Anti-crime wave crashes over crime-soaked California cities
by John Seiler | January 10, 2025
Like the tide moving in and out along its magnificent coastline, California’s crime policies oscillate between harshness and laxity, never getting it quite right. The crack epidemic and increase in violent crime of the 1980s led to the 1994 “Three Strikes and You’re Out Law.” Even stealing a slice of pizza for the third strike could bring a life sentence, which actually happened. Voters approved a variety of tough-on-crime policies during that era’s crime spike.
The 2007-10 Great Recession slammed the state budget so badly that in 2011 Gov. Jerry Brown pushed into law Assembly Bill 109, known as prison re-alignment. It sent 142,000 prisoners from state prisons to local jails, while releasing many thousands of inmates to probation. In 2014, voters passed Proposition 47, which reduced penalties for some nonserious and nonviolent property and drug crimes.
Whether caused by the laxer laws or just demographics, crime has been rising in recent years. “California’s overall violent crime rate increased by 1.7%, from 495 crimes per 100,000 residents in 2022 to 503 in 2023,” reported an October Fact Sheet by the Public Policy Institute of California. “Like the rest of the nation, California saw a jump in violent crime in the first year of the pandemic. The state’s violent crime rate is still up by 15.4% compared to 2019.” Perceptions also matter. Los Angeles and San Francisco have become global symbols of urban decay and neglect.
The inevitable California crime backlash hit this year as voters approved Proposition 36,
which repealed parts of Prop. 47 and increased penalties for some property and drug crimes (over the objections of many state leaders). And at the local level, voters in several elections replaced high-profile mayors and district attorneys accused of being “soft on crime.”
Former federal prosecutor Nathan Hochman ousted Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, 60% to 40%. For the Southern California News Group, investigative reporter Scott Schwebke wrote that Gascón was accused “not only a legacy of unpopular criminal justice reforms but also a raft of lawsuits filed by top prosecutors in his office that could cost Los Angeles County millions of dollars.”
A Republican during his failed election for California attorney general in 2022, Hochman now says he’s not in the GOP but the “hard middle,” as he tries to apply the Goldilocks principle (“not too much, not too little, but just right”). In endorsing him for district attorney after having previously endorsed Gascón, the Editorial Board at the Southern California News Group (on which I sit with my Free Cities Center colleague Steven Greenhut), opined:
Hochman touts a middle ground approach when it comes to handling cases and vows to direct individualized approaches to every case, rather than imposing blanket policies overriding the judgment of prosecutors.“I will work with the county to ensure proper funding for the DA’s office and law enforcement to carry out the job of incarcerating the true threats to our public safety and offering community service or diversion programs for non-violent, non-serious criminals who qualify for them,” he told us earlier this year.
Contrary to what one might expect, Hochman has also repeatedly credited Gascón and the progressive prosecutor movement for drawing attention to legitimate problems in the justice system. He just thinks their methods for addressing those problems are often flawed.
We’ll soon see whether this amounts to more than a campaign strategy. Whatever the case, Los Angeles County voters clearly tired of rising crime and the progressive DA approach.
In San Francisco, liberal Mayor London Breed lost, 56% to 44%, to Daniel Lurie, who will be switching his jeans as a Levi Strauss heir for a business suit as he brings what he calls a “common sense” approach to governance. “I am a lifelong Democrat, but we don‘t think of ourselves as progressives or moderates or conservatives here in San Francisco,” he said. “We just want to get back to common sense. We have to deliver the basics, and that’s my plan. That’s the mandate that I was elected to fulfill.”
Actually, he knows he has to reduce crime and clean up the feces from the streets. His election comes two years after progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled. Oddly, Boudin had replaced Gascón, who moved to Los Angeles. Earlier in 2022, the City on the Bay recalled three school board commissioners for numerous reasons, such as imposing the COVID-19 lockdowns too long. Even in America’s most progressive city, there are limits to what citizens will tolerate.
Across the Bay, Oakland saw a twofer recall. Mayor Sheng Thao suffered a 62% rejection at the polls. And Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price was kicked out by an even larger 65%. The Guardian reported inflation, especially for housing, and the departure of the city’s major league sports teams played a role:
But the recall campaigns particularly centered on residents’ enduring frustrations about the area’s crime rates. Like many cities in the United States, Oakland experienced a surge in violent crime during the pandemic, one that took longer than elsewhere to subside.
One thing voters may not have figured is new burdens on city, county and state treasuries. The current cost of state imprisonment this year soared to $132,860 per inmate, or $364 a day. It would be cheaper to put the cons up in Marriott resorts with free Netflix.
Speaking of rip-offs, last year Gov. Gavin Newsom negotiated a $1 billion raise package with the prison guards’ union (the California Correctional Peace Officers Association). “CCPOA has contributed more than $9.3 million to political campaigns in the last 20 years,” reported CalMatters. That included $1.75 million to fend off the 2021 attempt to recall Newsom.
Newsom mildly angered the CCPOA by tepidly opposing Prop. 36 to bolster his progressive bona fides ahead of an expected 2028 presidential run. Not that he will care after leaving office in Jan. 2027. But by 2028 Californians will know if Prop. 36 and the ouster of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland officials actually did reduce crime – or if it all was but another wave of the soft-on-crime/hard-on-crime tides.
John Seiler is on the Editorial Board of the Southern California News Group and blogs at johnseiler.substack.com.
