proposition 57 – Deputy Matt & Others Who Serve

Attention California Police Chiefs, Sheriffs, law enforcement labor unions, police officers, deputy sheriffs, traffic officers, probation officers, parole officers, correctional officers, and anyone else who is on the front line of the enforcement of California laws.

Attention California District Attorneys, deputy district attorneys, prosecutorial labor unions and anyone involved in the prosecution of criminals in the State of California.

Attention California community leaders and politicians who understand it is our role to make the community safer, not to pass laws making life easier for those who chose to victimize their fellow citizens.

Attention victim advocacy groups, law enforcement support groups, law enforcement chaplaincies, and anyone who has personally been affected by a criminal on the streets due to AB109, Prop47 or Prop57.

I am just a regular old street cop who has been running this blog for about five years. If you have heard of me, chances are at one point or another, I may have written something with which you did not agree. The fact of life is that even though we are all on the same side in this fight to maintain public safety, we do not always see eye to eye. However, there is a growing trend in our state that we should all be able to unite to combat, and that is the movement to decriminalize crime. It is time to put our differences aside, to come together to fight this dangerous game that our state’s elected officials are playing with the public safety, with our safety.

To the best of my knowledge, this trend began back in 2011 when Governor Brown signed AB-109 into law. Since then, with the passage of Propositions 47 & 57, the ignorant voting public has believed the misleading proposition names and followed the governor’s lead, voting to either lower the severity of crimes, or completely decriminalize them.

The reduced violent crime rate that our professions fought so hard to accomplish through the 1990’s and into the early 2000’s has slipped, and the crime rate has begun climbing in this state more often than not since 2011. In fact, it has risen the last three years in a row, with sharp increases in violent crime.

Many of us who chose to be vocal about these horrible laws dreamt up by ivory tower politicians, whom we personally protect on a daily basis, predicted the crime rates would climb, and we were not wrong. It does not take a gifted prognosticator to figure out that when you put more criminals on the street, crime will rise. I could point to all the FBI statistics that support my statements here, but if you are in this profession, you already know what I said is true.

However, for those not in this profession, here are those statistics which I took from the annually compiled Uniform Crime Report produced by the FBI. The chart below shows the rates for each year starting in 2011. The report for 2016 has not yet been released, but early reports from the FBI showed all violent crimes across the nation rose.

Thus far, AB-109 has cost the lives of several cops in California, the most recent being Deputy Robert French of the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department.* Before Bob came Officer Keith Boyer of the Whittier Police Department. In addition to AB-109, when considering the changes that Prop 47 put in place, the death toll for law enforcement rises to five, adding Officer Jose Gil Vega of the Palm Springs Police Department, Officer Lesley Zerebny of the Palm Springs Police Department, and Sergeant Steven Owen of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

That is just the number of cops killed as a result of these ridiculous laws. It does not include those who were shot and survived, or were attacked via other methods by persons who would have been locked up prior to the passage of those criminal coddling laws. Add to that the number of citizens who have been murdered, raped, robbed or just plain victimized by these early releases, and the extent of this problem becomes abundantly clear. Not a community in this state has been spared.

The only people who have not been victimized by these dangerous changes to state laws are the very people who created and passed those changes.

California politicians are making the entire state less safe, and they are only doing it to save money. The even sadder part is they are not attempting to save money in an effort to lower our taxes, because in fact they have continued voting to raise our taxes. Instead, they are merely trying to save that money so they can spend it on other projects that do absolutely nothing to enhance public safety and benefit only a small sliver of the population.

I have had enough! It is time that we, those of us whose professional lives are dedicated to public safety, stand together, face to face with these political elites and tell them “No more! Enough is enough!” It is time to reverse this doomed course they have set us on, before it kills another member of our law enforcement family.

If these political elites cannot see fit to do something to enhance all of our safety, maybe it is time that we stop taking extra steps to provide for theirs.

* While Deputy French’s murderer was on the streets due directly to the unfathomable decision made by Federal Judge Sallie Kim, the broad changes that AB-109 made to the previous parole system, including what constitutes a parole violation and the length of punishments received for those violations contributed to him being on the streets. Prior to AB-109, a person on parole who was arrested for a parole violation would not have been eligible for release, bail or not, prior to their hearing. Deputy French’s murderer bailed out. Despite what the CDCR press secretary Vicky Waters wrote in a press release, AB-109 absolutely, most definitely played a role in his release from custody.

If you are interested in being part of this project, please like and follow us on Facebook. Please share both this blog post and our Facebook page on all your social media accounts. The more exposure this post gets, the more support we will gain. It is time we fix these laws so more California cops are not killed by violent felons who should have been in prison!

Ask anyone in law enforcement and they will tell you that Proposition 57 is NOT a solution, and instead it is a total nightmare. Prop 57 is not a solution designed to make society safer. Simply put, this is a plan designed to fix a poorly run state’s budget shortfalls and overcrowded prisons by releasing even more convicted felons. Governor Jerry Brown, the man pushing this bill, is spending billions of tax dollars on a high speed train to nowhere because he likes trains* and has to figure out some way to attempt to balance the budget.

Thus far, over the last several years, Brown has released multiple thousands of convicted felons onto the public streets, and both previous times, he labeled it as a “public safety measure.”

The first step was when he signed AB 109, or the “Prison Realignment” bill into law. It was touted as a way to “reduce overcrowding, costs and recidivism.” Because it has been proven that releasing inmates early, lessening their punishments, reduces recidivism? No, no it hasn’t.

The passing of AB 109 nearly instantly led to an increase in the crime rate. Some very violent criminals were released under AB 109 because their current reason for incarceration did not qualify as a “violent” crime. Not surprisingly, many criminals released under AB 109 went on to commit very violent crimes, including assaults, shootings and murders. There are plenty of sources documenting this, and news stories documenting some of the more heinous crimes committed by these released prisoners (except the stories notably rarely mentioned their early releases or ties to AB 109), but you have to go out and look for them as the people responsible for passing this travesty of justice sure aren’t going to let you know about it.

The next step was Prop 47 which Brown supported and the voters of California were duped into passing. I say duped because sadly, most voters are too lazy to read the actual bill and vote purely based on the name assigned to the bill. Not surprisingly, the CA DOJ, run by Kamala Harris, a fellow democrat and friend to Brown, is responsible for the name the bill receives in the voting pamphlet and on the ballots**. When you name a bill, which will essentially decriminalizes many felonies, which prevents law enforcement from arresting thieves and burglars, which reduces theft of or possession of a stolen gun from a felony to a misdemeanor thus preventing cops from arresting the gun criminal, and which eventually leads to the release of thousands and thousands MORE convicted felons back onto the streets, when you title that bill the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” you are very clearly lying to the public in order to get the bill passed. Yet that is exactly what Kamala Harris did, and now she is running for US Senate…

The very day that bill passed, I predicted in writing that crime was going to increase dramatically. Here we are a couple years later and sadly, I was exactly right, which the FBI has confirmed. Since the passage of Prop 47, violent crime in California has skyrocketed. In just one year, the violent crime rate jumped 12% in California. While the liberal politicians responsible for this bill and even some media outlets refuse to draw the blatantly clear correlation between that rise in crime and Prop 47, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out when there are more criminals on the streets, more crime is bound to occur. Heck, all one need do to find that out is to Google “prop 47 increased crime” and you will get an ample supple of scary reading material, likely far more than you want to read.

Which brings us to where we are now, with more criminals on the streets, a climbing overall crime rate, a skyrocketing violent crime rate, and in response to all that, Governor Moonbeam is pushing a proposition that will release even more convicted felons?

Yes, that is exactly what Brown is doing. Talk about tripling down on failure!

And yet again, his buddy Kamala Harris is right there helping him out with the EXTREMELY misleading name for the proposition, the “Public Safety and Rehabilitation Act of 2016.” Conveniently, for the benefit of the uneducated, lazy California voters, that name sounds like a no-brainer.

Proposition 57, which is heavily backed by Jerry Brown, will release 7,000 more “nonviolent offenders” and will take the option of trying certain juvenile offenders charged with certain crimes as adults away from the district attorney and place that decision in the hands of a judge. You know, because coddling the criminals is working out so well for us as it is…

Also, just in case you were wondering what qualifies as a nonviolent offense under Prop 57, here are some of the “nonviolent” crimes:

Rape by intoxication
Rape of an unconscious person
Human Trafficking involving sex acts with minors
Domestic Violence involving trauma
Failing to register as a sex offender
Lewd acts against a child
Drive-by shooting
Assault with a deadly weapon
Hostage taking
Attempting to explode a bomb at a hospital or school
Supplying a firearm to a gang member
Hate crime causing physical injury
Arson
Discharging a firearm on school grounds
False imprisonment of an elder through violence

All of this should leave one wondering, “Who in the hell is pushing this?” If you are wondering that, as I was, following the money is the quickest way to find that out. Thankfully, with the advent of the internet, that is not nearly as difficult as task as it once was. By visiting the CA Secretary of State website, you can find out who is supporting this measure monetarily. Looking at the four committees listed, one is clearly donating the most money. The “Yes on Prop 57, Californians for Public Safety and Rehabilitation” (what a total crock for a name!) committee has donated over $6.9 million. By the way, try Google searching that committee name and see what you find, or more accurately, don’t find.

Digging into that committee further on the Secretary of State webpage, you can find out where all that money is coming from. Not so shockingly, or maybe it is, the overwhelming vast majority of that money ($4,138,764.06) came from one source, “GOVERNOR BROWN’S BALLOT MEASURE COMMITTEE.” A few other sources should not surprise you, such as the “CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY” and “CALIFORNIA STATE COUNCIL OF SERVICE EMPLOYEES ISSUES COMMITTEE.”

Now that you know who is supporting the bill, take a look at who is opposing it. Just a list of a whole bunch of people who have the actual public safety in mind, like district attorneys, and sheriffs, not to mention a metric crap load of us working, line level cops. Here is the major difference though, this is a bunch of civil servants who do not have millions of dollars to throw at the election like Brown and the Democrats do.

Folks, please, for the sake of all our safety, help us help you. Vote NO on Prop 57!

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Footnotes

* “You’ll always have critics (say), ‘Why spend the money?’ ” he added later. “My inclination is not to spend anything. But on the other hand, I like trains. I like clean air. I like to protect as much of the land as we possibly can. And I like to enjoy the comfort of trains.” – BBC Dialogues: Jerry Brown & California High-Speed Rail

** “One of the many responsibilities of the Attorney General is to prepare a title and summary for proposed initiative measures prior to the circulation of qualification petitions.” – Ballot Initiatives

Tag: proposition 57

Enough is Enough! Time to Fight Back!

Prop 57, Tripling Down on Public Safety Failure