Californians are finally getting serious about crime

For the last quarter century, progressives have argued that we should decriminalize drugs, stop enforcing laws against nonviolent crimes, and radically reduce the prison population. This softer approach to crime, addiction and homelessness has been proven to be more effective and compassionate than harsher models, they said. Hundreds of articles, books, documentaries, television reports and fact sheets supported this worldview.

We all needed more empathy for those who commit crimes, more empathy for drug dealers, activists said, and soon politicians did too. In this rush of compassion, it was not the criminals who were demonized, but the victims.

Blue states across the country—particularly California, Oregon, and Washington—have served as real-world laboratories of these radical theories over the past decade. The result was one of the worst humanitarian disasters in American history. And nowhere has it been worse than in my state: California, where soft measures were implemented first and most forcefully.

Historians looking for the beginning of history might look to Proposition 47, passed by California voters a decade ago. This law put one of those “compassionate” ideas into practice: It turned any theft of goods valued at less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor. The same was true for drug possession.

As a result, prosecutors lost much of the legal power they needed to prosecute cases such as burglary, leading to brazen assaults and assaults by criminal gangs and leaving store employees and customers helpless as they watched criminals loot everything from luxury items to toiletries . It also became much harder to prosecute drug dealers who could simply say their drugs were for personal use. Drug dealers also took advantage of Prop 47 by distributing their supplies to homeless addicts, who would then face doom if caught.

The number of homeless people in California – who are destitute largely due to addiction and mental illness – has increased by more than 50 percent in the past 10 years, from 113,952 in 2014 to 181,399 in 2023.

Violent crime also increased. In 2022, California's rate was 31 percent higher than the national rate. “This divergence is largely due to serious assaults, which have declined nationally while increasing in California,” the Public Policy Institute of California noted last November. One in four San Francisco residents surveyed say they have been a victim of a crime in the last year; 42 percent say they have been a victim more than once.

Meanwhile, the downtowns of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco became uninhabitable due to increases in open drug use and petty crime. (If you're wondering why toothpaste and deodorant are under lock and key in drugstores, this is why.) So many companies left San Francisco's city limits that the commercial real estate vacancy rate reached a staggering 36 percent by the end of 2023.

Unfortunately, this lawlessness has hardened the hearts of many, only compounding the tragedy. I have spent the last five years witnessing the lives – and deaths – of the people who suffer under these policies. A few scenes are enough to capture their distress and misery.