A possible gang member murdered multiple children at a child’s birthday party in Stockton, California. At what point will Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and California Democrats decide they want to put gang members in jail?
The shooting in Stockton resulted in four deaths, including three children, with 15 people total being shot. Stockton’s mayor was quick to blame gang violence, and the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office claimed the shooting was targeted. Stockton is known for its gang violence. On the same night of the shooting, police arrested five people on weapons and gang charges that, as of now, appear to be unrelated to the shooting.
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Under Newsom, California has made it more difficult to jail gang members, chiefly through 2021’s Assembly Bill 333. The STEP Forward Act, as it was called, made it harder for prosecutors to use gang sentencing enhancements, requiring them to prove that the crime committed benefited a street gang in a way other than “reputational” in order to add the enhancement. It also removed looting and felony vandalism as crimes that show a “pattern of criminal gang activity” for the purposes of applying a gang sentencing enhancement.
The California Supreme Court then retroactively applied this law to past convictions, removing one criminal from California’s Death Row and removing “strikes” from the record of two others under California’s “three strikes” law. Those strikes that were removed were gang enhancements for attempted murder. The death penalty case involved a gang member chasing down a car and essentially executing a 13-year-old.
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What will it take for California Democrats and Newsom to realize that gang members outright reject the rule of law and deserve to have the book thrown at them over every crime they commit, even if the crime does not “benefit” their gang? If this is indeed a gang shooting, there is a significant chance that the shooter already has a criminal record and should have been in jail instead of free to walk the streets and shoot up a children’s birthday party. After all, this is similar to what happened in the Sacramento mass shooting in 2022, where the two career criminals involved in the shooting were free because of California’s weak laws.
California’s criminal justice system has been defined by weakness under Newsom, to the point that California Democrats have deliberately made it harder to prosecute gang members and have considered weakening sentences for convicted murderers. Newsom will try to portray himself as a hard-nosed leader against crime here, as he does any time there is a high-profile crime story. But his record speaks for itself.