A Rollback for Prop 47, A Jail Death for Shoplifting, and Maybe a New Jail

What's the price of Law & Order?

California’s law enforcement professionals and their allies have put together a ballot measure aimed at gutting some Proposition 47 provisions reducing incarceration for minor property offenses. They would like you to be afraid because not enough people are behind bars.

Tomorrow (April 23) is the deadline for submitting the 546,651 signatures needed to get it on the November 2024 ballot. Supporters say they’ve collected around 900,000 signatures.

Proposition 47 passed in 2014 with nearly 60% voter approval. The seething within law enforcement circles has never abated. By 2019 Fox News was reporting that shoplifters were stealing with impunity, claiming everybody knew selective enforcement policies meant police largely ignored reports of shoplifting.

Critics of the reforms have built support for their effort by repeating tales of individuals shoplifting and drug use among unhoused persons. A lack of statistics supporting the prevalence of extreme retail theft is being explained away by claiming that many stores don’t report shoplifter crime. 

Perhaps the most common misrepresentation about 2014’s reforms is the claim it caused the doubling the dollar value of thefts punishable as felonies and contributed to more theft. The change in the dollar level actually occurred in 2010 with passage of AB 2372. Other states like Texas ($2500) and South Carolina ($2000) have higher thresholds and the effect is not quantifiable.  Certainly there haven’t been news accounts of Dallas shoplifters carrying calculators to stay under that state’s limit.

Backers have raised more than $7 million, mostly from large retailers like Walmart ($2.5 million) and Home Depot ($1 million). California taxpayers, on the other hand, could get stuck with the hundreds of millions of dollars necessitated by this rollback to boost the incarcerated population.

The allure of the “get tough” promise made by this measure is affecting local politics, as Mayor Todd Gloria (and other local mayors) was baited by former police chief Shelley Zimmerman on Friday for not expressing his support for this “un reform” ballot measure. 

What is really being sold to voters here is an attitude. The US already imprisons the most people (1.9 million), has the sixth highest per capita rate (531 per 100,000) world wide. The law enforcement/prison industrial complex would have us believe that we’re somehow safer this way. 

Our incarceration rate, by the way, isn’t explainable by differences in crime rate compared to other nations. What makes the US crime rate significant is the number of firearms in circulation.

The bottom line for this attitude is that some lives are with more than others, which brings me to an article by Jeff McDonald appearing in the Union-Tribune on Saturday with the headline Records detail last hours of dying jail inmate.

It’s an account, told in excruciating detail, of the incarcerated death of Elisa Serna, arrested for the sort of stealing California’s law enforce axis wants to further criminalize. Documents revealed in a lawsuit by her family reveal a level of neglect and indifference by San Diego County Sheriffs and other jail personnel that is abjectly terrible.

• Serna was 24 and pregnant when she was arrested on suspicion of theft and drug charges.

• When she was booked into Las Colinas women’s jail, she told deputies that she had recently used drugs and alcohol, records show, and she was supposed to be placed into the sheriff’s withdrawal protocols. She was not.

• Instead, she collapsed six days after her arrest and died, becoming the 15th person to die in a San Diego County jail in 2019. Sixty-seven more people have died in sheriff’s custody since Serna was found dead on the floor of her Las Colinas jail cell, records show.

• Venters said in his unsealed report that evidence he viewed as part of the discovery process proves the sheriff’s jail medical staff failed completely.

Sheriff Kelly Martinez released a statement as the documentation became public calling the evidence “disturbing” and saying “the actions of some staff on that day do not reflect the values of the Sheriff’s Department.”

She reiterated her earlier pledge that substantial changes had been made toward improving conditions in San Diego County jails, including improving facilities, expanded medical care for drug addiction, and seeking 24 hour mental health care. 

Martinez may be relatively new in this position, but she’s apparently an expert at spinning yarns in response to criticisms of her department. 

Last month the Union Tribune reported on the primary health care provider’s failures to take care of the roughly 4000 people in San Diego jails. Some hospitals are refusing to accept patient referrals through NapeCare Correctional Health due to unpaid bills, gynecological care is being denied to patients, and requests to repair or replace medical equipment have been ignored.

This company has been operating under contract for two years, supposedly under the watchful eye of the County Sheriff. Martinez had to be aware of their problems.

Perhaps she’s been too busy scheming about her next haul from taxpayers.

Sheriff Martinez is currently on a “listening tour” in each of the five supervisorial districts seeking to test the public appetite for projects and potential funding. This sort of public relations ploy is normally the precursor to announcing a bond measure for the public to vote on.

A new sheriff’s station along two busy North County highways, expanding the Ramona sheriff substation, and a new jail in Vista are on her wish list. To be sure, many of these items are objectively justifiable, given future population growth and especially with an increase in inmates following voter approval of undoing Prop 47.

The Sheriff Department’s needs present an opportunity that shouldn’t be missed. California’s constitutional provision making County Sheriffs an elected position gives those agencies a firewall against outside interventions. 

Given that the ballot choices for the position are nearly always preordained, there’s little beyond budgetary matters County Supervisors can do to change policies or behaviors. “Defund the police” (something that’s happened almost nowhere) is such a potent deterrent that no politician in their right mind is going to make it seem as budgets for law enforcement are changed in ways unpalatable to top enforcers.

Going for a bond measure requires public support. In fact, the usual strategy for publicly funded entities is to start right out of the gate with a massive list of well known individuals agreeing with the need for a bond. I’m not saying anybody should refuse to be on that list, if and when it happens, but there should be plenty of room for negotiating about agency policies and practices.

So, there are likely two opportunities coming soon before the voters. With the Prop 47 rollback, the obvious answer is to encourage the public to say no despite the fear mongering. Getting the Sheriff’s office to join the transition of San Diego County government into a better organization will require (a lot of) behind the scenes activism. 

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Monday News You Should Read

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New Hampshire’s GOP Is Taking a Stand—Against the Polio Vaccine via Mother Jones

• New Hampshire could soon beat Florida—known for its anti-vaccine Surgeon General—when it comes to loosening vaccine requirements. A first-in-the-nation bill that’s already passed New Hampshire’s state House, sponsored only by Republican legislators, would end the requirement for parents enrolling kids in childcare to provide documentation of polio and measles vaccination. New Hampshire would be the only state in the US to have such a law, although many states allow religious exemptions to vaccine requirements. 

• Currently, Republicans control New Hampshire’s state House, Senate and governor’s office—but that isn’t a guarantee that the bill will be signed into law, with GOP Gov. Chris Sununu seemingly flip-flopping when it comes to disease control. Sununu did sign a bill in 2021 allowing people to use public places and services even if they did not receive the Covid-19 vaccine. But the next year, the governor vetoed a bill that would bar schools from implementing mask mandates. 

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Elon Musk’s Robotaxi Dreams Plunge Tesla Into Chaos via Bloomberg

• On Tuesday, Tesla is expected to report a 40% plunge in operating profit and its first revenue decline in four years. Musk has ordered up the company’s biggest layoffs ever and staked its future on a next-generation, self-driving vehicle concept called the robotaxi. People familiar with his directives, who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations, are unsettled by the changes the CEO wants to push through.

• The idea of creating an autonomous taxi service has been kicking around Tesla for at least eight years, but the company has yet to stand up much of the infrastructure it would need, nor has it secured regulatory approval to test such cars on public roads. For the moment, Musk has put off plans for a $25,000, mass-market vehicle that many Tesla investors — and some insiders — are pushing for and believe is crucial to the carmaker’s future.

• In the wake of media reports on the strategic shift, key managers including Drew Baglino, an 18-year company veteran who headed Tesla’s powertrain engineering and energy business, have left.

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Supreme Court divided over homeless ban and rights of the unhoused via the Washington Post

• Both sides in the case known as City of Grants Pass v. Gloria Johnson cited a Supreme Court ruling from decades ago to bolster their conflicting arguments. The Biden administration and the homeless individuals said the 9th Circuit ruling is consistent with a 1962 decision from the high court that invalidated a California law criminalizing drug addiction, finding that the government cannot criminally punish a person because of an involuntary status.

• “Just as California crossed the constitutional line when it criminalized simply being in the state while having a narcotic addiction, punishing homeless people for existing in the community without shelter access is cruel, unusual, and impermissible,” lawyers for the homeless individuals told the court.

• Grants Pass attorneys said the same decision drew a line between permissible punishment for conduct and unconstitutional penalties targeting a person’s status. The local laws, they said, are about protecting public safety and health and target the spread of encampments.