A NATION UNRAVELS
A woman puts money into a parking meter in San Francisco, Calif., on Jan. 21, 2011. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Car Burglary Epidemic in Some Cities Prompts Renewed Calls for Legislative Fix
December 4, 2019 Updated: December 4, 2019
A dramatic rise in car burglaries in San Francisco and other California cities in recent years has renewed calls for legislation to close a legal loophole that makes it difficult to prosecute thieves.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has been championing the cause for nearly two years. He introduced Senate Bill 23, sponsored by then-San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, in December 2018, but the bill was later shelved.
The legislation is similar to Wiener’s unsuccessful Senate Bill 916 introduced in January 2018. A similar bill, Assembly Bill 476, also failed passage in the Assembly Committee on Public Safety back in 1997.
Weiner’s bills attempted to eliminate the requirement that to prove auto burglary, the prosecution must prove the door of the vehicle was locked, even if evidence showed the defendant smashed a window to enter the vehicle, according to Weiner. Instead, evidence of forcible entry would be enough to prove the crime.
“I was disappointed that legislators chose to kill a bill that would have closed a loophole that disproportionately impacts one class of victim,” Gascón recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Tourists are disproportionately targeted because they are more likely to have valuables in their cars, and this loophole means justice may not be applied equally.”
He said he hoped state legislators will re-consider the proposal next year.
State Assembly Republican leader Marie Waldron from Escondido told the newspaper that supporting Weiner’s bill was “common sense.”
“There’s no reason for someone to enter a vehicle that doesn’t belong to them, whether the door is locked or not. This was a common-sense bill to close a major loophole in our car burglary law,” Waldron told the news outlet.
The current requirement to prove that the car door was locked undermines efforts to prosecute auto burglary cases, said Wiener. For example, a burglar can simply unlock the car door after breaking the glass. In addition, when a rental car is burglarized—a common occurrence in San Francisco—the tourist who rented the car often returns home and cannot testify that the car door was locked.
“The explosion in auto break-ins we’re experiencing is unacceptable, and we need to ensure our police and district attorneys have all the tools they need to address it,” Wiener said in a November 2018 media release.
“When residents or visitors park their cars on the streets, they should have confidence that the car and its contents will be there when they return. Damaged cars and stolen property can significantly harm people, and shattered glass all over the ground undermines safe neighborhoods. This loophole in the Penal Code can lead to cases being dropped or charges reduced even when the evidence of burglary is clear.”
In December 2017, the San Francisco Police Department reported that larceny theft from vehicles had risen by 26 percent from the previous year, and earlier reports showed that vehicle break-ins tripled since 2010. In 2018, there was drop in auto break-ins, but incidents are still high and continue to increase in some neighborhoods, according to the release.
“The legislation Senator Wiener is proposing will be a very useful tool to help us reduce vehicle burglaries by making it easier to successfully prosecute these crimes,” San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said in the release.
San Francisco County Supervisor Vallie Brown also showed support for Senator Wiener’s legislation, according to the release.
“Sadly, car break-ins are now endemic to California cities and we have to be smart when parking, but District 5 residents shouldn’t have to think twice anytime we consider parking along Alamo Square, no one should,” Brown said. “We shouldn’t have to step over broken glass anytime we walk along the park. Broken glass ought to be enough to prove forced entry—that’s just common sense.”
However, the issue of prosecuting suspected criminals for vehicle break-ins may have less to do with serving justice and more to do with concerns about prison overcrowding, according to bill analyses of SB 23.
“California is subject to a federal court order to reduce its in-state adult institution population to 137.5 percent of design capacity,” read the bill analysis by the Senate Committee on Appropriations. “By potentially increasing the inmate population in in-state institutions, this bill could make it more difficult for the state to comply with the court order.”
This 2009 federal court order was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2011. As of Nov. 27, the state’s prison population was 131.5 percent, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).
In a statement opposing the bill included in the bill analysis by the Assembly Committee on Appropriations, the California Public Defenders Association said, “In an era where our streets are filled with homeless people looking for shelter from the elements, this expansion of the prosecution and incarceration time for individuals who have not damaged a locking mechanism of the vehicle to gain entry could negatively impact those with the least of means.”
Proposition 47, passed in 2014, reduced penalties for some low-level property crimes and contributed to an increase in thefts from vehicles, according to a Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) report released last year (pdf).
From 2016 to 2017, car burglaries in San Francisco jumped 24 percent. In 2018, they dropped 13 percent. Statewide, there were 243,000 thefts from vehicles last year, well above the annual average of 223,000 for the previous eight years.
In February 2019, Harris’s presidential campaign announced that its California co-chair would be Rep. Barbara Lee, known for her ideological ties to such noted Communists and revolutionaries as Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fidel Castro, Angela Davis, and Van Jones.
Harris put her anti-Americanism on display at a February 2019 campaign stop in New Hampshire, where she called for eliminating Columbus Day and replacing it with Indigenous People’s Day. “We are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country,” said Harris, “and we have to be honest about that.”
In the final analysis, Kamala Harris is a living embodiment of virtually every corrosive principle that defines what the modern-day Democratic Party has become. She may not have gotten her party’s nomination for president, but rest assured that the values and agendas of the ultimate nominee will be indistinguishable from Harris’s.
Kamala’s Agenda Will Live On
Kamala’s Agenda Will Live On
Envy, hate and anti-Americanism will be advanced by whoever the Democrat nominee is.
Amid declining poll numbers and reports of turmoil within her campaign, Senator Kamala Harris has ended her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Characterizing her departure from the race as “one of the hardest decisions of my life,” she laments: “My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue. I’m not a billionaire. I can’t fund my own campaign.”
Throughout her run for the White House, Harris showed herself to be every bit as much of a radical leftist as any of her Democrat rivals. Indeed, radicalism has been Harris’s hallmark for decades.
One facet of her radical spirit has been her reluctance to be tough on crime. A few days after a San Francisco police officer named Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed by a gang member in 2004, for instance, Harris, who was the city’s District Attorney at that time, announced that she would not seek a death sentence for Espinoza’s killer. Though many were outraged by Harris’s decision, she was merely fulfilling her campaign promise to never pursue capital punishment for any offender, because she considered it an unjust and immoral practice.
Harris also has shown a low regard for America’s immigration laws. In her role as Attorney General of California, she issued a December 2012 memo informing all the law-enforcement agencies in her state that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers – i.e., temporary holds that federal immigration authorities may place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.
Harris again demonstrated her contempt for immigration law after an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez – a convicted felon who had been previously deported from the United States on five separate occasions – was released from a San Francisco prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered an innocent young woman named Kathryn Steinle. Even after Steinle’s killing, Harris said she supported Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi’s decision – which had been made in accordance with the city’s sanctuary policies – to set Lopez-Sanchez free rather than turn him over to immigration authorities. “I trust and believe in the ability of local sheriffs to make a decision about what’s in the best interest of his or her community in terms of local safety,” Harris declared.
Illegal immigrant rights are not Harris's only passion. For instance, she is essentially an absolutist on abortion rights. In 2015 she launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. In that investigation, Harris had eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house and confiscate his computers, hard drives, private documents, video footage, and telephone.
The following year, when Harris ran for a U.S. Senate seat in California, her campaign website featured a petition to “protect” Planned Parenthood and “the important work it does.” Over the course of the 2016 election cycle, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates and employees contributed at least $30,000 to the Harris campaign. Other pro-abortion groups and their affiliates donated at least $50,000 more.
Harris is a doctrinaire leftist on virtually all political and social issues, as evidenced by her Senate campaign website's pledge that she would: “stand up to the climate-change deniers and fight to pass national climate-change legislation that promotes innovation like establishing a carbon tax or creating a cap-and-trade market for carbon pollution”; “make the minimum wage a living wage and tie it to inflation”; “support President Obama‘s “plan for making community colleges free”; support “expanding access to Head Start [and] Early Head Start, and creating national universal pre-kindergarten”; “make it a priority to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act,” legislation rooted in the false premise that “women earn about 21 percent less than men”; strive to end “mass incarceration” by “roll[ing] back draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses”; “fight to end federal bans on student loans, food stamps, housing, and voting rights for ex-offenders”; and “stop voter suppression” measures like Voter ID laws.
Harris's campaign website further stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America’s “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.
After winning a Senate seat in 2016, Harris continued to raise a proverbial middle finger to immigration law and its enforcers. In November 2018, she suggested to Ronald Vitiello, whom President Trump had nominated to head the ICE agency, that the public’s negative perception of ICE was creating fear and distrust in a manner similar to how the KKK had done in the 20th century.
Displaying unwavering fidelity to Democratic Party principles, Harris, in her campaign, repeatedly articulated her devotion to identity politics and victimology. Among her more noteworthy pronouncements:
Throughout her run for the White House, Harris showed herself to be every bit as much of a radical leftist as any of her Democrat rivals. Indeed, radicalism has been Harris’s hallmark for decades.
One facet of her radical spirit has been her reluctance to be tough on crime. A few days after a San Francisco police officer named Isaac Espinoza was shot and killed by a gang member in 2004, for instance, Harris, who was the city’s District Attorney at that time, announced that she would not seek a death sentence for Espinoza’s killer. Though many were outraged by Harris’s decision, she was merely fulfilling her campaign promise to never pursue capital punishment for any offender, because she considered it an unjust and immoral practice.
Harris also has shown a low regard for America’s immigration laws. In her role as Attorney General of California, she issued a December 2012 memo informing all the law-enforcement agencies in her state that they could “make their own decisions about whether to fulfill” Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers – i.e., temporary holds that federal immigration authorities may place on municipal prisoners who are suspected of being eligible for deportation.
Harris again demonstrated her contempt for immigration law after an illegal alien named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez – a convicted felon who had been previously deported from the United States on five separate occasions – was released from a San Francisco prison in April 2015 and subsequently murdered an innocent young woman named Kathryn Steinle. Even after Steinle’s killing, Harris said she supported Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi’s decision – which had been made in accordance with the city’s sanctuary policies – to set Lopez-Sanchez free rather than turn him over to immigration authorities. “I trust and believe in the ability of local sheriffs to make a decision about what’s in the best interest of his or her community in terms of local safety,” Harris declared.
Illegal immigrant rights are not Harris's only passion. For instance, she is essentially an absolutist on abortion rights. In 2015 she launched an investigation of journalist/anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, who had recently made headlines by releasing undercover videos demonstrating that Planned Parenthood routinely violated federal law by collecting and selling fetal tissue and body parts. In that investigation, Harris had eleven police officers raid Daleiden’s house and confiscate his computers, hard drives, private documents, video footage, and telephone.
The following year, when Harris ran for a U.S. Senate seat in California, her campaign website featured a petition to “protect” Planned Parenthood and “the important work it does.” Over the course of the 2016 election cycle, Planned Parenthood and its affiliates and employees contributed at least $30,000 to the Harris campaign. Other pro-abortion groups and their affiliates donated at least $50,000 more.
Harris is a doctrinaire leftist on virtually all political and social issues, as evidenced by her Senate campaign website's pledge that she would: “stand up to the climate-change deniers and fight to pass national climate-change legislation that promotes innovation like establishing a carbon tax or creating a cap-and-trade market for carbon pollution”; “make the minimum wage a living wage and tie it to inflation”; “support President Obama‘s “plan for making community colleges free”; support “expanding access to Head Start [and] Early Head Start, and creating national universal pre-kindergarten”; “make it a priority to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act,” legislation rooted in the false premise that “women earn about 21 percent less than men”; strive to end “mass incarceration” by “roll[ing] back draconian sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses”; “fight to end federal bans on student loans, food stamps, housing, and voting rights for ex-offenders”; and “stop voter suppression” measures like Voter ID laws.
Harris's campaign website further stated that “everyone should have access to public education, public health, and public safety regardless of their immigration status”; that Harris would “fight for comprehensive immigration reform that creates a fair pathway to citizenship” for America’s “11 million undocumented immigrants”; that she would “protect President Obama’s immigration executive actions,” which shielded several million illegals from deportation; and that the U.S. had a duty to “responsibly resettle refugees” from war-torn, terrorism-infested nations around the world.
After winning a Senate seat in 2016, Harris continued to raise a proverbial middle finger to immigration law and its enforcers. In November 2018, she suggested to Ronald Vitiello, whom President Trump had nominated to head the ICE agency, that the public’s negative perception of ICE was creating fear and distrust in a manner similar to how the KKK had done in the 20th century.
Displaying unwavering fidelity to Democratic Party principles, Harris, in her campaign, repeatedly articulated her devotion to identity politics and victimology. Among her more noteworthy pronouncements:
- “Women are paid on average 80 cents on the dollar. Black women, 63 cents. Latinas, 53 cents.”
- “Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia are real in this country. They are age-old forms of hate with new fuel. And we need to speak that truth so we can deal with it.”
- “[T]oo many unarmed black men and women are killed in America. Too many black and brown Americans are locked up. From mass incarceration to cash bail to policing, our criminal justice system needs drastic repair.”
In February 2019, Harris’s presidential campaign announced that its California co-chair would be Rep. Barbara Lee, known for her ideological ties to such noted Communists and revolutionaries as Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fidel Castro, Angela Davis, and Van Jones.
Harris put her anti-Americanism on display at a February 2019 campaign stop in New Hampshire, where she called for eliminating Columbus Day and replacing it with Indigenous People’s Day. “We are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country,” said Harris, “and we have to be honest about that.”
In the final analysis, Kamala Harris is a living embodiment of virtually every corrosive principle that defines what the modern-day Democratic Party has become. She may not have gotten her party’s nomination for president, but rest assured that the values and agendas of the ultimate nominee will be indistinguishable from Harris’s.
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