What Was California Thinking?
Back in 2014, the political leadership of California became alarmed at the rapidly rising prison population in the state. The state was also under court order to reduce the overcrowding in state prisons. The people of California set a grand objective to reduce the number of convicts in the state. Fewer people going to prison has to be a good thing -- right?
The first thing they did was pass Proposition 47 -- the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. That sounds like something everyone would want. 58% of Californians voted in favor of the measure. There was just one problem. Reduced prison population was the objective -- not the outcome. Nothing in Prop 47 was designed to actually reduce crime. It redefined drug use and theft of property valued at under $950 as misdemeanors rather than felonies. Punishment would no longer be imprisonment, but a fine of $1,000. The objective of prison population reduction was achieved by not incarcerating criminals, rather than by eliminating criminal behavior. Perhaps the voters should have read past the title of the proposition.
Prop 47 also allows those imprisoned under previous guidelines to petition for early release. If a convict is in prison for stealing less than $950, he is now eligible for early release. As many as 10,000 state prisoners have been released. Thousands more have been released from country jails. An additional 15,000 are expected to be released with the closure of five correctional facilities. I can feel the neighborhoods getting safer already.
In a further demonstration of out-of-control liberalism, the voting public elected district attorneys who are more inclined to work as advocates for, rather than prosecutors of criminals. Even though he’s only been in office for six months, a recall effort is currently underway for Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, due to his soft-on-crime policies. He was even sued by his own prosecutors for restricting their ability to seek enhanced sentences. News flash: Gascón shouldn’t be recalled. He should have never been elected.
Los Angeles may have been unwise, but San Francisco was totally insane. The City by the Bay elected Chesa Boudin as its District Attorney. His parents were members of the Weather Underground and served time in prison for the murder of two police officers and an armored car guard. After his parents were incarcerated, Chesa was adopted and raised by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were also unrepentant terrorist members of the Weather Underground. If those names sound familiar, they’re the same Bill and Bernardine who are friends and supporters of the Obamas. Now that he’s in office, Boudin is more interested in social justice than criminal justice. It’s a real shocker, but it turns out a person raised by people determined to bring down our society is not particularly interested in defending it. He, like many of his fellow leftist DAs, simply chooses not to prosecute criminals that don’t fit the social justice narrative. The voters of California are getting what they asked for -- good and hard!
The end result of these changes was foreseeable to anyone who understands human nature -- which is clearly beyond the understanding of Democrats in general and California leftists in particular.
Drug use has skyrocketed in California. Sleeping, drugged-out junkies litter the floors of BART train stations. Fortunately, junkies do have an easy means to support their drug habits. They can simply steal stuff -- with no risk of jail time.
Theft has become a very simple business venture in California. On average, a shoplifter is caught once for every 48 times he steals. However, he’s only charged 50% of the time. Based upon the dollar value that qualifies as a misdemeanor, and the fine for getting caught, shoplifters will have to pay a $1,000 fine for every $91,200 that they steal. For them, the fine is simply the cost of doing business. Merchants are even reporting that shoplifters carry calculators to make sure they don’t exceed the $950 threshold. They may be strung out on heroin or fentanyl, but they’re clearly smarter than the people that passed Prop 47.
Thanks to Prop 47, the streets are now flooded with career criminals. Fortunately, they’re not committing felonies anymore. Now they’re committing misdemeanors that look remarkably similar to the felonies which formerly would have landed them in prison.
The police have stopped arresting all but the most violent criminals. The prosecutors will release them anyway. Declining to arrest people over and over again isn’t dereliction -- it’s a process improvement. Giving criminals a pass achieves the same outcome as catch and release -- at much less risk and expense. Why catch and release when you can just not catch?
Even though crime has skyrocketed, the prison population is down. So our neighborhoods must be safer, right? If things don’t feel safer in California, consider this: making it no longer a felony to steal stuff, doesn’t mean people aren’t still stealing stuff. They’re just not being arrested for it. But the felony numbers are down, so the neighborhoods and schools must be safer.
Here’s a novel idea to lower the prison population. Instead of eliminating the penalty for committing crimes, let’s start teaching our children that crime is wrong and socially unacceptable. Of course, we would also need to teach them personal accountability, but that’s anathema to liberal thinking. We can’t be accountable for our own actions and still be victims of systemic [insert your chosen ism].
John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Star, Idaho. He is a retired engineer with 40 years of experience in the areas of product development, quality assurance, organizational development, and corporate strategic planning. He currently writes at the American Free News Network (americanfreenewsnetwork.org). He can be followed on Facebook or reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.
Pending Home Sales Unexpectedly Soar 8% as Americans Flee Cities
Pending home sales jumped higher in May, rising to the highest level for the month since 2005.
The National Association of Realtors said on Wednesday that its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts to buy previously owned homes, rose 8.0 percent in May to a reading of 114.8. Economists polled by Econoday had forecast a 0.8 percent decline after a disappointing April.
“May’s strong increase in transactions—following April’s decline, as well as a sudden erosion in home affordability—was indeed a surprise,” said Lawrence Yun, the association’s chief economist. “The housing market is attracting buyers due to the decline in mortgage rates, which fell below 3 percent, and from an uptick in listings.”
Sales were up across the country, with the strongest rise in the Northeast, where the index was up 15.5 percent.
The housing market has been hot for a year now. Many apartment and condo-dwelling city residents decided during the pandemic to move into more spacious single-family homes. Shuttered urban amenities—such as museums, restaurants, theaters, music venues, and bars—eased city residents’ hesitancy to move into suburbs and encouraged those who might have moved in the coming years to move up plans and buy a home immediately. Rising crime in the cities, where murder rates have skyrocketed, and politicized racial strife resulting in anti-police protests and rioting last summer, have also contributed to the flight to suburbs.
What’s more, many families found that they had extra cash after the pandemic suppressed spending on services and entertainment while government programs pumped cash into the private sector. The stock market’s historic bull run since last spring has pumped up household wealth, as have rising home prices. This has helped home sales grow despite obstacles that included pandemic-induced obstacles to showing homes, record-high prices, and all-time low inventories of homes for sale.
“While these hurdles have contributed to pricing out some would-be buyers, the record-high aggregate wealth in the country from the elevated stock market and rising home prices are evidentially providing funds for home purchases,” Yun said.
The high prices and strong demand will likely result in more homes coming on to the market, especially if supply chain problems that have elevated lumber prices and supersized unemployment benefits that have hurt the labor market subside. This could reduce prices in some of the markets that have seen the most explosive growth, making home-buying more affordable.
“Home price growth will steadily moderate with increased supply, but a broad and prolonged decline in prices is unlikely,” Yun said. “However, if a reduction occurs in some markets, homebuyers will view the lower home price as a second-chance opportunity to get into the market after being outbid in the previous multiple bid market conditions.”
New York City to move 8,000 homeless people from hotels to crowded shelters, ending COVID-19 prevention program
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to move about 8,000 homeless people out of hotel rooms, where they have been staying during the pandemic, and back to shelters. The timing of the move is uncertain, but the administration plans to complete it by the end of July. The campaign will disrupt the lives and threaten the health of homeless people to make hotel rooms available for tourists as de Blasio declares, “This is going to be the summer of New York City.”
The Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is about 2.5 times more infectious than the wild-type variant, now accounts for more than 10 percent of tested cases in New York City. It is on its way to becoming the dominant strain in the United States. Only 49 percent of city residents and 48 percent of state residents have been fully vaccinated against the virus. Moreover, vaccination rates for homeless people may be significantly lower than those in the general population, according to advocates.
Yet city, state and national politicians are prematurely proclaiming the end of the pandemic and removing all impediments to the generation of profit. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat like de Blasio, ended almost all restrictions related to the pandemic on June 15. Capacity limits, social distancing and information for contact tracing are now optional for offices, retail stores and other businesses. Shelters themselves are merely required to have residents wear masks.
“It is time to move homeless folks who were in hotels for a temporary period of time back to shelters where they can get the support they need,” said de Blasio at a news conference earlier this month. But many homeless people have continued to receive support at the hotels and do not want to return to shelters. Moreover, the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to pay for the hotel rooms until the end of September.
“I don’t want to go back—it’s like I’m going backward,” Andrew Ward told the New York Times. Ward was moved from a shelter to the Williams Hotel in Brooklyn. “It’s not safe to go back there. You’ve got people bringing in knives.”
Before the pandemic arrived in New York, the shelters were notoriously overcrowded. In some shelters, as many as 60 people stayed in one room. These conditions enabled the rapid spread of the coronavirus. More than 3,700 residents of New York’s main shelter system became ill with COVID-19, and 102 have died, according to city data. But considering the inadequate systems for testing and contact tracing, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, these figures are undoubtedly underestimates.
The pre-pandemic crowding of shelters, combined with the continual rise of homelessness, emphasizes that the existing shelter system is inadequate to meet the needs of all homeless New Yorkers, including those who stayed in hotels recently.
In spring 2020, the de Blasio administration moved homeless people out of the shelters and into 60 Manhattan hotels, many of which were in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods. The residents of these neighborhoods soon complained about noise and claimed that homeless people were using drugs and urinating in public. A neighborhood group in the affluent Upper West Side area demanded that approximately 300 homeless men be evicted from the Hotel Lucerne. When the city developed a plan to move them to a hotel in the Financial District, residents of that neighborhood filed suit to stop its implementation.
Understandably, many homeless people prefer the hotels, which provide far better living conditions than the shelters. Hotel rooms have granted homeless residents privacy, kept their belongings secure and reduced confrontations involving residents with substance abuse or mental health problems. “It’s peaceful. It’s less stressful,” Ward explained to the Times. He added that if he were moved back to a shelter, “I’d just stay in the street like before.”
The spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus and the inadequate distribution of vaccines create the conditions for a health disaster if homeless people are returned to shelters or sleeping rough. “There are people sleeping in shelters who are still testing positive and getting sick,” said Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, in a statement. “Until permanent affordable housing can be secured, the safest option remains placement in hotel rooms.”
Moreover, shelter operators have been able to maintain most of the treatment and counseling services for those without homes while the latter have stayed at the hotels. “It is simply inaccurate to say that people aren’t getting services in hotels,” said Routhier, in a direct response to de Blasio’s statement.
When he ran for mayor eight years ago, de Blasio decried New York’s inequality, using “A Tale of Two Cities” as a major theme of his campaign and promising to reduce homelessness dramatically. Today, homelessness in the city is at its highest level since the Great Depression. During fiscal year 2020, 122,926 individual homeless men, women and children slept in the city’s shelter system. The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping in shelters each night is 39 percent higher now than it was 10 years ago, and people from every New York City zip code are homeless.
But these stark figures do not provide a full picture, because they do not account for those who do not sleep in shelters. Natalie Monarrez is a homeless woman who works full time at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, a borough of New York City. Her hourly wage of $19.30 is too low to afford a studio apartment in Staten Island or New Jersey, so she sleeps in her car. Her clothes are stored in suitcases, and she keeps food in a cooler.
Monarrez maintains a membership at Planet Fitness gyms so that she has a place to shower and brush her teeth. She relies on fast food restaurants and retail stores for their public bathrooms. When businesses were locked down and their bathrooms inaccessible, Monarrez was forced to buy anti-bacterial wipes and use her car.
“Jeff Bezos donates to homeless shelters for tax write-offs and PR. He needs to know that some of his own workers (without family or a second income) can’t afford rent,” she told Vice News .
The candidates in New York City’s recent Democratic mayoral primary scarcely acknowledged the crisis of homelessness. As of this writing, Eric Adams, a former policeman and former Republican, is ahead in the initial first-choice results in the primary election. Adams has made vague promises to provide housing for homeless New Yorkers, but these promises are as meaningful as those that fellow Democrat de Blasio made eight years ago.
Andrew Yang, the businessman and former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, depicted homeless people themselves as the problem, alleging that they degraded other New Yorkers’ quality of life. No doubt he was appealing to the affluent and heartless residents who demanded that homeless people be ejected from “their” neighborhoods. That such a vile position is accepted within the Democratic Party is a further indication of its reactionary character.
The crisis of homelessness in New York City is a product of capitalism, which is itself in historic crisis. Homelessness cannot be addressed in a humane or meaningful way by either of the capitalist parties, which uphold the interests of finance capital and subordinate all other considerations to private profit.
“Most of our residents live in fear. As a result, daily activities such as getting gas, carpooling or going for a walk are no longer done without careful consideration and concern for safety,” Bill White, CEO and chairman of the committee, told Yahoo News. “We have shootings in our neighborhoods every day, at all hours of the day.”
Fraternal Order of Police VP: Crime Rates in 2021 Outpacing 2020’s ‘Historic Crime Numbers’
(CNSNews.com) – Violent crime is skyrocketing in major U.S. cities at a rate not seen since the 1990s, and violent crime in 2021 is surpassing the “historic crime numbers in 2020,” National Fraternal Order of Police Vice President Joe Gamaldi said Tuesday.
“I think what you're really seeing is these signs of urban decay that are occurring in our communities, and it's a result of rogue prosecutors and activist judges who have created a revolving door criminal justice policy in all of these major cities. So we have gang bangers,” Gamaldi told Fox Business’s “Mornings with Maria Bartiromo.”
“We have people that are trigger pullers who are getting out on probation after shooting people or they're out on eight felony bonds and then after they shoot someone they get another bond. Combine that with the anti-police rhetoric that seems to permeate every single major city that we have in this country, and it's a recipe for disaster, but this is just the beginning,” he said.
“We saw historic crime numbers in 2020. We saw over 20,000 homicides which we hadn't seen since the mid-90s,” Gamaldi said, adding that “2021 is outpacing it.”
“It's even worse in the cities that decided to defund their police department. They saw increases in murders in Chicago by 34%, in Minneapolis 236%, Portland 137%, New York City 50%, Philly 66%, and the list goes on and on,” he said.
As CNSNews.com previously reported, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed Monday that Republicans defunded the police by not voting for President Biden’s American Rescue Plan.
Host Maria Bartiromo pointed out that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is dismissing the rise in crime, saying that the headlines are causing hysteria.
“It's a complete joke. It's like they're trying to tell the American people don't believe their lying eyes. I mean in the same day that the press secretary was saying that it's Republicans that are defunding the police, the Oakland City Council which is Democrat controlled decided to defund the police by $18 million while their homicide rate is up over 87 percent. This is Washington talk,” Gamaldi said.
“And as far as Congresswoman Cortez, I find it funny that she says this is hysteria and these are just statistics. Excuse me, these are actual people who are being murdered - fathers, sons, daughters, mothers - being murdered wholesale in our street, and you've got the nerve to say this is all hysteria? But I think what you saw was the congresswoman said the quiet part out loud, and that is the narrative matters more to them than people's lives,” he said.
“We have a major problem in our cities right now, but the fact of the matter is, the American police officers delivered historic crime reductions in the last 20 years, and it led to an urban renaissance, and we can do it again, if we restore the rule of law, if we prosecute violent crimes and if we embrace broken windows theory and if we get the funding and support from community members and elected officials, we can turn this around,” Gamaldi added.
He added that Ocasio-Cortez failed to consider that by defunding of police, black and Latino communities will suffer the most, because that’s where the violent crime is taking place.
“And you know what the worst part about all of this is? It's members of our black and brown community that are impacted most. Statistically they are the victims of these violent crimes,” Gamaldi said.
“So while she talks about how all these lives matter, apparently they don't matter to her too much because she's not supporting policies that will ultimately be able to impact the crime that is occurring, and I think that realize this is a complete loser, the defund the police for the Democrat Party. Representative Clyburn said that after they nearly lost the majority during the midterms,” he said.
“Not only that. If you look at a recent Gallup poll, 81% of black Americans said they don't want less police officers in their neighborhoods, they want more. In a recent poll in New York City, less than 15% of the black and Latino community want to defund the police. It's a complete joke,” Gamaldi said.
Citing spike in crime, affluent Atlanta district looks to secede from city: 'It's a war zone'
Thanks to a sharp rise in crime in an affluent district in Atlanta, residents have mounted a campaign to secede from the majority Black city.
The Buckhead district is known for its luxury high-rise apartments, lavish restaurants and trendy boutique shops, but a spike in robberies, aggravated assault and larceny over the past year has left many in the community dismayed. Saying that Atlanta has abandoned them, they’ve formed the Buckhead City Committee, with the goal of forming a city of their own.
“Most of our residents live in fear. As a result, daily activities such as getting gas, carpooling or going for a walk are no longer done without careful consideration and concern for safety,” Bill White, CEO and chairman of the committee, told Yahoo News. “We have shootings in our neighborhoods every day, at all hours of the day.”
White is leading the effort for Buckhead to become an independent city, and he says that while combating crime is the top priority, an under-resourced police and fire department, crumbling infrastructure and zoning issues are additional causes for concern.
In August of last year, 28 Atlanta police officers resigned and 11 retired, citing an overall lack of morale, according to the Atlanta police union. Five fire trucks in the city’s aging fleet have been put out of service this year, including one truck that had to be towed from a fire because it broke down.
“Crime is way up, arrests way down,” White said. “Nothing makes sense.”
In May, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms described the growing trend of violence across the city as a “COVID crime wave.” According to police data, 2020 was Atlanta’s deadliest year in the past decade. Murders are up 41 percent over the past year, and while citywide robberies are down 4 percent over the past year, aggravated assaults are up 24 percent, and auto theft has risen by 31 percent.
The spike in crime rates has been especially prevalent in Buckhead, yet not all the district’s residents say they feel unsafe. Michael Quirk, who has lived in Buckhead for five years and grew up just north of the area, believes a lot of the outrage is driven by “fear.”
“Buckhead is a safe community, with something for everyone,” Quirk told Yahoo News. “Crime really seems to be limited to one area of Buckhead, over by Lenox mall, so whatever can be done over there crime-wise would be great. Personally, I think a lot of [the angst] is driven out of fear, and neighbors trying to out-outrage and out-pearl-clutch one another.”
A string of crimes, including multiple shootings, in the past year at Lenox Square mall in Buckhead has raised community members’ angst. The luxury shopping center installed metal detectors and gun-sniffing dogs at its entrance late last year. But the violence hasn’t stopped. Earlier this month, on June 13, two 15-year-olds were arrested for shooting a security guard in the torso at the mall after trying to gain access to the Apple Store after hours. It was the third shooting at a metro Atlanta mall in a week, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
It’s these kinds of frequent incidents that are the driving force behind the secession plans. Buckhead resident Essie Scarbrough described life in the neighborhood back in 2014 as “carefree,” but she says the spike in crime in recent years leaves her wary of what the future holds.
“I am hopeful that as Buckhead city is formed we will have faster response times and more investment in security,” she said.
“Buckhead used to be a little slice of heaven,” another resident, Stan Stellings, said. “Now it’s a war zone.”
The Buckhead City Committee hopes that the proposed, predominantly white, new city will be able to better protect its residents with its own taxpayer-funded police force and emergency services. The committee says it has so far raised $600,000 in its lobbying effort to form a new municipality.
With a population of 87,000, Buckhead’s median household income is $85,000, compared with metro Atlanta’s $59,948 household income for its 524,000 residents. The district’s racial makeup is 78 percent white, 11 percent Black and 6 percent Asian. Metro Atlanta, by comparison, is 51 percent African American, 41 percent white and 4 percent Asian, according to the most recent census data.
The rise in crime in the district, coupled with the swell of many nonresidents into the area, has many residents considering moving out of Buckhead.
“I used to love and be proud of living in Buckhead, but now [I’m] disgusted and afraid, so I’m moving,” Marilyn Krone, who has lived there for 50 years, told Yahoo News.
But critics are quick to point out that if Buckhead were to secede, it would cause a dramatic ripple effect across the city, stripping Atlanta of a huge chunk of the revenue from the tax base. Retail sales in Buckhead generate $2.9 billion annually, making up a large portion of Atlanta’s economy.
Another community group, Committee for a United Atlanta, says that while combating crime is an issue in Buckhead, breaking away to form a new city isn’t the answer.
“Buckhead residents and businesses have a legitimate reason to be upset with the city of Atlanta about crime,” Billy Linville, a consultant for the group, told Yahoo News. “However, we believe the best way to solve this issue is by turning out voters to elect [an] effective and accountable city of Atlanta government in November 2021.
“Carving off Buckhead will have a devastating economic impact on the city of Atlanta’s finances and bond ratings that will weaken the future prospects of the capital city of Georgia,” Linville added. “A weaker Atlanta won’t make Buckhead safer.”
Analysts say the secession proposal faces an uphill battle, thanks to steep infrastructure costs, Linville said, and would lead to further questions about where students would receive public education.
For many Black Atlanta residents, the talk of secession is a painful echo of the pre-civil-rights era. Stephanie Flowers, chair of Atlanta Neighborhood Planning Unit V, a group that oversees neighborhood associations in predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city, believes Buckhead’s attempt at seceding is, in part, racially motivated.
“It makes me angry because the crime they are seeing in Buckhead is the same crime we on the south side have been dealing with for years,” Flowers told the Washington Post. “We on the south side, because of our demographics, we can’t pay our way out [of it].”
Republican lawmakers introduced legislation earlier this year to incorporate the city of Buckhead, and a vote is expected in 2022. Ongoing legal battles over the move could keep it tied up in court for years. Buckhead City Committee members, meanwhile, say the previous formations of cities like Brookhaven and Sandy Springs show it can be done. Since 2005, 10 new cities have been formed across three of Georgia’s largest counties, the Atlantic reported. With the exception of two, they have been majority white.
Former Georgia House of Representatives Minority Leader Stacey Abrams said that while the crime issues need to be solved, seceding is not the answer.
“I have been a very vocal skeptic about cityhood bills designed to fracture distinct communities,” Abrams told the Black News Channel earlier this month. “This is not simply about a small group of people who want to do something else; this is about siphoning off resources that have been provided by the larger Atlanta community, and for one community to benefit and simply take its toys and leave is deeply problematic.”
But according to White, Buckhead’s crime issues should be a priority for everyone, adding that if Atlanta won’t address the recent spikes, the community has no choice but to seek its own remedy.
“We believe safety is a universal right,” he said. “Losing a loved one due to crime is a pain that nobody should experience, not in Buckhead, not anywhere.”
Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images
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