There is a popular phrase about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The last of those three has become a particular favorite of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) as he tries to shed the soft-on-crime label he has earned himself and the state of California.
Newsom has been on a yearslong kick of lambasting Republicans on social media using crime statistics. He has touted that the statistics show that California is not the paradise for criminals that Republicans portray it as. As one example, when Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) told Newsom to focus on “the lawlessness and crime in San Francisco instead of auditioning for the 2028 Presidential primary with stale talking points,” Newsom responded, “Your state’s homicide rate is 117% higher than California’s.”
It’s a great point if you are exactly the kind of gullible Californian who elected Newsom to any of the offices in which he has failed. In reality, it fails to hold up to any scrutiny. For example, Missouri’s homicide rate is driven by the city of St. Louis, which has the highest homicide rate in the country and has been run by Newsom’s fellow Democrats going back to 1949. St. Louis is a Democrat-run city, like nearly all of the most violent cities in the country.
But the misleading nature of Newsom’s point goes beyond a rudimentary examination of the politics of St. Louis. Newsom uses homicides, one of the only positive data points for California, because he cannot actually argue that California is less violent than most states. As the liberal outlet PolitiFact pointed out, FBI data from 2023 show that California has the sixth-highest rate of violent crime of any state in the country (three spots ahead of Missouri’s St. Louis-driven violence, for those keeping track). Along with that, according to the Pacific Research Institute, “Most states have lower overall felony crime rates than California.”
(Keep in mind as we continue that there is a notable lag when it comes to nationally reported crime data, which is why the dates used in measuring this data will be from a few years ago).
The FBI’s crime data over the years highlights California’s violent crime woes. Going back to 2010, California has always outpaced the national average on violent crime. From 2020 to 2021, violent crime nationwide began to decline, driven by a decrease in aggravated assaults. California’s violent crime rate continued to rise in that same time period. Before the pandemic, California’s aggravated assault rate was 6% higher than the national average. By 2022, the gap had widened to 24%, thanks to California’s aggravated assault rate being 25% higher than it was in 2019.
Over this same time period, California saw an increase in its robbery and property crime rates, both of which widened the gaps over the national averages. (The FBI changed its reporting system in 2021, but the Public Policy Institute of California notes that data from the California Department of Justice shows violent crime, and specifically aggravated assault, consistently rising going back to 2014, which reflects the FBI data.)
On top of this, it should be noted that California’s homicide rate increased in the years after Newsom was elected governor, increasing in 2020 and 2021. The number began declining again in 2022 and 2023, but remained higher than before Newsom was elected in 2018, which should take some of the shine off his homicide statistic boasting.
The reason Newsom is so touchy about California’s soft-on-crime reputation is that he knows that it is the result of the aversion to enforcement that he and his fellow California Democrats have. Take Proposition 57 as an example. Prop 57 was a statewide ballot initiative brought forward by former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2016 (when Newsom was Brown’s lieutenant governor). Brown and the California Democratic Party were the ones pushing the measure.
Prop 57 was one of California’s “rehabilitative” criminal justice reforms, designed to force the justice system to go softer on convicted criminals. It created a parole process for people convicted of nonviolent crimes (more on that later) after they finished serving the sentence for “their primary criminal offense,” according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The proposition also removed the ability of prosecutors to determine whether juvenile criminals would be tried in juvenile or adult court, handing that power to the state’s soft-on-crime judges instead.
California voters passed Prop 57 by a 64%-35% vote, but this new parole did not go only to nonviolent offenders as was promised. Even the current Democratic attorney general of the state, Rob Bonta, admitted that domestic violence and “rape of an unconscious person” should be considered violent crimes and that the enforcement of Prop 57 (as interpreted by the state Supreme Court) is too broad.
Proposition 47 had a similar effect. Just under 60% of California voters approved Prop 47 in 2014, which reduced a number of drug, fraud, and theft charges from felonies to misdemeanors. The biggest effect came with thefts, where serial shoplifters were often let out with nothing more than citations as California tried to keep its prison population down. Shoplifting in California jumped 23.9% from 2019 to 2023.
The number was likely higher than that, though. Shoplifting was such a regular occurrence that many stores likely stopped reporting, especially when it was clear in cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco that Democratic prosecutors wouldn’t do much of anything in response. California’s reported property crime rate was down 0.3% from 2019 to 2023, though the nation as a whole saw a 14.4% decrease in property crime reports over that same time period. Auto thefts in California were up nearly 43%, and theft of car accessories (say, catalytic converters) was up 52%.
The law was so terrible that 68% of Californians partially repealed it in 2024 through Proposition 36. In fact, about 2.5 million more people voted in favor of repeal through Prop 36 than voted at all on Prop 47, for or against. More Californians supported Prop 36 than supported the Democratic nominee for president in a race between a Democratic California native and the state’s bogeyman, President Donald Trump.
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Despite this return to actually prosecuting criminals being the most popular policy in the state of California, Newsom opposed Prop 36. He feebly floated the idea of a rival proposition, trying to pressure the retail chains supporting the proposition to abandon it for his hypothetical one. That half-hearted alternative proposition never materialized. Now that Prop 36 has become law, Newsom is doing what he can to undermine it, trying to force counties to fund the enforcement on their own. Clearly, it would be too much to ask him to allocate 0.12% of his $322 billion budget proposal toward locking up criminals that Californians want locked up.
The Prop 47/Prop 36 saga shows exactly what the problem is. Newsom is overly sensitive to critiques of California’s crime policies because he is one of the architects of the state’s soft-on-crime justice system. That is why he is reduced to cherry-picking statistics that have been stripped of all context and ignore just how California is failing on crime, and how crime has grown worse under Newsom’s tenure. Newsom views crime policies as a political game between him and his opponents, where the goal is to one-up them in online debates. That is why he cares so little about the effects his crime policies have on his constituents in the real world.