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From their phones and television screens and sometimes from their windows, Californians watched their state change rapidly during the pandemic. Homelessness grew then and continued to grow. Fatal fentanyl overdoses rose. Brash daytime robberies floated from TikTok to nightly newscasts.
A constellation of law enforcement officials, prosecutors and big-box retailers insisted the cause was simple: the punishment was not severe enough.
They proposed a measure that elevated some low-level crimes to felonies and created opportunities to force reluctant people into substance abuse treatment. That measure, Proposal 36passed by an overwhelming majority on Tuesday evening. It led 70% to 30% early Wednesday.
It reverses some of the changes voters made with a 2014 ballot measure that turned certain nonviolent felonies into misdemeanors, effectively shortening prison sentences. Amid the visible changes of the pandemic in California, in the growing homeless encampments, it is Nordstroms looted and the plundered rail yards, critics of that earlier initiative finally found the right climate to roll back the law.
The strategy at the heart of Prop. 36 is still subject to debate. Opponents say tougher penalties will never be an effective deterrent to crime. A big part of sciencepart of it funded by the US Department of Justicesupports them.
But the victory of Prop. 36, despite opposition from the governor and most of the state’s Democratic leaders, was not about what people know, but about what they saw.
An IT technician was afraid to walk five blocks to work in downtown Los Angeles, so he bought a parking pass and drove. A big box retailer moved all of its merchandise to the second floor because people on the ground floor continued to steal. The fentanyl crisis caused police caught in body camera videos to panic and black out when you are exposed to the substance.
The prop. 36 campaign continued such imagesand it promised to make them disappear.
That Prop. 36 would succeed had been quite clear since late summer Governor Gavin Newsom’s last ditch efforts Preempting the measure with other bills on retail crime failed to secure funding from Prop. 36 to be transferred or kept out of the vote. So how did Californians, who supported milder sentences, respond? Proposition 47 of 2014will you support a stricter crime measure ten years later?
“What we may be seeing is evidence of a course correction in a long path of criminal justice reform efforts,” said Magnus Lofstrom, criminal justice policy director at the Public Policy Institute of California. Prop. 36 “focuses on crime and social problems that people can see: shoplifting, more locked up goods, more viral videos (of thefts) and then the media talks about it.”
It’s those visible problems, Lofstrom said, that can quickly change voters’ minds. That includes the growing sidewalk encampments of unhoused people, coupled with public drug use.
During the pandemic, shoplifting and business burglaries skyrocketed, especially in Los Angeles, Alameda, San Mateo and Sacramento counties. Statewide, the institute found shoplifting of merchandise worth up to $950 increased by 28% over the past five years. That is the highest level observed since 2000.
By combining shoplifting with business burglaries, the institute’s researchers found that the total number of reported thefts was 18% higher than in 2019.
“California voters have spoken loudly about the triple epidemics of shoplifting, homelessness and fatal drug overdoses plaguing our state,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. “By supporting Proposition 36, they said yes to the treatment. They said yes to responsibility. And they said yes to putting common sense over partisanship so we can end the suffering in our communities.”
Californians still want prisoner rehabilitation
Opponents of the measure say Prop. 36 was a smart way to reintroduce the war on drugs in a way that will be palatable to voters in 2024. They argue that no research on criminal justice or homelessness supports the idea that harsher punishments — or the threat of harsher punishments — prevents crime or gets people off the streets.
Prop. 36 will, they say, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on legal and prison costs without measurably reducing crime or poverty.
“We are aware that there has been a shift in the atmosphere around criminal justice reform,” said Loyola Law School professor Priscilla Ocen, a former special assistant attorney general at the California Department of Justice.
“I disagree with the premise that California is moving more and more to the right when it comes to the bad old days of mass incarceration,” she said. “I think the electorate is frustrated on certain issues by feelings of insecurity – despite the fact that those feelings are often not based on data in terms of the likelihood of becoming a victim, either through a property crime or a crime against a person . .”
The Yes on 36 campaign focused on “a sense of insecurity and uncertainty,” highlighting the most visible elements of pandemic-era crime, Ocen said. Despite the general violent and property crime much closer to them historic lows beyond their peaks, certain visible crimes, such as burglaries and car break-ins, have increased year on year since the pandemic until at least 2023, the latest year for which statistics are available.
“There’s a frustration that in addition to routinely seeing unhoused people on the streets, there are just feelings of unease, even though that doesn’t show up in the data,” Ocen says.
Vote at the end of September showed that as many likely voters favored expanding treatment and rehabilitation as those who favored harsher sentences.
The measure’s proponents insist the changes do not require the kind of mass incarceration that led to California’s massive prison overcrowding problem in the 1990s and 2000s.
What Californians see downtown
Claudia Oliveira, executive director of the Downtown Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, said businesses in the city’s commercial center have had to make adjustments since the pandemic began to combat shoplifting — one Burlington Coat Factory, she said, has already merchandise moved to the store. 2nd floor used for a while due to repeated thefts on the ground floor.
“It’s not something we should be angry about, but it is sadder that we are in a place where people are not healthy and where people still live in scarcity and have to steal,” she said.
“Sometimes people say, ‘It’s just a property crime, so who cares, they have insurance.’ Which isn’t always true. They have their own risk. I’ve seen small businesses close after being looted. And it’s not always true that they have the resources to get back on their feet, especially in the inner city.”
Oliveira said she could not vote on Proposition 36 because she was undocumented. But she said she supported the measure because she expects it will connect people with substance abuse or mental health issues with social services, while preventing theft on the scale California has seen since the pandemic began.
Jeff Ashoo, 48, said his life in downtown Los Angeles has gotten worse.
“I started working here in downtown Los Angeles, before the pandemic, and I was living in Glendale at the time, and yeah, I parked about, oh, about a half mile away from where I work,” he said. “And I felt safe walking to work. I did.
“After the pandemic, the homeless came back, but the police never came.”
Ashook said he now lives downtown but drives the five blocks to work, fearing for his safety.
‘And I’ve had colleagues who were actually physically abused. A few colleagues who ended up having to go to hospital during the short distance I walked,” he said. “So yeah, like I said, it has made me a little more tired.”
Ultimately, Ashook said he would accept Prop. 36 could not support due to the expected costs.
“I don’t like that the budget impact ranges from several tens of millions of dollars to several hundred millions,” he said. “That’s a lot of money. And it doesn’t say where that money comes from.”
Voters are changing their priorities on California crime
Ultimately, Lofstrom said, it’s not really a contradiction to pass Prop. 47 and also voted for Prop this year. 36.
In 2014, the state urgently needed this reduce the prison populationfor practical reasons and due to a court order not to keep the population higher than 137.5% of the prison system’s capacity.
Today, the urgency is moving in the other direction, he said. But the underlying causes for the increase in shoplifting and property crime are still unclear, he said.
“We don’t know what is contributing to the increase in shoplifting. We don’t know to what extent this is driven by economic and social challenges that lead to shoplifting,” he said.
Even with Prop. 36 in the books, Lofstrom said much about the measure’s implementation remains to be determined.
“Will the police arrest for this?” he asked. “Will prosecutors pursue this charge? It is uncertain how this will all turn out.”
Joe Garcia is a California Local News fellow