A Law and Order Election for California in 2022
What law enforcement does and doesn’t do will have a major influence on upcoming state and local electoral contests. The police industrial complex, consisting of sworn officers, prosecutors, and prison personnel doesn’t need a slate of white guys with crew cuts to make their case; they’re ready to rumble.
They already own enough political loyalty among electeds –through fear or favors– to quash resistance to rolling back the clock to the good old days, when children had to walk miles uphill both ways over snow and broken glass to go to school.
Polling says the public is buying into the narrative that the nation is experiencing an exploding crime rate (and it’s all Joe Biden’s fault). And despair has turned to desperation when it comes to imagining solutions for our unhoused citizens.
What the public thinks law enforcement does, namely arrest people, has become a voter concern through media accounts portraying rampant crime throughout the state. In San Diego, by the way, 1% of calls were for service (police being alerted to a potential serious violent crime) in 2021.
A kernel of truth and a series of spectacular thefts have been spun into a narrative the law enforcement community hopes will result in the rollback of criminal justice reforms in California.
With the exception of murder, most crimes remain at or near historical lows, but if you had 2 hypothetical crimes last year and 4 this year, the headline on KUSI is “crime rate doubles.” The way to look at crime statistics is long term, and CA’s overall crime rate is less than half of what it was in 1995.
Multiple studies (here’s one from Scientific American) show that incarceration has little to no impact on crime rates. California counties that lock up more people per capita experience twice as many homicides per capita than low-incarceration counties, by the way. But the “solution” being pitched this electoral cycle involves locking more people up.
What law enforcement doesn’t (and shouldn’t) do, which would be to arrest and jail all the homeless people at the behest of socialites concerned about ruining the ambiance from the beaches to the valleys. Cops already expend too much effort in policing the homeless, which involves contact and (sometimes) relocation. It’s worth a ton of overtime, which keeps the rank and file officers happy, which makes the process sad on multiple levels.
While the “lock’em up and throw away the key” mentality represents a very small segment of public opinion, the seeming failure of governments to make “them” go away has enough people worked up about homelessness that anything is possible. .
There are worrying signs aplenty on the horizon for California Democrats. Given that we have a feeble Republican party, statewide voting in the June Primary will mostly reflect voter sentiments about the top two Democrats running for office. Having no real opposition party means voters will need to look at what flavor of Democrats they are electing. (I’ll get to writing about that soon enough.)
Look for the mayoral contest in Los Angeles to be a bellwether for voter sentiment. Candidates vying for the job are Congresswoman Karen Bass (generally recognized as the front runner), City Attorney Mike Feuer, City Council members Kevin de León and Joe Buscaino along with businessmen Mel Wilson and Rick Caruso.
All those candidates need to be ready to meet some mad-as-hell voters, according to polling and focus groups. Platitudes won’t cut it. .
From the Los Angeles Times:
“I’ve probably sat through, I don’t know, a couple hundred focus groups ... and never in my entire career, which is many decades, have I ever seen this kind of result,” longtime political strategist Darry Sragow, who led the research, said in an interview.
Angelenos, the pollsters concluded, are angry over the condition of the streets, disturbed by the human suffering taking place on them and frustrated with the inability of government to do anything about it. They want elected officials to set realistic goals, pursue tough policies and hold themselves accountable.
Statewide, the GOP will put up a sacrificial lamb for the gubernatorial contest, with Northern California state Sen. Brian Dahle vying for the Trumpy vote and the possibility of former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer running to prove how few moderates are left in the state.
The latest bad news for Democrats came via a Los Angeles Times sponsored poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies indicating a big downturn in voter approval away from Gov. Gavin Newsom. Although respondents strongly supported Newsom’s actions addressing the pandemic and climate change, white voters in particular are souring on him over crime and homelessness.
According to the poll, 48% of registered voters surveyed approved of Newsom’s job as governor, while 47% disapproved — a difference within the survey’s margin of error. That’s down from the 64% approval rating California voters gave Newsom in September 2020 amid the first wave of the pandemic.
More than half of registered voters polled, 54%, believe California is on the wrong track compared to 36% who believe the state is on the right path, with the remainder expressing no opinion. Voters were evenly split just last May.
Back in the before times, a law n’ order election wouldn’t have been as big an issue as it is this year, I think. This time around, we’re living in the shadow of the social and political effects of the pandemic.
Somewhere between 15 and 20% of the country has been saying they’d rather worship a Golden Idol than read a book. And people sworn to protect the public have chosen to deny or ignore the number one cause of death for law enforcement.
Police officers have been at the forefront of resistance to the various public health measures we’ve all endured over the past two years. If you think this resistance was about mandates or freedom, think again.
It’s about Let’s Go Brandon, an expression of (mostly white) alienation.
We can’t be nice about this anymore. What they can’t win at the ballot box, they’ll be getting around to taking at gunpoint. Obviously, this seditious grouping is not just police and not all police see things this way.
Voters are not generally opposed to Democratic policies. But the perception that elected officials don’t understand and care about stressors in people’s lives is driving down interest in Democratic candidates. Polling at the national level indicates that GOP messaging/misinformation about America running amok is most effective with center-left voters, independents and Hispanic voters. Ooops.
The national party would have candidates to “correct the record” and avoid “stoking divisive cultural debates.” In other words, become more like Republicans (correcting the record usually ends up not changing minds because the original bad premise gets restated.)
Democrats need to be Democrats, a party with bold solutions to big problems. Given that we know that policing as presently exercised doesn’t really work, perhaps hiring more cops to do more policing isn’t a solution. Calling for reforms that give copagandists an opening to squeal about “defunding the police” is a serious obstacle here.
What if all citizen contacts with the government involved a reimagined agency that was created by merging services into one entity? This is the kind of idea –a one stop shop, offering everything from permits to crime reduction in convenient locations– that could be sold by a candidate as a way of improving people’s lives. I know this brings up a ton of other issues, but it could dissolve the silo that law enforcement hides behind that prevents any real change from happening. Instead of Us vs Them, it would be We the People.
What if a city announced that non-parkland open spaces would be turned into safe havens for homeless people? Those unneeded parking lots downtown could be leased and turned into supervised and organized little villages. Making this work –because there would be a lot of squealing– would involve a promise to make them temporary in return for votes for a method of rapidly enabling social housing. Again, I know this brings up issues. But it’s a hell of a lot better than what we’re not doing now.
The above are just ideas, and perhaps unworkable. But bland and rhetoric filled promises aren’t going to cut. So if you think these are terrible ideas, put on your thinking cap and let the world know what you come up with.
What shouldn’t happen is for people to sit this election out because [fill in the excuse]. I know that things look grim in Washington, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep trying at the state and local level.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com