California Sheriff Now Blasts Newsom’s Failure on Surge in Crime

April 8, 2024

A California sheriff now blasts Newsom’s failure on surge in crime, a problem that has triggered businesses to shut down in prominent areas.

Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco is helping lead an effort to reverse a 2012 ballot measure he says is directly contributing to the homelessness and crime crisis in the Golden State and is calling on Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to get on board.

“California, we’re in a very trying time right now when it comes to public safety and for the most part, from a law enforcement perspective, we can say that, we can attribute the majority of our issues that we are having, or at least, there’s some type of a correlation to them, to the passage of Prop 47 in 2012,” Bianco told Fox News Digital.

Prop 47, passed in 2012, reclassified a number of felonies, including retail and property theft, as misdemeanors.

Under Prop 47, petty theft of goods valued under $950 is classified as a misdemeanor, even for multiple offenses.

It also took a broad swath of narcotics possession offenses that were previously felonies and converted them to misdemeanors, reports Fox News.

Bianco told Fox News Digital that voters were “lied to” about that measure, which he says has contributed to a deterioration in public safety.

“Quite frankly, we were lied to and misled by our state, in that the name and the description on the ballot was not something that we were getting,” Bianco explained.

“We voted for a proposition that was named the Safe Schools and the Safe Streets Initiative and it contained absolutely nothing to do with safe streets or safe schools, and it was everything that is bad about public safety right now, directly contributing to the increase in homelessness, mental health and drug addiction.

Directly resulted in what we see now in our serial theft cases, in our retail theft cases and issues in crime of residential burglaries and those types of things.”

The ballot measure Bianco is hoping will be on the ballot this November, which he calls the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, will undo the lowering of narcotics possession penalties from felonies to misdemeanors, will allow judges to recommend rehab for drug and substance abuse, and will allow prosecutors to add the value amount of multiple thefts together in order to meet the $950 threshold set by Prop 47 thus cracking down on serial thefts.

“If you need help to get fixed, then we should be able to help you.

If you just flat out refuse, and you’re going to continue to use drugs and cause us all to be victimized by your drug addiction and your theft and everything else, then you’re going to suffer the consequences of jail time,” Bianco said.

“It’s just plain and simple.

But the reality is, without consequences, there is no reason for anyone to change behavior, and we need to get past this feel good way of what our legislators are doing now in this, this notion that it’s somebody else’s fault and you’re not responsible for your own actions.

We need to move past that, and we need to get back to a time of common sense that would tell us if we can put you in rehab and help you, then great.

We’ve helped you. We’ve helped society. But otherwise, then you’re going to have to do jail time, so we stop you from victimizing the rest of us.”

Newsom has signaled he opposes the changes to Prop 47, which Bianco says is an example of a failure of leadership.

“Right now, they are against it because, in elementary terms, I guess they’re going to have to admit that Prop 47 was a disaster that they have tried to defend for years since its passing and the reality of a leader, a true leader, is someone that can say, ‘Look, we had good intentions of something, but, we had some unintended consequences that now we have to fix.’

That would have been a leadership way for our government to come out of this ahead. But instead, for the past 10 years, they have completely defended Prop 47.

They have lied to the public.”

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Other Economy News Today

Your favorite tech company now lays off over 600 employees in California, shortly after it canceled a long-running project.

Apple is laying off 614 workers in California, according to a new state filing, the company’s first significant round of job cuts since the Covid pandemic.

The affected Apple employees worked at eight different facilities in Santa Clara, according to the WARN notice posted by California.

The workers were officially informed of the cuts on March 28 and the changes are effective May 27, the filing said.

Apple hasn’t been forced into the same kind of downsizing as its tech peers, largely because the iPhone maker grew more slowly than rivals during the pandemic.

The filing comes weeks after Apple canceled a long-running project to build an electric, self-driving car in a team called the Special Projects Group.

While the California notice didn’t mention the specific projects where jobs are being cut, none of the locations in the filing are at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, but at smaller, satellite offices more likely to house secretive initiatives.

Positions that were cut include machine shop managers, hardware engineers and product design engineers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

An Apple representative declined to comment, per CNBC.

Layoffs in the United States continues to be a developing topic.

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Also Read: A Giant Company Now Announces Unexpected Layoffs in Virginia

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