Mass looting events have been reported outside Los Angeles as the phenomenon spreads throughout Southern California, defying efforts by local officials to deter the flash mobs that carry out the daytime heists in retail stores.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass launched a new task force Thursday to fight mass looting and retail theft in the region, and Governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would triple the number of California Highway Patrol officers in the city to assist the effort.
Bass announced the task force at a press conference Thursday morning, days after a mass looting event in the Westfield Topanga mall made national news .
There have been several such events in the last few years, thought to be connected to organized crime.
The mayor elaborated in a press release:
“What we’ve seen over just the past week in the City of Los Angeles and in surrounding regions is unacceptable, which is why today we are here announcing action,” said Mayor Karen Bass. “These are not victimless crimes – especially in the case where Angelenos were attacked – through force or fear – as they did their jobs or ran errands. No Angeleno should feel like it’s unsafe to go shopping and no Angelenos should feel like it’s unsafe to open a business in Los Angeles or Los Angeles County. This task force will aggressively investigate these incidents and hold individuals that are responsible for these crimes fully accountable.”
Newsom announced that he would triple the number of California Highway Patrol officers in the city to assist Bass’s task force.
His office added a boast: “Under Governor Newsom’s leadership, public safety funding is at an all-time high in California.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’ . He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election . He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .
Paperwork was filed on Aug. 15 to recall Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price because of overwhelming crime in the area and a perceived lack of support from her office, according to petitioners.
“We are doing this on behalf of people in the county, and we just want to keep people safe. Especially seniors, children and families,” Carl Chan, a principal on the recall committee and president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement (pdf ) announcing the petition. “They deserve protection. ... By not sending a strong message by charging and prosecuting criminals, we are almost saying it’s okay to commit crime because there are no serious consequences.”
The group behind the recall is Save Alameda for Everyone, also known as SAFE , a coalition of local businesses, residents, victims, and advocates.
“We are unified in our belief that recalling Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price is not only necessary, but critical to keeping our community safe and restoring public safety in our neighborhoods,” the group wrote on its website. “DA Price is failing us in her responsibility to enforce the law, prosecute criminals and keep violent offenders off our streets.”
Skyrocketing crime and a general sense of unease due to carjackings, home invasions, property crimes such as car break-ins and retail theft, and drug use are driving the desire to replace the district attorney, according to petitioners.
According to Oakland Police Department statistics, violent crime is up by 15 percent and burglaries by nearly 40 percent compared to last year. Homicides are up by 80 percent compared to 2019, authorities report.
Looters rob a Target store as protesters face off against police in Oakland, Calif., on May 30, 2020. (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images) Some, including those behind the recall, perceive the prosecutor’s office as too soft on crime and unwilling to take the steps needed to keep the community safe, according to the statement. Utility companies now have to hire security guards to protect crews working in the city.
Recent allegations of nepotism stoked angst among residents after the district attorney’s office hired Ms. Price’s boyfriend, Antwon Cloird, for a six-figure salary as a “senior program specialist” earlier this year. News reports indicate that Mr. Cloird was involved in an FBI investigation in 2015 related to extortion in the city of Richmond in the San Francisco Bay area.
Court documents from a lawsuit filed in 2016 in Contra Costa County allege that Mr. Cloird was involved in cash payments flowing from cannabis dispensaries to the Richmond City Council in a pay-to-play scheme, but it's unclear what became of the investigations.
Mr. Cloird didn't respond to requests for comment by press time.
“Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals,” Cynthia Adams, president of the Oakland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Bishop Bob Jackson, senior pastor at Acts of Gospel Church of Oakland, said in a joint statement in July.
Talk of a potential recall began brewing earlier this year, and with organized efforts and 100 verified signatures supporting it, the recall petition was submitted to the county, with Ms. Price given until Aug. 22 to respond.
Once she responds, the group will have 160 days to collect more than 90,000 signatures to satisfy requirements that at least 10 percent of registered voters sign the petition to proceed, as per guidelines (pdf ) set by the California secretary of state. If enough signatures are ultimately verified by county election officials, a recall vote will be announced to potentially replace the district attorney.
In response to the intent to recall being filed, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters released a statement on Aug. 16 saying that such a move is unprecedented.
“The [Registrar of Voters] has not been required to conduct a recall election targeting a County of Alameda official for at least the past 30 years, if ever,” Donna Ziegler, county counsel for Alameda, wrote in the statement. “The [Registrar of Voters] is currently analyzing the relationship between the recall provisions set forth in the county charter and those found in state law to determine the path and timeline for conducting a recall of a county officer.”
Ms. Price didn't respond to The Epoch Times’ requests for comment.
A man walks by the Oakland Police headquarters in Oakland, Calif., on Dec. 6, 2012. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) While the registrar is checking its rulebook and preparing to handle the recall petition, some say that something needs to change, as lives are at risk and people are fearful while in their communities and at home.
“As an advocate for families who have lost loved ones, what I see now is something I have never seen before. There is a true disconnect on who is the victim,” said Brenda Grisham, another proponent on the committee to recall and mother of Christopher LaVell Jones—who was gunned down in front of his family home in Oakland in what police believe was a mistaken ambush on Dec. 31, 2010. “We all want a fair justice system, and that includes holding people accountable for their crimes.”
In Los Angeles County, another recall effort is underway targeting District Attorney George Gascón and is currently entangled in a lawsuit contesting the signature verification outcome. The lawsuit was filed on July 7 by recall proponents alleging that the Los Angeles County Registrar incorrectly or unlawfully invalidated some petition signatures.
Mr. Gascón, elected at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2020, is known for his progressive reforms of the county’s criminal justice system through what critics have called “soft-on-crime” policies, including eliminating sentencing enhancements for firearms, ending the death penalty, removing cash bail for misdemeanors or nonviolent felony crimes, and not charging minors as adults.
A recent precedent of successful recall was the case of San Francisco County District Attorney Chesa Boudin—who was elected in 2019 and recalled in 2022 . Angered by rising crime and limited prosecutions, 55 percent of voters chose to remove Mr. Boudin from office.
THE DUMPSTER CITY
SF scamp organizes the first-ever ‘Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour’ to highlight the ‘urban decay’ of certain policies
“You’ve read the headlines, you’ve seen the Tweets, now get close and personal to the Doom and Squalor of downtown San Francisco!”
That’s the advertising hook for the city’s newest walking tour, and it worked — tickets sold out, weeks in advance. The guide remains anonymous, and the big reveal is set for next Saturday, but what we do know is that he is a San Francisco native, a “political junkie,” and a “card-carrying City Commissioner” and he’s ready to pull back the curtain on the “policy choices that made America’s wealthiest city the nation’s innovative leader” in every civic crisis imaginable.
Also from the promotional teaser:
How can a city with a $14.6 billion annual budget be a model of urban decay? How can it spend $776.8 million per year on police and have no rule of law to show for it? How can it spend $690 million on homeless services and receive an official United Nations condemnation for its treatment of the homeless (“cruel and inhuman”; “violation of multiple human rights”)?
The tour is an easy 1.5 miles, and participants will have a chance to see the “open-air drug markets, the abandoned tech offices, the outposts of the non-profit industrial complex, and the deserted department stores.”
We might be tempted to immediately assume the mystery tour guide is a conservative, given his sardonic stunt over the undeniable causality between leftism and societal rot, but I’m not so sure. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d wager that he is actually a leftist himself (a circumstantial speculation, of course).
First off, this man is evidently well-versed in the “rules” of Saul Alinsky, given his strategy of ridicule, a tool that Alinksy touted as “man’s most potent weapon.”
Secondly, he writes this:
You will find no better expert. Your guide is an urban policy professional… overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m…. He has spent hundreds of hours on both sides of the government dais, shouting into the opposite abyss. (This event is the result of his own mental-health crisis.)
When he says he’s an “urban policy professional” I can only assume he has some sort of academic background in the field; not typically (if ever) a route taken by principled conservatives. It’s also safe to assume that this man has been in government a long time because a) it would be unusual for a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate to receive commissioned appointment with a half a billion dollar budget; and b) how could anyone drive themselves to the point of a “mental-health crisis” over government being hopelessly incapable of solving social issues? The government’s literal modus operandi is to leave everything it touches worse off — more intervention always equals more problems — every conservative knows that!
The man in question almost reminds me of the highly-distinguished Thomas Sowell, who at one point was a left-wing Marxist. As a young man, he saw gaping wealth disparities in Manhattan, and when he stumbled upon the writings of Karl Marx, Sowell said they “ seemed to make sense .”
But then… Sowell took a summer internship at the federal Department of Labor, and very quickly learned that “the government is not simply the personification of the general will” but rather “the government institutions have their own institutional interests.” Soon thereafter, Sowell abandoned Marxism and became a limited government conservative; his conversion story can be watched here:
VIDEO
Anyone who can work in government, see the problems with government firsthand, then “spend hundreds of hours” on a fool’s errand like trying to get the government to be more efficient can only be a leftist.
Image: Free image , Pixabay license, no attribution required
Records: Son of Billionaire Democrat Donor George Soros Has Visited the White House 14 Times The Vera Institute of Justice, a Soros-associated entity, funds radical-left agendas that persecute law enforcement. It partner with district attorneys to manipulate 'racial disparities' in decisions for criminals. They state their mission is to demolish what they perceive as a 'racist' system. It views immigration enforcement agencies as a threat to civil liberties. Vera Justice's president, Nick Turner, said , "We work to transform the immigration system because many of the problems that we see in the criminal legal system are just the same in the immigration system. And by transform, what I mean is to shrink both of those systems."
DeSantis Suspends Soros-Backed Prosecutor Who Coddled ‘Violent Offenders, Drug Traffickers…and Pedophiles’ In a significant move toward restoring law and order in Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has taken decisive action by suspending Monique Worrell, the State Attorney for the Ninth Judicial Circuit.
Worrell, who had received backing from a group associated with radical activist Democrat billionaire George Soros, has been exposed for her dereliction of duty and sheer incompetence in handling criminal cases. This suspension comes as a vital step in safeguarding our communities from dangerous offenders.
Wednesday morning, Gov. DeSantis signed an executive order suspending State Attorney Worrell, citing her neglect of duty as the main reason for her removal. The move is a step to protect the law-abiding citizens of Florida and ensure that justice is served, by ending Worrell’s failure to prosecute a violent criminal who later commits heinous acts.
The governor’s executive order lists several instances of Worrell’s “neglect of duty and incompetence,” including:
· “[T]he administration of criminal justice in the Ninth Circuit has been so clearly and fundamentally derelict as to constitute both neglect of duty and incompetence.”
· “[Worrell] authorized or allowed practices or policies that have systematically permitted violent offenders, drug traffickers, serious-juvenile offenders, and pedophiles to evade incarceration when otherwise warranted under Florida law.”
· “These practices or policies include non-filing or dropping meritorious charges or declining to allege otherwise provable facts to avoid triggering applicable lengthy sentences, minimum mandatory sentences.”
· “[Worrell] authorized or allowed practices or policies whereby her assistant state attorneys are generally prevented or discouraged from obtaining meritorious minimum mandatory sentences for gun crimes.”
One of the reasons for Worrell's suspension is her abuse of prosecutorial discretion. While prosecutors do have the ability to choose which cases to pursue, Worrell has taken it to an extreme by effectively nullifying laws in the state, such as restrictions on abortion and provision of harmful gender-change services to minors.
Worrell's policies and practices have directly contributed to a more dangerous environment, endangering the lives and well-being of Floridians, DeSantis said.
The governor's office has presented various instances that exemplify the egregious outcomes resulting from Worrell's misguided policies. These examples expose a system that has failed to protect the innocent and prioritize the well-being of their communities. It is clear that action had to be taken to rectify this alarming situation.
Announcing the suspension, Gov. DeSantis highlighted a specific case involving Daton Viel, who shot two Orlando officers while out on bond for a child rape case. Worrell's failure to keep this dangerous individual off the streets demonstrates her incompetence and inability to fulfill her duties as a state attorney, which have put innocent lives at risk.
Worrell also failed to prosecute the suspect who tragically shot and killed a Spectrum News reporter, a mother, and a little girl in Orlando earlier this year.
VIDEO
The suspension of State Attorney Monique Worrell is an example of Gov. DeSantis' commitment to upholding conservative values and ensuring that Florida’s elected officials carry out their duties with integrity and adherence to the law.
Worrell’s suspension is part of Gov. DeSantis's ongoing efforts to address the influence of woke prosecutors tied to George Soros who have who had demonstrated a lack of competence and a disregard for the law. Last year, DeSantis removed Andrew Warren, the Tampa area state attorney, for similar reasons. Warren, like Worrell, signaled his opposition to prosecuting abortion providers and those seeking abortions.
Displaying a blatant disregard for the rights of the unborn, Warren refused to enforce a 15-week abortion ban. Both she and Warren have condemned Florida’s law protecting minors from gender-altering procedures.
The governor's decision to suspend Worrell has garnered support from law enforcement officials such as Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey. Their presence at the announcement reflects the seriousness of the situation and the need for decisive action. While they may not work in Worrell's district, their endorsement highlights the importance of maintaining law and order across the state.
Moving forward, Judge Andrew Bain will be taking over for the 9th Judicial Circuit. Bain is noted for his experience and dedication to law enforcement.
How bad is Soros DA Pamela Price? First the Asian community turned on her after she washed her hands of the murder of a 3-year-old boy, and now the NAACP.
Shouting “justice for Jasper,” “do your job!” and “victims come first,” protestors sounded off on Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price on Monday over concerns about how she’s handing the emotionally charged Jasper Wu case.
Jasper Wu, a 23-month-old boy, lost his life to a stray bullet while riding in his car seat.
Three men – Trevor Green, Johnny Jackson, and Ivory Bivens have their preliminary hearing on murder charges in three weeks. A member of the AAPI community asked Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price for an update on the case, and Price sent this email Tuesday that reads in part, “Our office is currently working on a partnership with the Asian Law Caucus to support AAPI victims of violence in ways that open up broader possibilities for healing and non-carceral forms of accountability.”
Price then sent a hostile email blasting Asian-American critics as ignorant of “constitutional law” and argued that the gang members are “presumed innocent”. Then she accused Asian-Americans complaining about her pro-crime policies of “mob violence” and claimed that “as a descendant of people in this country who were historically subjected to mob violence in the form of lynchings, racist profiling and wrongful convictions, I am particularly sensitive to the danger of this type of comment” and proposed a forum to “better educate” Asian Americans.
Price was so bad that Rep. Eric Swalwell, of all people, brought a victim’s mother to testify against her in the House.
The parents of 26-year-old Blake Mohs, a Home Depot loss prevention employee, who police said was shot to death by a shoplifter in April, are deeply troubled by the lack of communication with District Attorney Pamela Price and her decision to pursue lesser charges and sentencing in the case.
Police said Knapps stole a charger for a power tool, and tried to leave the store through the loading dock when she was stopped by Blake.
Lorie said her son was shot in the chest at close range, and Knapps retrieved the item after killing him.
Since his death, the family said Price has never reached out. It was only after consistent outreach on their part, that a DA assigned to the case responded.
“The phone call was that Pamela Price was not going to meet with us, she was not going to have a conversation with us, and we discussed my concerns about the charges, and we were not being kept in the loop with my victim’s advocate along with the DA’s office,” Mohs said.
“Can you also tell us — you have this public forum, a forum that you never wanted — but to the prosecutors in this case, I hope they’re listening to this, what do you want to see as an outcome?” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-California) asked in that meeting.
“We should be charging this case appropriately and we should be charging the case based on facts and not personal opinion or personal agenda,” Mohs said. “We should be using the judicial system as it should be used, not for personal gain but for the safety of our communities and our children. By not charging the proper ‘gun’ which is discharge and death, Benicia Knapps will serve much less of a sentence and the DA’s office is refusing to do so. It’s not fair that we have to be victimized again.”
Now the NAACP is turning against her .
The Oakland, California, NAACP civil rights organization blasted woke city leaders for their soft-on-crime policies which they say have led to skyrocketing numbers of shootouts and violent armed robberies, forcing residents to leave the area for good.
The group issued the statement Thursday as dozens of Oakland residents packed a public safety meeting and demanded progressive Alameda County DA Pamela Price to address the alarming uptick of violent crime in the city.
In the letter, the local NAACP chapter said residents are “sick and tired” of the shootings, car-break-ins and highway shootouts and implored city leaders to declare a state of emergency.
“There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety,” the group wrote.
“It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.”
The group, along with Bishop Bob Jackson of the Acts Full Gospel Church, said Price’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute serious criminals, as reported by The Post, has created “the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric and created a heyday for Oakland criminals.”
Jackson and the NAACP said no one is safe when it comes to becoming targets of criminals who have taken over Oaklands’ streets because of the lack of leadership and prosecution.
“African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city,” the group said. “But residents from all parts of the city report that they do not feel safe. Women are targeted by young mobs and viciously beaten and robbed in downtown and uptown neighborhoods.
“Asians are assaulted in Chinatown. Street vendors are robbed in Fruitvale. News crews have their cameras stolen while they report on crime. PG&E workers are robbed and now require private security when they are out working. Everyone is in danger.”
DA Price’s whole argument was that she was defending black people against racism. Now that argument is dead. Her only constituents are criminals. Asians have turned against her. Even the NAACP is against her.
No one except Soros, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and other rich white pro-crime lefties support criminals.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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