuse to treat like, yes, career criminals.