California Sheriff Criticizes Newsom, Calls State’s Crime Policy Deceptive

A California sheriff who is championing an effort to roll back the state’s 2014 proposition that reduced the penalties for certain crimes slammed Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), saying that voters had been “lied to and misled by our state.”

In 2014, California passed Proposition 47, which altered some low-level crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. “According to state data obtained by KQED, about 15% of theft cases resulted in an arrest in 2013, the year before Proposition 47 passed. In 2022, that number had dropped to 6.6%. That means in more than 90% of reported cases of theft, no one is ever arrested,” KQED reported.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco spoke of his efforts to support the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act, telling Fox News, “California, we’re in a very trying time right now when it comes to public safety and for the most part, from a law enforcement perspective, we can say that, we can attribute the majority of our issues that we are having, or at least, there’s some type of a correlation to them, to the passage of Prop 47.”

“Quite frankly, we were lied to and misled by our state, in that the name and the description on the ballot was not something that we were getting,” Bianco continued. “We voted for a proposition that was named the Safe Schools and the Safe Streets Initiative and it contained absolutely nothing to do with safe streets or safe schools, and it was everything that is bad about public safety right now, directly contributing to the increase in homelessness, mental health and drug addiction. Directly resulted in what we see now in our serial theft cases, in our retail theft cases and issues in crime of residential burglaries and those types of things.”

The Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act, which is currently gathering signatures in order to be eligible for the November 2024 ballot, states that it will classify “repeated theft as a felony for individuals who steal less than $950 if they have two or more prior theft-related convictions,” allow “stolen property values from multiple thefts to be combined so repeat offenders can be charged with a felony if the total exceeds $950, countering tactics by career criminals to avoid harsher penalties,” and authorize “judges to impose an enhanced penalty when an offender steals, damages, or destroys property by participating in organized theft with two or more offenders or by causing losses of $50,000 or more.”

“If you need help to get fixed, then we should be able to help you. If you just flat out refuse, and you’re going to continue to use drugs and cause us all to be victimized by your drug addiction and your theft and everything else, then you’re going to suffer the consequences of jail time,” Bianco stated. “It’s just plain and simple. But the reality is, without consequences, there is no reason for anyone to change behavior, and we need to get past this feel good way of what our legislators are doing now in this, this notion that it’s somebody else’s fault and you’re not responsible for your own actions. We need to move past that, and we need to get back to a time of common sense that would tell us if we can put you in rehab and help you, then great. We’ve helped you. We’ve helped society. But otherwise, then you’re going to have to do jail time, so we stop you from victimizing the rest of us.”

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“The governor is going to have no choice but to get on board because this is 100% complete common sense,” Bianco said. “We have a complete failed political agenda in this state. It’s been a social experiment that has been led by the governor, from his time as mayor of San Francisco, into lieutenant governor and now governor, which has been made worse by our attorney general, who has absolutely no desire to fix any of these issues with crime and protect Californians.”

“Right now, they are against it because, in elementary terms, I guess they’re going to have to admit that Prop 47 was a disaster that they have tried to defend for years since its passing and the reality of a leader, a true leader, is someone that can say, ‘Look, we had good intentions of something, but, we had some unintended consequences that now we have to fix.’ That would have been a leadership way for our government to come out of this ahead. But instead, for the past 10 years, they have completely defended Prop 47. They have lied to the public,” he concluded.

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