‘A revolving door’: California police and DA blame safer neighborhoods law for rise in drugs and crime
Rachel Schilke
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California counties, like many areas around the United States, are suffering from a stark increase in homelessness and drug use. District attorneys and sheriffs are placing the blame on state laws that lessen penalties for certain crimes, contributing to a “revolving door” of crime.
California is one of several Democratic states that have begun making steep alterations to the criminal justice system on the basis of eliminating systemic racism, instead hoping to refocus efforts on investing in mental health and rehabilitation programs.
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However, some people in law enforcement believe that laws like California’s Proposition 47 tie their hands and prohibit them from exercising the law, and district attorneys feel weary as their prosecutors come up empty-handed in their efforts to charge criminals.
What is Proposition 47?
Proposition 47, known as the Safer Neighborhoods and Schools Act or Prop 47, was a ballot initiative that went into effect in November 2014. It reduced penalties for certain nonviolent property and drug crimes.
Under the new law, charges were reduced from felonies to misdemeanors for grand theft and shoplifting worth less than $950. So were charges for drug possession for personal use of most drugs, including methamphetamine and cocaine. Before the proposition, prosecutors were also allowed to charge people with prior convictions with a felony.
Under Prop 47, the money intended for keeping criminals in prison would be redistributed to fund rehabilitation programs. However, a lot of this money is going to waste as law enforcement continues to see criminals choosing to go to jail for a few days rather than spend a week or longer getting clean.
Prop 47 weakens power of prosecutors
Greg Totten, chief executive of the California District Attorneys Association, said he sees the effect of Proposition 47 from the point of view of both an association leader and a prosecutor for four decades. However, his feeling about the law remains just as strong as it did almost 10 years ago.
“Prop 47 was a measure that we opposed in its inception. We opposed it because we viewed it as very bad public policy,” he said. “The public was sold a bill of goods … and it was anything but that.”
Totten said that prior to Prop 47, criminals arrested for theft or drug use had two options: serve felony jail time or go to a court-ordered rehab program.
“The traditional approach that we had — kind of a carrot and stick approach. The carrot was, if you get into treatment, you don’t do jail time,” he said. “The stick was, if you don’t get into treatment, you’re facing potential jail time.”
“Prop 47 ended all that,” Totten continued. “From a pure prosecution standpoint, the tools that we relied on to address both of these areas of crimes were markedly weakened.”
Of the drug courts surveyed by the Center for Court Intervention, 67% across the state reported that their caseloads decreased following the passage of Proposition 47.
If an offender does decide to go show up in court, the law now gives them two new options: serve minimal jail time or go to a weekslong court-ordered rehab program. Researchers at the Center for Court Intervention found that Proposition 47 gives courts less leverage to push drug addicts to seek treatment.
If they are a new offender, they may just get a fine and be “put back on the streets,” he said. They’re likely to be arrested for the same crime again just days or weeks after, he said.
“The issue within our justice system of people basically walking in a revolving door was mightily contributed to by Proposition 47,” Totten said. “There’s literally zero sanctions in our system today.”
“It’s not for a lack of effort. There’s just no teeth in the law,” he added.
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County law enforcement is fed up with drug-infused streets
With Prop 47 in play, many California counties and cities are facing a rapid escalation of retail theft crimes, more substance abuse issues, drug addiction, drug overdoses, and homelessness.
California’s fatal overdose rates rose more than 35% between 2014 and 2019, skyrocketing the following year during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County said his officers have always encountered people under the influence of drugs but never at this level since Prop 47 was established. When police arrested someone for drug possession prior to Prop 47, sometimes offenders opted for felony jail time because they knew they could not get clean in rehab.
“For the vast majority of folks, it was a diversion, and the good thing about forcing someone into drug diversion, is they’re going to get sober for a minimum of a couple of days, could be a week,” Bianco said. “It could have been the one time they hit their rock bottom, and that was what they needed to turn their life around, and they never went back to drugs again.”
Now, under the law, he said it’s not uncommon for his officers to arrest someone with 20 failure-to-appear-in-court tickets.
“They’re not going to go to court. They want no part of going to court; they’re not going to go to rehab. They believe they don’t have a problem. They think that it’s our problem, that we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing, and just leave them alone,” Bianco said.
In Bianco’s opinion, Prop 47 enhanced the drug problem, which contributes to homelessness in California’s cities. He does not believe there is a separate “homeless crisis” or “mental health crisis,” but instead a situation fueled by drugs that forces people to get kicked out of their homes and develop mental health struggles.
“You cannot give someone a service that doesn’t want it,” Bianco said. “And that’s what we have. None of these people that we see on the street — ‘homeless people’ that we keep calling them, these mentally deranged, drug-induced psychosis people — none of them accept help.”
“We offer it to all of them on a daily basis. It’s a drug abuse problem, and that is stemmed from Prop 47 making basically drugs legal,” Bianco added.
County jails are also feeling the effects of Prop 47. Offenders that originally would have served felonies in prison are now taking up space in county jails, which are designed for holding people with misdemeanors. So much so, Bianco said, that those who are actually committing misdemeanors often get away with crimes, as officers find it hard to keep up with the demand.
“The law enforcement officers no longer have the ability to arrest most people,” Bianco said. “And the criminals know it. They’re completely emboldened by a law system that allows them to just keep offending keep reoffending. And that’s what we’re dealing with right now.”
Bianco said the reason why people are calling attention to the effects of Prop 47 now, and not so much within the last decade, is because people are finally “fed up.”
“They’re tired of me telling them there’s nothing I can do,” Bianco said. “They don’t want to hear the top law enforcement official in the county saying, ‘Sorry, there’s nothing I can do.'”
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Prop 47’s effect on morale among prosecutors and law enforcement
Both Bianco and Totten described their sect of people as feeling “weary” toward the issue, as they do not see an end in sight under Prop 47.
Bianco said as a sheriff, the most important part of his job right now is “keeping everyone motivated to keep doing the right thing.”
“In the end, we still have crimes; we can still arrest for crimes,” he said. “If they’re not going to get prosecuted, if they’re not going to stay in jail, if they’re not going to go to prison — that is beyond our control. And that’s always been beyond our control.”
Prosecutors who deal with the criminals that officers like Bianco’s team arrest are growing “frustrated and disappointed” with the erosion of the legal system and being “demonized” by activists for trying to uphold the law.
“Prosecutors have always been perceived as committed to doing what’s right. And that’s our job at its core,” he said. “We’re wary of some of these advocacy groups that are demonizing us. But are we deterred from going forward and doing our work as we’re called to do, and as our duty is? No.”
“Our job is that neither the guilty shall escape nor innocents suffer. And so we have a responsibility, even to the defendants that we charged, to make sure that their case is handled appropriately,” he added.
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Totten admitted that there is “genuine concern” for the disproportionate amount of people of color in prison compared to white people. He said it’s one of the top issues that fuel the criminal justice reform movement. He also pointed to the enforcement of laws in the 1990s and 2000s, where police and prosecutors were harsher to black people than white people when it came to enforcing the law.
“But I think what’s going on now is a step too far,” he said.