Don’t Be Fooled by California’s Anti-Prop 47 Movement

In California, there’s a movement afoot to get tough on crime, with advocates citing a ballot measure (Prop 47) approved by 59.6% of the electorate a decade ago as a problem. Law and order types want us voters to send more people to jail, when data proves this isn’t a solution.

The movement afoot to regress rather than reform changes of California’s flavor of three strikes is living proof of a school of thought not tied to party lines. Plenty of Democrats want in on this action. Fear is a basic human  motivator and it only takes a couple of lies to trigger a stampede.

Alleged mega-shoplifting crimes are the basis for the ripples of racism coursing through the blue state of California. Even though the foundational narratives are often disproved, the combination of “taking” by “others” is a siren song for people who otherwise may seem to have good intentions.

Hence we saw the gaggle of San Diego County Mayors standing beside District Attorney Summer Stephan for TV cameras last week, calling for signatures to get the “Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act” on the November ballot.

The ‘problem’ driving this sort of showboating by law enforcement and politicos comes from –I would say deliberately-- a fabricated impression of retail reality that manages to overlook many of the causes of an unsustainable way of doing business.

Are there actual crimes by random individuals occurring? Sure. But that’s not what’s driving store closures and walled off merchandise, the two things often offered up as proof of this crime wave. In fact, asked to provide data about a statewide retail crime wave, advocates for harsher penalties come up empty-handed.

Via the Los Angeles Times:

• Jeff Kreshek, a senior vice president at Federal Realty Investment Trust, which he said owns 102 shopping centers nationally and across California, said the problem is more pervasive and pronounced in the Golden State “than any other place we have property.”

• But when asked to provide data by lawmakers at last week’s hearing, he came up empty-handed.

• “I asked 15 retailers for data [before this] and they couldn’t provide it. I realize it makes your job harder,” he told the committee. “My data is stores closing, retailers not being able to hire. Consumers telling us they don’t feel safe going out.”

Even San Francisco, oft cited as a shoplifting mecca, has fallen victim to what ultimately is an attempt to regulate online retailers and make citizens afraid of “others” be they homeless and/or of color.

From the New York Times:

• One of the most prominent examples came in October 2021, when Walgreens said it would close five stores in San Francisco, citing repeated instances of organized shoplifting. The company’s decision had come months after a video seen millions of times showed a man, garbage bag in hand, openly stealing products from a Walgreens as others watched.

• But an October 2021 analysis by The San Francisco Chronicle showed that Police Department data on shoplifting did not support Walgreen’s explanation for the store closings.

• Eventually, Walgreens retreated from its claims. In January, an executive at the company said that Walgreens might have overstated the effects on its business, saying: “Maybe we cried too much last year.”

The National Retail Federation was forced to retract claims it made about shoplifting being responsible for nearly half the $94.5 billion in store merchandise disappearing in 2021. 

Organized crime, including drug cartels, are, in fact, operating on-line markets where pilfered goods can be bought for better-than-retail prices. These virtual storefronts can even place specific orders for what gets stolen. 

Thinking that stiffened sentences for low level mules will stop this type of crime is absurd. Study after study after study using real data, rather than feelings, fails to find a connection between imprisonment and crime reduction. The exceptions to the rule (mostly data from the 1990s) show that deterrence is minimal. 

These propaganda efforts try to build upon “common sense,”  as in “everybody knows.” Everybody knows how successful the War on Drugs was, right? Ooops. We continue to spend more money on law enforcement while actual drug use is mostly unchanged. (There is hope for Gen Z, but no proof that illegality is a factor)

Now that fentanyl overdoses and deaths have become a media focus, the same sort of misdirection being used about shoplifting applies. Drug trafficking, according to the usual common sense purveyors of information, is inexorably tied to migration, with the solution supposedly being that if the “illegals” are stopped so will drug smuggling. Human beings carrying backpacks (about 80 lbs is normal for those that get caught) are an inefficient, unreliable, and costly means of transport. It happens, but the real shipments come via the 11 million containers unloaded at US ports annually. Only 4% of these containers are inspected, and when drugs are found the quantities are greater than an army of smugglers could carry.

Those arguing against incarceration as a means of mass control, need only point out that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the countries nearest us on a comparative chart all have authoritarian governments. More to the point, incarceration on a mass level is a waste of money. (Yes, some people need to be kept away from the rest of us, but that number is miniscule compared to the lives we’re throwing away now.)

I draw this conclusion based on studies done by the Prison Policy Initiative:

Here’s what they concluded:

• For four decades, the U.S. has been engaged in a globally unprecedented experiment to make every part of its criminal justice system more expansive and more punitive. As a result, incarceration has become the nation’s default response to crime, with, for example, 70 percent of convictions resulting in confinement — far more than other developed nations with comparable crime rates.  Our new analysis of incarceration rates and crime rates across the world reveals that the U.S.’s high incarceration rates are not a rational response to high crime rate, but rather a politically expedient response to public fears and perceptions about crime and violence.

• Today, there is finally serious talk of change, but little action that would bring the United States to an incarceration rate on par with other stable democracies. The incremental changes made in recent years aren’t enough to counteract the bad policy choices built up in every state over decades. For that, all states will have to aim higher, striving to be not just better than the worst U.S. states, but among the most fair and just in the world.

All this crime talk is handy, because it keeps us distracted. With instances of shoplifting offered up as bait, we’re less concerned about the bad (for us) choices being made to increase profitability in the retail field. 

The buildings many of the bigger name stores inhabit are being threatened by a slow, steady collapse of the commercial real estate market. The labor systems that exploit people with unpredictable schedules and unseeing management are being threatened by both union militancy and technology. 

Stock buybacks and debt shuffling are the new measures of success, not quality of product or public appeal.

Consumers aren’t paying for “shrinkage,” they’re paying to enable investors to squeeze every last dime out of a brick and mortar distribution scheme while they still can.

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Monday News You Should Read

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The Anti-Abortion Blueprint by Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day

• Since Roe was overturned, I’ve covered all sorts of anti-abortion legislation: bills that would criminalize miscarriage, legislation to track pregnant women’s data, even bills that would make abortion punishable by the death penalty. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a bill like this one out of Oklahoma, though—which so perfectly captures the anti-abortion movement’s goals for the entire country.

• Oklahoma House Bill 3216 epitomizes so much of what I’ve warned about since launching Abortion, Every Day: It would ban emergency contraception and IUDs, create a state database of women who have had an abortions, potentially force doctors to perform c-sections instead of providing life-saving abortions, and redefine life-saving abortions as “pre-viability separation procedures.”

• In short, it’s an anti-abortion dream bill. Which makes sense, given that Oklahoma Republican Rep. Kevin West wrote it with Alliance Defending Freedom—the conservative legal group that overturned Roe and is going after mifepristone. That means this legislation is a model for what the anti-abortion movement wants to see nationally.

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Opinion - How Trump pushed Silicon Valley off the rails By Kara Swisher at the Washington Post

• Over time, I’ve come to settle on a theory that tech people embrace one of two pop culture visions of the future. First, there’s the “Star Wars” view, which pits the forces of good against the Dark Side. And, as we know, the Dark Side puts up a disturbingly good fight. While the Death Star gets destroyed, heroes die and then it inevitably gets rebuilt. Evil, in fact, does tend to prevail.

• Then there’s the “Star Trek” view, in which a crew works together to travel to distant worlds like an interstellar Benetton commercial, promoting tolerance and persuading villains not to be villains. It often works. I am, no surprise, a Trekkie, and I am not alone. At a 2007 AllThingsD conference tech columnist Walt Mossberg and I hosted, Apple legend Steve Jobs appeared onstage and said: “I like ‘Star Trek.’ I want ‘Star Trek.’”

• Now Jobs is long dead, and the “Star Wars” version seems to have won. Even if it were never the intention, tech companies became key players in killing our comity and stymieing our politics, our government, our social fabric, and, most of all, our minds by seeding isolation, outrage and addictive behavior. Innocuous boy-kings who wanted to make the world a better place and ended up cosplaying Darth Vader feels like science fiction. But it all really happened.

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Trump sneakers? Whichever presidential candidate offers the best footwear gets my vote. By Rex Huppke at USA Today Opinion

• Remarkably, the sneakers look exactly like the kind of sneaker you’d expect from a man who created a fake university named after himself and then had to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits accusing him of fraud.

• The sneakers are (possibly spray-painted?) gold, including the laces. They have a big “T” on them in various places. And they have a sort-of American flag thingy wrapped around the ankles.

• They’re the go-to athletic shoe for people fleeing responsibility.

• They look as if someone took all the tacky couture from a random night at Mar-a-Lago, put it in a blender and then poured it onto a cheap pair of high-tops that, in their defense, never did anything to deserve such a fate.