Crime
Blog
California’s Death Penalty: The Decision No One Wants to Make
After nearly twenty years without an execution, the more pressing question is whether the state is willing to decide what should happen to the 573 – and increasing – number of inmates already sentenced to death. Executions have stopped while death sentences continue to be imposed, and politicians of both ...
Blog
San Francisco’s Recovery—and Its Lessons
A few years ago, I was one of San Francisco’s harshest critics. Writing for the Pacific Research Institute, I documented rising crime, retail theft, open-air drug markets, and a criminal justice philosophy that often seemed more focused on reducing incarceration and prosecution than on protecting public safety. During recalled district ...
Blog
On The David Lucero Case: The Victims Left Behind
When David Lucero went to work one night in June 2013, he wasn’t thinking about criminal justice reform. He was thinking about his son. The single father had picked up a shift as a bouncer outside a Sunnyvale nightclub to help pay for his son’s Pop Warner football fees and ...
Blog
The Search for Police Racism: A Narrative of Data, Oversight, and the Reality of Police Reform in California
In 2020, following nationwide protests after George Floyd’s murder, California began an ambitious experiment: could expansive data collection and new oversight agencies reveal whether policing was systemically racist? Central to this was the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), passed in 2015 and expanded after 2020. RIPA required law enforcement ...
Blog
On Juvenile Justice Policy Debates Driven By Untested Dogma, Not Data or Honest Timelines
Two 2026 bills—Assembly Bill 1902 by Asm. Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz) and the failed “Lorenso’s Law” (AB 2040) by Asm. Alexandra Macedo (R-Tulare)—show how lawmakers are grasping for answers. But the most glaring flaws run deeper. The system’s rigid age cutoff means some offenders—many who are adults by the time ...
Commentary
San Francisco’s Justice System Is Breaking Down
San Francisco’s criminal justice system may be reaching a breaking point. A San Francisco Superior Court judge recently found Public Defender Mano Raju in contempt and imposed fines after the office continued declining court-assigned cases in defiance of a prior order to stop doing so. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins says ...
Blog
BOOK EXCERPT Urban Policy Beyond the Nation’s Big Metros: Smaller-City Case Studies from California, Washington and Michigan
It’s easy to think that urban policy is solely about big cities and their surrounding suburbs, much in the way that one would naturally believe that farm policy is solely about farm regions. A quick perusal of the statistics suggests that America is indeed an urban nation despite its vast ...
Blog
Bay Area police oversight is in turmoil—and the real problem is inside the oversight system itself
Civilian police oversight was built on a simple premise: internal police discipline was not enough on its own. Independent civilian review would add transparency, improve accountability, and strengthen public trust. That model now exists in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose. But its defining feature today is not success ...
Blog
Road to Freedom – Unravelling the Riddle of David Allen Funston
California’s “elderly parole” system, created under AB 3234 and related statutory reforms, allows incarcerated people to be considered for release once they reach age 50 and have served at least 20 years. It is routinely described as a compassionate mechanism for aging inmates and prison population management. But the label ...
Blog
BOOK REVIEW: Does backing the blue mean backing unions’ ‘Blue Power’?
Five years ago, in response to George Floyd’s death, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute issued a report outlining methods to move toward a “criminal justice system — police, courts, prison, reentry, community supervision — that is focused on the safety, health and well-being of communities rather than ...
California’s Death Penalty: The Decision No One Wants to Make
After nearly twenty years without an execution, the more pressing question is whether the state is willing to decide what should happen to the 573 – and increasing – number of inmates already sentenced to death. Executions have stopped while death sentences continue to be imposed, and politicians of both ...
San Francisco’s Recovery—and Its Lessons
A few years ago, I was one of San Francisco’s harshest critics. Writing for the Pacific Research Institute, I documented rising crime, retail theft, open-air drug markets, and a criminal justice philosophy that often seemed more focused on reducing incarceration and prosecution than on protecting public safety. During recalled district ...
On The David Lucero Case: The Victims Left Behind
When David Lucero went to work one night in June 2013, he wasn’t thinking about criminal justice reform. He was thinking about his son. The single father had picked up a shift as a bouncer outside a Sunnyvale nightclub to help pay for his son’s Pop Warner football fees and ...
The Search for Police Racism: A Narrative of Data, Oversight, and the Reality of Police Reform in California
In 2020, following nationwide protests after George Floyd’s murder, California began an ambitious experiment: could expansive data collection and new oversight agencies reveal whether policing was systemically racist? Central to this was the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), passed in 2015 and expanded after 2020. RIPA required law enforcement ...
On Juvenile Justice Policy Debates Driven By Untested Dogma, Not Data or Honest Timelines
Two 2026 bills—Assembly Bill 1902 by Asm. Gail Pellerin (D-Santa Cruz) and the failed “Lorenso’s Law” (AB 2040) by Asm. Alexandra Macedo (R-Tulare)—show how lawmakers are grasping for answers. But the most glaring flaws run deeper. The system’s rigid age cutoff means some offenders—many who are adults by the time ...
San Francisco’s Justice System Is Breaking Down
San Francisco’s criminal justice system may be reaching a breaking point. A San Francisco Superior Court judge recently found Public Defender Mano Raju in contempt and imposed fines after the office continued declining court-assigned cases in defiance of a prior order to stop doing so. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins says ...
BOOK EXCERPT Urban Policy Beyond the Nation’s Big Metros: Smaller-City Case Studies from California, Washington and Michigan
It’s easy to think that urban policy is solely about big cities and their surrounding suburbs, much in the way that one would naturally believe that farm policy is solely about farm regions. A quick perusal of the statistics suggests that America is indeed an urban nation despite its vast ...
Bay Area police oversight is in turmoil—and the real problem is inside the oversight system itself
Civilian police oversight was built on a simple premise: internal police discipline was not enough on its own. Independent civilian review would add transparency, improve accountability, and strengthen public trust. That model now exists in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Jose. But its defining feature today is not success ...
Road to Freedom – Unravelling the Riddle of David Allen Funston
California’s “elderly parole” system, created under AB 3234 and related statutory reforms, allows incarcerated people to be considered for release once they reach age 50 and have served at least 20 years. It is routinely described as a compassionate mechanism for aging inmates and prison population management. But the label ...
BOOK REVIEW: Does backing the blue mean backing unions’ ‘Blue Power’?
Five years ago, in response to George Floyd’s death, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute issued a report outlining methods to move toward a “criminal justice system — police, courts, prison, reentry, community supervision — that is focused on the safety, health and well-being of communities rather than ...