How Did We Get Here?

Breaking down the past 10 years of CA leadership, laws & policy that caused the misery we now see on our streets and the crime we now have in our neighborhoods

People often look around at the squalor strewn across the city and ask “How did we get here?” It’s a great question with many factors that all lead back to bad policy, changing of laws and refusing to hold people accountable. It started in 2011 when then CA Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB109 into law also known as “the prisoner realignment bill”. CA prisons were overcrowded after years of tough on crime legislation like 3 strikes and the feds demanded California do something to alleviate the overcrowded prison system. In typical California fashion we don’t ever truly fix the problem with objective solutions, we do a 180 and go in the complete opposite direction at 100 mph. AB109 diverted those convicted of non-violent felonies to serve their time in local county jail rather than state prison. Remember the term “non -violent” when we get into discussing Prop 57 later in this article because even the definition of that has been changed. It also diverted many on state parole/probation to local county supervised probation which is usually much less formal. One example of AB109’s consequences was in 2017 when Whittier Police Officer Keith Boyar was shot and killed by a felon who was transferred from state to local probation while responding to the scene of a vehicle accident after the felon had already killed his cousin and stole his car earlier that day. Critics say if the suspect was on formal probation he would have had to meet his P.O. weekly in person with drug tests vs. informal county probation which allowed him to spin out unmonitored and wind up killing his own cousin ad Officer Boyar.

In 2012 Prop 36 revised the state's Three Strikes initiative to impose a life sentence only when the new felony conviction was considered a violent felony. It also allowed inmates already in prison to be re-sentenced if their third strike was not considered violent and if a judge determined they did not pose a risk to public safety. The initiative was passed by voters in 2012 continuing the release of mostly habitual criminals back into society.

In 2014 Prop 47 was voted in to law under the name “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” which turned ALL drug and petty theft charges into eternal misdemeanors with no chance of a felony no matter how many times a person is arrested (ticketed) for possession or theft. This also released many low level habitual offenders from custody for possession and theft charges since there were no graduated felonies from these crimes anymore. Enter the revolving door of injustice. The people we see on the street using drugs, riding around on bikes with backpacks through our neighborhoods at 4am breaking into cars and stealing mail, the encampment bike chop shops with 100 stolen bikes piled around them, these people used to be able to be arrested and sent to prison for 6 months to a year plus which did 2 things: 1. Kept them off the street for a time being and 2. Might have gotten them actual help while incarcerated. Since Prop 47 these people can’t get arrested anymore for quality of life crimes, the ones that were locked up were let out and now most of them are living in the encampments across the city still addicted and allowed to steal with impunity to support their habits. Soon after Prop 47 was voted in late 2014 I started noticing the changes and started documenting them with an instagram page I made @streetpeopleoflosangeles which is still running today 315k strong. I was shocked when I asked a Cop why are we seeing so much open air drug use and vagrancy? His answer: Prop 47, we can’t arrest them anymore.

Part 2 coming soon discusses Prop 57, SB 10 & $0 bail, AB 1810 and polices related to criminal justice reform.