Crime rates in California dropped dramatically after the state implemented reforms aimed at reducing incarceration, a new report shows.
The report from the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice shows that the impacts of three critical reforms between 2011 and 2016 are associated with lower crime across almost every category.
That flies in the face of the narrative around crime in the state and in San Francisco, and provides evidence that Prop. 36, which seeks to repeal parts of the 2014 measure that is credited with keeping minor offenders out of jail, will not lead to lower crime rates.
A decade after the reform era, the report notes, the state is facing a false media narrative that CJCJ calls “lying about California.”
“California’s reforms, some of them court mandated, did not bring about more crime,” Mike Males, a PhD sociologist who did the study, said in a webinar Friday. “Rates are at or near record lows in California.”
Males noted that data from the FBI and from state and local law enforcement show very clearly that crime rates were much higher in the days when more police were on the streets, more people were arrested, and more people were locked up.
“In 2005, the peak period of imprisonment, California had very high crime,” Males said.
From the report:
Statistics released this month by the California Department of Justice, clearly show that property crime rates now stand near record lows following a period of major criminal justice reform that includes Public Safety Realignment (2011), Proposition 47 (2014), and Proposition 57 (2016).
Public Safety Realignment moved thousands of people from state prison to local jails and local rehabilitation programs. Prop. 47 reduced a number of nonviolent crimes from felonies, which often mean prison, to misdemeanors, which result in less punitive sentences. Data from some studies shows that the state saved $800 million in taxpayer money by reducing the prison population.
Prop. 57, part of a court-mandated program to reduce radical overcrowding in state prisons, allowed more people to be released on parole and reduced the number of juveniles charged as adults for crimes.
That five-year period was known as the “reform era” in California, and it mirrored efforts in other states to go beyond the era of mass incarceration. It also ushered in several district attorneys who sought to change the way communities address crime, among them Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascon in Los Angeles, and Pamela Price in Alameda County.
Gascon, the former SF district attorney, was a leading proponent of Prop. 47.
Then the pandemic hit—along with social media sites like Nextdoor and Citizen, and a proliferation of home cameras watching the streets.
During the height of the pandemic, Males said, crime was down everywhere; the state was to a great extent closed down.
Then things started to open up—and crimes rates began rising again.
Boudin, after a vicious and inaccurate media stampede, was recalled from office. Price is also facing a recall.
But the current level of everything from violent crime to break-ins, smash and grabs, and commercial theft remains radically lower than it was before the reform era, the CJCJ report says.
That’s not what most people are seeing in the media they experience daily. Part of that, Males said, is that the most serious crimes, that were once the focus of new reports, are now as such low levels that most of us don’t see much reporting on them.
“The media used to be obsessed with violent crime,” he said. “Now they are featuring shoplifting, which indicates to me that the levels of serious crime have dropped so much that they are focusing on lower-level crimes.”
So why do so many people think crime is out of control? “The perception is so high because we live in a more surveillance state, Males said. Every break-in, every attempted theft, is now on social media.
Everyone agrees that at the tail end of the pandemic, when the state began to open up, so did criminals. “The news media act as if this has never happened before,” Males said. “We find that people’s impression of crime is not from personal experience but from the news media.”
For example, the much-discussed smash-and-grab burglaries where someone breaks into a car and steals the contents “were much higher 40 years ago than they are today.”
But we didn’t hear as much about them.
The uptick after the pandemic may also be due to changes in the way the federal Justice Department now collects data. Under the old rules, if a person was charged with multiple crimes—say, they rob a store at gunpoint, a serious felony, then grab a purse from a car, often a misdemeanor, the data only reflected the more serious crime. Now, under the new system, both of those crimes would count in the data, making it appear that crime has gone up, Males said.
But the overall crime rate is still very low compared to historic trends.
Grecia Resendez, a policy analyst at CJCJ, said that the media narrative “has real life consequences.”
If Prop. 36 passes, Resendez said, “it will take money away from K-12 education and mental health services and put it into prisons.”
We already tried that. It didn’t work.
