The ‘Right’ Kind of Crime Is Soaring in San Diego
San Diego is one of the safest big cities in the country to live in.
We’re a border city, and contrary to what fact challenged politicians imply with their rants about migrants crossing into the county, FBI statistics show that crime rates are lower on the border than non-border cities across the country.
The front page of our daily newspaper yesterday included a headline (online edition) proclaiming “San Diego crime down by 3 percent last year.”
Several crime categories saw notable decreases from 2022 to 2023, including prostitution, which fell nearly 30 percent; burglary with a 16 percent decrease; sexual assault, which also dropped 16 percent; and homicide, which saw seven fewer cases, from 52 in 2022 to 45 in 2023.
Other major cities also saw decreases in homicides last year when compared to 2022 — one of several shifts indicating crime figures across the nation are returning to pre-pandemic levels.
In an analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice, 32 of 38 surveyed cities reported fewer homicides in 2023 than in 2022. Aggravated assaults, burglaries and larcenies also saw decreases.
Nonetheless, Supervisorial candidate Kevin Faulconer is thrilled about the prospects of the law enforcement industrial complex campaign to undo elements of Proposition 47, which reformed sentencing and downplayed the need for involuntary confinement. The argyle-gargle mambo jumbo about a $950 bar for felony prosecutions is easily discredited.
Misdemeanor prosecutions have continued in California, and the adjusting for inflation dollar limitation is still lower than it is in 34 other states; Texas, that great paragon of law and order, has a $2500 threshold mandating felony prosecution.
Mayor Todd Gloria, who mentioned locked cabinets in stores by way of driving home his allyship with the retail industry in his state of the city speech, is also part of the chorus cheering for greater sentences. To be truthful, he has little choice– soft on crime accusations can be lethal for liberals, and he already brought on the enmity of the SD Police Officers Association by attempting to mandate Covid vaccinations.
If his honor would visit Target in Mission Valley, he’d find many of those cabinets unlocked and open. People weren’t buying stuff; they didn’t want to wait for permission to select their purchases. And the messaging that such actions were supposed to be delivering wasn’t getting through, in part because the same merchandise could be bought and delivered from Target’s website.
Crime may be down, but fear mongering on the subject hasn’t been this intense since Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for president. Videos of wanton shoplifting are repeated often. Retail businesses are seeing less foot traffic because consumers are being taught to believe there may be danger lurking on their premises.
From the 11/29/2023 New York Times:
Is the U.S. in the middle of a shoplifting wave? Target and other retail chains have warned of widespread theft. News outlets have amplified the story. On social media, people have posted videos of thieves looting stores.
But the increase in shoplifting appears to be limited to a few cities, rather than being truly national. In most of the country, retail theft has been lower this year than it was a few years ago, according to police data. There are some exceptions, particularly New York City, where shoplifting has spiked. But outside New York, shoplifting incidents in major cities have fallen 7 percent since 2019, before the Covid pandemic.
Since this set of falsehoods about crime is repeated endlessly it feeds a broader trend, namely that the public often overestimates crime. Over the past two decades, most Americans have said that crime is rising, according to Gallup’s surveys. In reality, crime rates have generally plummeted since the 1990s.
Reactionary politicians are flat-out lying about crime as a means of pandering to voters yearning for a more authoritarian society where arrests are made as a form of regulating humans who don’t fit into supremacist stereotypes.
While we’re safer in terms of homicides, sexual assaults and thefts, we do have crime problems.
The spike in animal cruelty arrests, given the often single digit numbers involved, may well be an anomaly.
On the other hand, hate crimes are up by 75% in San Diego, which is consistent with other cities around the country. Locally, a third were racially motivated, but the biggest increase were incidents attributable to religious bias; nearly half of that increase had an antisemitic basis.
While antisemitism has manifested itself with political extremists both left and right, the right wing flavor dominates prosecutorial caseloads. The Great Replacement Theory at the heart of modern day bigotry has its origins in antisemitism.
Once far out conspiracies about wealthy Jewish donors (like George Soros) have moved toward the mainstream to the point where it’s an article of faith in law enforcement circles.
Cult leader Donald Trump blames his court troubles on Soros-funded prosecutors and judges. And when the former president speaks ill of someone, a torrent of death threats follows. A recent court ruling was withheld until such time as security arrangements could be made for the family of the judge in question.
So, using the same sort of logic being applied to shoplifting propaganda, is it safe to say that hate crimes are up because perpetrators think they’ll be given a pass by law enforcement? Or is it because bigotry is simply not the sort of crime that the powers that be consider to be worthy.
It’s not such a far out concept here in San Diego, given the deference shown by the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office, and the SDPD to street thugs disrupting protests over the past few years.
I’m not advocating for law enforcement to embrace chasing bigots in order to bring them to justice, in part because such activities would be a waste of time. The dirty little secret about cops in general is that they don’t actually solve a majority of the crimes reactionary politicians use to make the electorate afraid.
A February, 2024 report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice crunched the numbers and came to conclusions piercing the veil of the promoted image of what California law enforcement actually does and doesn’t do.
Despite budgets (adjusted for inflation) that increased the per capita rate of law enforcement funding by 52% over the past three decades, the clearance rate (crimes solved) has fallen from 23% to 13.2%.
Declining clearance rates, not reforms, drove down new prison admissions for property offenses - Opponents have criticized Proposition 47, as well as “liberal” prosecutors, as too lenient towards people who have committed serious property offenses (Washburn, 2022).
However, police clearance data suggest that this blame is misplaced. In fact, while prison admissions for property offenses did fall by 24% from 2014 (just before Proposition 47 took effect) to 2022, much of the responsibility for this decline lies with police departments whose felony property crime clearance rates fell even faster (by 50%) during the period.
In fact, the likelihood of prison admissions per cleared property offense rose by 13% from 2014 to 2019, the latest year before COVID-19 restrictions temporarily reduced new prison admissions. Imprisonment rates per property offense rebounded in 2022 to levels 26% higher than 2014.
The bottom line here isn’t that police officers are deliberately incompetent, it’s that solutions to crime are inadequate, and “fighting crime” by using the threat of force or involuntary confinement is analogous to “solving homelessness” by creating more shelter beds.
These are societal problems largely driven by economic policy, inbred bigotry, and opportunist politicians. Wait! Did I just say Kevin Faulconer (and politicians generally) are facilitating anti-social and anti-property offenses? Why yes, yes I did.
When governments continue using the same solutions and getting the same results, perhaps it’s time to consider other alternatives. By repeating the stereotypes of criminals and failing to acknowledge the root causes, politicians like incumbent Mayor Todd Gloria are merely pandering to fear mongers and fascists.
Law enforcement is the primary source of contact between governments and individuals in many communities; it should be treated that way. No, cops don’t need to become Mr. Rogers to neighborhoods; they need to be trained to assist in directing available resources to the general population.
Of course, those “available resources” are perpetually in short supply, but that’s another conversation for a different day.
Oh, and one other form of crime that needs referencing is the general condition of our jails.
This is about more than just the deaths, which are symptomatic of the practices used in running these places apart from society. The fact that sworn personnel are so against screening for drugs –and that this opposition is used as a form of political blackmail – should tell us all we need to know about the incarceration culture tolerated by society. Jail based deaths and brutality are apparently the right kind of crime.
No politician in their right mind dares take on the law enforcement establishment; being soft on crime is right up there with being a pedophile as far as the public is concerned. That also is a conversation needing to take place.
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Thursday’s Noteworthy News Links
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Baseball, Community, and the Meaning of the Crowd by Jim Miller at our sister Substack, The Jumping Off Place. (I’m a founding editor)
Hence, beneath all the commercialism and competitive rivalry is a deeper yearning for community that we dismiss at our peril. For if all crowds are reduced to “mobs” or “the duped masses” there’s ultimately not much hope for democracy in the end. And the more we replace the messy experience of the face-to-face social encounter with our fixed and mobile screens, the further we move beyond old fashioned alienation toward an ever-more-affectless society, one solely centered on the atomized isolated individual.
To yearn for the crowd is to yearn for belonging in community--to dream of some kind of connectedness with your fellow humans. People look to sports for a sense of something larger because, as Robert Putnam noted in Bowling Alone, social capital has severely eroded throughout our society.
So, people look for some kind of connectedness. And there’s something to be said for that. As we head into an electoral season where much of the country will be flirting with fascism, perhaps it is a mistake to give up on the messy, contradictory crowd with all its love, hatred, and chaotic excess. Spending too much time alone together on cellphones, social media, and Zoom screens hasn’t worked out that well for us either, to put it mildly.
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A guide to electric car misinformation (part 1) by Emily Atkin at HEATED
The closer we get to the 2024 presidential election, the more sketchy information you’re going to hear about electric cars.
Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have decided to make electric cars central to their campaigns. Biden is doing this by promoting his administration’s efforts to expand EV production and ownership, and Trump is doing this by attacking those efforts.
GOP polling has shown that attacking electric vehicle policy has been “amazing” for Republicans, former Trump energy advisor Michael McKenna recently told the New York Times. And Biden’s EV policies have drawn praise from both green groups and the United Auto Workers union—two important political constituencies.
So the EV political discourse isn’t likely to die down soon, which is generally bad news for public understanding. Because political actors aren’t primarily motivated by helping you understand reality; they’re primarily motivated by inflaming or exciting you into making a certain political decision.
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Red Scare - MAGA resurrects the threat of communism by Nina Burleigh at American Freakshow
The weird furor over “commies” and “cultural Marxism” in America exists in parallel with a trend on the right toward adulation of foreign capitalist autocrats. Hungary, for example, a country most Americans associate with goulash and Zsa Zsa Gabor has come to play a significant role in our national politics. Trump recently met with Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, a man who has achieved hero status on the American right for his nativism, his claim to be a white Christian bulwark on the edge of the Asiatic East with its hordes of migrants moving toward the EU, and his anti-gay and forced birth positions. The EU has declared his government an electoral autocracy - defined as having elections but with speech and association repression that undermines the very notion of democracy.
The Hungarian people, of course, do have in their national memory the experience of being violently invaded by a nominally communist country, the former USSR. Billions of people in China live in a nominally communist country that operates like a capitalist autocracy. But as former CIA covert agent John Sipher pointed out yesterday in a hilarious Tweet, most of the commie-obsessed Americans have no idea what the word “communism” even means. The Oxford English dictionary definition of communism is: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.
Other than our national parks and BLM lands, most U.S. property is privately owned. We’ve never had a class war. Workers most definitely are not paid according to their abilities and needs. Americans have never experienced communism and likely never will. The far greater and more imminent threat to our democracy and way of life is the autocracy that MAGA yearns for.
