California's Crime Wave - What's the Problem - Full Documentary

Violent crime is way up, plaguing our local communities right now. I don't even care where you are in the city, you will feel it. We don't wear jewelry anymore, we don't wear our watches. The escalation in crime is forcing us to change our living habit. Why is crime going up? Why is this happening? By the time the cops show up, they're gone. We're spread far, too far. With that, the crooks know it, so... You can make statistics say whatever you want. What about the police? Sometimes it's better not to do anything. If you didn't commit crime and not go to jail, what would you do? Would you stop doing it? We've seen an effort to just reduce sentences altogether. You do all that, you don't have much of a system left. If it were as simple as just an incarceration model, I think we would all sign up for it. North shuttle 7087, fly level 400. North shuttle 7087, good afternoon. We are approaching our destination, Los Angeles International Airport, and we expect to be on ground... Just six miles north of Los Angeles International Airport lies one of the most desirable places to live in Southern California. ...popular family-friendly destination. It's a great place to get outside and enjoy... It is also rated as one of the safest neighborhoods in the greater Los Angeles area. ...all here in the marina, Marina Del Rey... Home prices here are nearly double the national average. ...is the only dream that has ever come true for this one and a half square miles... With its vibrant coastal community, luxury hotels, and stunning beaches... It's going to be perfect though, right, Rick? Marina Del Rey's charm lies in its walkable neighborhoods where residents enjoy the quintessential California lifestyle. Today, about 8,000 people live in the marina, either in apartments... My brother and I moved here in 1995. Since 95, we've seen sort of a huge improvement in California, and now over the last five, six, seven years, it has really started to regress and become more dangerous than it was in the 90s. It happened on Sunday 5, 10 in the afternoon here in Hancock Park. That mom, police say, out for a walk. Her baby in the stroller, she had just returned home, opened up the security gate... When two men followed them to their doorstep, and that's when things really got scary. We're back to a point where it's dangerous to walk out at night. Hancock Park on alert tonight after that mother was followed home and robbed. You have to be very careful about going to restaurants. My friends and family and neighbors, we don't wear jewelry anymore, we don't wear our watches. Pulled out guns, surrounded them, and then demanded their property. The victims gave them two expensive watches and the robbers took off. I mean, social media is full of videos of random attackers coming out, you know, walking into restaurants, sticking guns into people's faces and taking all their belongings. What's scary is how blatant these men were, doing this in the middle of the afternoon in front of dozens of witnesses and cameras. I think you'd have to be crazy to go into areas of Hollywood, Melrose, Fairfax, where a lot of these robberies, even Beverly Hills. And this is probably one of the nicest parts of downtown, a very upscale... If you're driving around in a nice car, you've worked really hard to attain a certain amount of sort of status symbols. That now makes you a target. And gangs are following people home and robbing you in your own home. And it's happening almost every day. In terms of the criminal element, they're always going to exist in society. They're going to be the thieves. They're going to be the rapists. They're going to be the people that are prone to violence. They're going to be the people who commit sophisticated frauds. You're always going to have that criminal element. Some people, that is the way they exist. So the only way you can impact that is through your policies and the people you have that fight the criminal element. Police and prosecutors. If you have ineffective law enforcement, well, the criminal element is going to have a certain advantage. They can get away with stuff they shouldn't get away with. Here in this building works your champion of justice, your public prosecutor, whose job it is to deal vengeance to the guilty and mercy to the oppressed. Come with us now. Are we weak prosecutors? Well, then the criminal elements are still going to have an advantage. They're not going to be dealt with. They're not going to be eliminated from society. So they'll just keep committing their crimes. And you're going to have a crime-ridden society. Los Angeles at a rate we haven't seen in decades. We're going to have the public at large very fearful. People have been murdered. Because they're going to know about the crime. And that denigrates society. It reduces the quality of life. At night, basically the 3 a.m. was like the witching hour. Luckily, we had installed a pretty extensive network of high-resolution cameras. A bank vault style door. Every morning while I'd enjoy my coffee, we'd review how many different criminals tried to break into our house. And I kept a folder on my desktop of all these events. Every night we'd have people stalking through the neighborhoods, breaking into, jumping gates, forcing through windows, forcing through your main entry doors. So one night, one of our dogs started to bark a little bit. And my wife wakes me up. And I hear this peep, peep, peep. And I'm like, that's the entry code system at the front gate. So we get up. And lo and behold, there are some what look like homeless individuals. They were trying to get into our property. We had to call the security service. And they ran off. And the security service only missed them by about one minute. It has become sometimes that's a weekly event. Eventually got to the point where we had to start organizing our community. So I presented a lot of these videos to the HOA. It ended up with a huge majority, over 80% of the homeowners voted in favor of an armed service with a security guard with a firearm. I think two, three years ago, the notion that they would approve having someone with a gun walking around their neighborhood at night would have probably been the other way around. But it has really flipped the electorate here. People are tired of the crime. And they're very worried about what's happening to not just Los Angeles, but California as a whole. It's a concerning trend. One that California hasn't seen in decades. Today, communities throughout California are catching a big wave. Los Angeles is certainly not alone. That crime has worsened in San Francisco in recent years. And that poll also found that more than 40% of people surveyed would like to move out of the city in the next few years. Many already have. I mean, I think the city has changed drastically in the last 10 years. There's a lot of good. But just recently, there's also been a lot of negative parts of the city. And it's sad to see as a citizen that's been here for so long. Michael Xu is the owner of a small boutique located in the Sunset District in San Francisco. We've been here for over 15 years. I've always loved shoes. Shoes have been my passion. So it was almost natural that I took over a shoe store. It's almost like a dream. Francisco tonight, many small businesses that weather the pandemic are barely hanging on. And now they are getting hit by a crime wave. Vandals, thieves and burglars are hitting already struggling small businesses, many of them Asian owned. Michael Xu was among many small business owners who got hit by thieves multiple times. SFPD says burglaries have gone up more than 100%. Anytime you turn on the news, there's something happening every day. Crime is there and it seems like there's no consequences. So just recently, what we hear is it's okay to steal. That's almost the message that we're sending out in the media because nothing's being done. They're telling tourists not to rent cars. That's almost telling tourists don't come to San Francisco because you will get robbed one way or another. So has it become okay to steal in San Francisco? Mobs of looters storming and ransacking high-end stores in the San Francisco area and they appear to be organized. And it is chaotic. Take a look. People running in all directions. It's bad. It's beyond bad. It should never be this bad in a major metropolitan city. It happened three days in a row. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Here's video at Nordstrom where a wave of thieves struck at the same time. Police say it was clearly a planned event and one store employee was even pepper sprayed. Most of the time they take merchandise to sell off for financial gain. So they don't even use the merchandise themselves personally. Now three of the top cities for organized retail theft in the United States are in California. What makes it complex is that the ones who are stealing are referred to as boosters. Booster, it's a job. A booster wakes up in the morning and that's what they're out to do. Boosters can be someone on a local level who only hit the stores in the city or the town where they live. The next level of boosters are the ones who jump around from town to town or city to city. The merchandise goes to what's called a fencer. And the fencer is the one who will mark and sell the products. And they will do a process which is called cleaning the merchandise. Removing all the stickers and anything that would indicate where that particular item was stolen from. The fencers, they are using everything that we have out there. Getting online, selling the merchandise online, from social media to chat platforms to mobile devices, texting and so forth. Sounds like a very elaborate operation. It does, but it's really not that complicated. That's why it's so successful. This is the San Francisco we know and love. Framed by the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay, preserving and enhancing the city's unique human scale and livability require a special effort by its caring citizens. Realizing a dream, we invite you to be a part of it. Now, some of the San Francisco residents are complaining about crime. And what is happening over the last 10 years, there's been a shift from what it looks like from you guys' perspective. Tell us what the residents feel about what's going on in the city. Well, obviously, this is an urban area. It's a city. There's always been crime. There will always be crime, right? You can't, you will never eradicate it. But it has ramped up lately. The escalation is absolute. It is marked. I think most people in just about any area of the city are now feeling it very much on a personal level. And that's different. That's different. I never used to see the amount of shoplifting that we have today, never. And there's nothing that data can say that saying that it's not happening. The DA is saying that it's not happening. People who've got a vested interest in saying that it's not happening it makes no sense. We see it. We see it every day. You could go into Walgreens right now or Target or Safeway, hang around for five minutes. You'll see it. So I don't even care where you are in the city. In just about every retail store, you will feel it. However, what we saw and heard on the ground contradicts recent crime statistics. According to official data, violent and property crime rates have hit historic lows in California in recent years. So could the data be wrong? Or is the rising crime anecdotal? Statistics in San Francisco, and I'm sure it's this way in any municipality in America today, you can make statistics say whatever you want. We're going to get one group of statistics from the mayor's office that's going to try to convince you that crime in some important areas is going down. You're going to get another group of statistics from the cops that are going to tell you it's going down in other areas and going up in some areas. The DA is going to give you a different story. So let's put the statistics out of the way. If you ask the average San Franciscan living in this city today, is crime on the uptake? He's going to look at you and think you're crazy. It's gone wild to the point where the average person is now afraid to go downtown. The mayor's office likes to blame the DA. The DA likes to blame the cops. Cops like to blame the DA. If we don't turn things around, we're going to become another Detroit. And if you ever mentioned that to a San Franciscan 20 years ago, they'd say it's impossible. 10 years ago, it's impossible. To understand why we're experiencing a rise in crime and how data can fit into the current situation, I went to talk to someone who has been investigating California's most pressing issues. Michael Schallenberger is an independent journalist and author. We are hearing anecdotally that crime is on the rise, but the numbers are not looking that crime is going up a lot in California. Can you tell us what's going on with crime? Sure. I mean, there's been a concerted effort to deny the increase in crime in California over the last year and a half. But we know that homicides increased significantly nationwide by 30 percent in 2020. We know that homicides have increased even more than that in the year 2021. We now know that homicides have increased in California's largest cities by 17 percent in the year 2021. And we know that property crimes have increased by 7 percent in major cities in California as well. That's just the official numbers. There's good reason to think that crime has actually increased significantly more than that. And the reason for that is that there's just a very large number of people that report that they no longer report crimes, particularly property crimes, car break-ins, shoplifting, other kinds of theft, because the police don't respond. And the police aren't responding for two reasons. The first is that the police forces themselves have been absolutely decimated. The police force of Los Angeles lacks 500 officers. In San Francisco, they lack at least 300 officers. And the other issue is, of course, that the district attorneys of both San Francisco and Los Angeles are not prosecuting many crimes. And so we've seen basically a withdrawal of police officers from making arrests, from taking reports, and then also a significant reduction of ordinary people being willing to file reports. So I did my own research to see how much the data is different from what we heard on the ground. And what I found was truly astonishing. Take shoplifting, for instance. Official data from the San Francisco Police Department says that there were about 3,000 shoplifting incidents in 2021. That's only eight incidents per day throughout the entire city, which has about 10,000 retail stores. It seems like a small number. And this data is often used by many officials and news media. I did a public records request to SFPD to find out what those shoplifting cases entailed. And they were all violent shoplifting that required the police to come out. Former San Francisco police officer Lou Barberini has been investigating these shoplifting cases. There's a lot of shoplifting or tons of shoplifting that occur that do not require a police response. Everybody's pretty much just been desensitized to the shoplifting. And I spoke to a security guard at the Walgreens on 4th and Market, and he told me he has 20 shoplifting cases a day. In just one store, right? And that was just one store. So we know that we've seen a significant rise in crime officially. We've also seen a decline in reports, and we've seen a decline in arrests. So people are not imagining things. Crime really is rising. After talking to multiple experts, we realized that we need to look at the data in a different way. Yes, the surge in violent crime, of course, is very frightening. But the murder rate is especially troubling. Now, what everyone is asking, is this due to COVID or is it here to stay? In general, homicide is a really, really good bellwether of reality. Douglas Eckenrod is the former deputy director of California State Parole. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department data from January 1 to December 31st of 19 to 2021. Immediately, what strikes me here is a disconnect between the criminal homicide rates that have exploded much larger than the rest of the state of California. We're looking at two-year changes here that are approaching 100%. And when you look over time with criminal justice data, you see that there's a relationship between homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault. Generally, those numbers kind of, through common sense, work together. And so when you see specific municipalities, specific jurisdictions, break that connection between criminal homicide, which is sort of a number that can't really be tinkered with. It's a person who's deceased and a coroner's made a determination it was a homicide. When you see that number break from the associated numbers like robbery and aggravated assault, you see one go up and the others trend stabler down. There appears to be a reporting problem there in my estimation. All crime across California in aggregate has gone up. But you see some anomalous counties where I believe there's an under-reporting of crime, either intentional or unintentional. They can't hide the 93% increase in homicide number. Why can't they hide the homicide? Well, you know, when somebody is deceased and the coroner makes a decision, there's a tally, that number's captured. So based on your experience, the only data that we can trust now is the homicide data. You know, I think there's some counties that are doing a fantastic job and their numbers are right on point and they tell the truth, good or bad. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has done a fantastic job and even a better job than that considering what's happened to their budget. What do you think will happen to us in the next couple of years? Do you think crime is headed to get worse? I suspect that the Sheriff's Department likely has a chart that projects out at this pace. And this red number of 98% is going to turn into 110% and 130% and 150% unless exigent action is taken today. It looks like crime is on the rise and the criminals are becoming bold. So I thought we should talk to the police to see how they're dealing with it. So I'm Rich Sabati. I'm a sergeant in the San Francisco Police Department. Driving these guys around and showing what's going on in San Francisco. Richard Sabati has been a San Francisco police officer for over 14 years. He shares what it's like to be a police officer in a major metropolitan city these days. These are all my own personal opinions. So the parking lot back there is known for a lot of car break-ins. There's usually kind of roving crews that go around the city hitting cars and breaking windows. Over here this car was, the wheels were stripped off the other day. Made the news yesterday. So. What about the police doing about it? How does the police feel about these crimes? Do they, can they do much about it? It's a hard crime to arrest people for because you usually have to try to catch them in the act. We do have, we had plainclothes teams that were doing a pretty good job of catching people. But you know once we arrest people and then it goes to the district attorney's office. After that it's up to the district attorney's office to provide some kind of consequence. How about the police force in San Francisco? If you can explain what's going on with the police force. I mean I've been in the police department for 14 years and I don't think I've ever seen morale lower. People are leaving in droves. We probably lose five to ten officers a month right now. A lot of cops have felt like they've lost a purpose. They've gotten the job because they wanted to help people and go out and you know make arrests and try to improve life in the community. But when they go out and they make arrests and then either get in trouble from our local civilian oversight board or when the people that they arrest are getting no consequence. It feels like they've lost their purpose of their mission. Today San Francisco police officers are facing a different kind of problem. One that challenges the accountability and trust in their line of work. Leaving many officers feeling like they're handcuffed. We have a civilian review board that's very aggressive. Which we have a few thousand pages of policy. So the chances that you'll run afoul of some rule even minuscule are possible. So you have possible administrative consequences. I think every time they take an action they're looking over the shoulder. How is this going to be perceived? And so they're hesitant. They're hesitant to make decisions. A lot of micromanaging and microprocessing every single act that they do. Sometimes it's better not to do anything unfortunately for the police officers than to take action. But then also if something goes wrong on the call and then now you have to use force and somebody gets injured and the DA investigates and thinks that that use of force was you know excessive or wasn't necessary. Then now all of a sudden you yourself could be subject to criminal prosecution. So that's you know constant you know worry I would say in people's minds. Now you were a police officer right for how long? 21 years. If you were to join the force today would you do it? If I was going to join the police department now I'd do it because I was hoping that things would change. Only with that. If it's going to be this way from here on out I would not want to be a police officer. I think it's really tough. I think to be a police officer in any big city or San Francisco right now you're heroic because there's so many things you're working against. The media, the perception that you're all out there racist and biased and so it's really difficult. Police are leaving the Oakland Police Department in record numbers. Reports that resignations were up 45 percent in the last year alone. Retirements up by 18 percent. And police officers across the nation are turning in their badges at an alarming rate. Police department also seeing a shortage as well and seeing fewer applicants this year. With respect to law enforcement in Los Angeles County I think it's fair to say that morale is in the toilet. Many people who might be inclined to go in law enforcement really good candidates are saying you know law enforcement's not respected by the public at large. They're unnecessarily criticized. In some cases wrongly prosecuted. Why should I become a law enforcement officer? Then you have more and more law enforcement officers saying I've pretty much had it. They'll either leave the jurisdiction where they served proudly or they's retired. So this one goes from here to Citrus APU. Oh so this is going north to get out. It goes north. Oh yeah. They're going to get on this one. You want to get on this one? With the defunding of law enforcement and our withdrawal I mean we're the most understaffed agency in the entire nation. It's not even close. NYPD has four cops for every 1,000 residents. I have 0.9 cops or deputies for every 1,000 residents in LA. Alex Villanueva is the sheriff of Los Angeles County. The largest sheriff's department in the country. We're spread far too far and with that the crooks know it. So they have a reasonable expectancy they can do a heinous crime and get away with it. At least in the short term. So this is our problem station. We have a lot of transient population. They hit this target regularly. They do the smash and grab on a regular basis. And the fact is when I'm missing 25 percent of my entire detective division that's less detectives solving crimes, solving homicides, the robberies, the rapes, all the things that we do. I have for every four detectives I only have three which means they have to carry the workload of the other ones that's missing. That is a consequence of defunding. That means the bad guys are longer out there on the street committing more crimes, victimizing more people. It takes that much longer to finally get a hold of and we do catch them, put them in jail. Now we're troubled with lack of personnel to keep everyone in jail because again defunding has consequences. Were they thinking of putting this money somewhere else? Were they having different ideas? What were they going to do? What was the plan? Well the public face of their plan is oh we want to reimagine. We're going to reinvest. They have all these big flurry ideas. Let's reinvest in the community. Let's reinvest in social engineering is what they're thinking. We're going to go to the root cause of crime and let's spend our money there so we don't have to pay for the consequences. Well that's like offering a person in the desert who is dying of thirst and heat, let's plant a tree. Does absolutely nothing for that person. The progressive reforms were a response to a historic period in California's criminal justice system. Over the decades, California's criminal justice system has gone through many major reforms. The question of whether to be tough on crime or soft on crime has been a long-lasting debate. Both approaches have faced a major backlash in the past. Long before he became governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger had expressed his interest in helping prison inmates rehabilitate. In 2006, he incorporated the word rehabilitation into the California's Department of Corrections name and restructured the agency. It was an attempt to strike a balance between being tough on crime while at the same time reducing the prison population. However, the prison population didn't decline and cost per inmate skyrocketed, forcing California to think of new ways to approach the problem. One that would prevent incarceration in the first place. Trust me, if we can spend the money in prison on somebody, we can spend the money up front to avoid sending them to prison because we're all safer for it. Public defender Matt Gonzalez is an advocate of progressive reform within the California's justice system. I mean, if somebody, for most offenses, if somebody is never going to do them again, then as a society, we have succeeded. So in the old days, if you sold marijuana, you might go to prison. You sold a little bit of whatever drug it was, you might go to prison, but you come out as a felon versus, hey, we've got a case against you. Go enroll in college and we will, uh, we'll dismiss the case or we'll let you end up with a misdemeanor or you go get a GED and show that you're trying to improve your life. You know, those are the real social impacts. It was under this premise that the progressive district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco ran for office and got elected. Getting at the root causes of crime by treating people like human beings, with compassion, with dignity, by understanding the need to lift up our healthcare workers and our educators to invest in schools and hospitals, not in new jails. Recognizing that we cannot arrest or prosecute ourself out of these problems and anytime that we can intervene and prevent violence from occurring in the first place, we're actually creating a better community for all of us. It's to look at violence through a public health lens. It must demand that we stop using the jail as the primary place to treat people suffering from mental illness. Movement must demand police accountability. Ending racial disparities at every step of the criminal justice system. Using science and data, we're crafting thoughtful, humane policies that are helping to build safer and healthier communities across this nation by both holding people accountable, addressing the root causes of criminal behavior, and providing trauma-informed services to victims and survivors of crime. Now, do you think we have two extremes? One is that we go to one extreme, like we advocate for the victims, we don't want to give second chance, or we go to another extreme where, you know, we may not want to advocate for the victims. Yeah, I mean, these are a couple of different ideas. I mean, I would say that what motivates progressive prosecution or the reforms that are being fought over are, in fact, about trying to make people safer. But the question is, what path utilizes a strategy that's going to try to make a person whole again and law-abiding? And if it were as simple as just an incarceration model, I think we would all sign up for it. From the 80s to the early 2000s, California's crime rate was reaching an all-time high. Really, homicides, they dipped a bit in the late 80s, but then they rose significantly again. Fact of life, there are not enough police to be everywhere all the time, so safety is like charity when we... Part of the reason was the crack epidemic. We had very significant amounts of violence resulting in a law and order backlash. Californians approved a series of tough-on-crime initiatives that put offenders behind bars with longer sentences. A get-tough attitude on crime, combined with a surging population, doubled the number of prisoners... Tougher and tougher laws, like the well-known three-strikes law, were overwhelmingly approved by voters in the early 90s. That resulted in a major backlash, a tough-on-crime crackdown. We incarcerated many people for very long periods of time. Proponents of tougher measures said harsher punishments would reduce crime rates, and indeed it worked. But critics say these measures made the system too costly, created overcrowding, and were too punitive. So on to this man who was busted for paying for a small package of donuts. Now, as you heard, he could be spending the rest of his life in prison. I mean, if you put everybody in prison that steals something from a store, great in the short term, but what do you have? You've got hundreds of thousands of people that you're paying for to be in prison, and when they get out of prison, you've disadvantaged their ability to be law-abiding. Out of this demand for new prison beds came voter-approved bond issues and other funds, totaling $3.2 billion for new prison construction. Incarcerating a huge population of people is not a good idea. It's not a desirable thing for government to want to do. There should be as little as possible. The incarceration rate should be only that which is necessary to keep the public safe, and no more. In 2006, California's prisons had reached a breaking point. Housing more than 170,000 people in a system designed to just house 85,000 people. Overpopulation had become a major problem. Prisoners were sleeping in gyms, hallways, and day rooms. Poor medical and mental health care quality became another serious concern, to the point that in 2011, the United States Supreme Court ruled the system unconstitutional. It was at this point that California decided to make a change, and a new era of criminal justice reform began. AB 109 was passed as a way to reduce prison population. And the new Prop 36 is an amendment to the California Three Strikes law. Your voters passed Prop 47. It reduces certain drug and theft crimes from felony charges to misdemeanor. Voters passed Prop 57. Now this allows for felons who are classified as non-violent to be released from prison early. Passed Proposition 64, which would legalize the use of recreational marijuana. Their big one is zero bail. 76,000 inmates in California could be eligible to shave years off their sentences, including violent felons. AB 109 was one of the first laws passed of the reform laws. For a whole host of crimes, people would not go to prison, they would go to the local jail instead. Traditionally, jails are run by the county and used for short-term sentences only. The people locked up in county jails are typically those who've committed a misdemeanor and those waiting for a trial, and some of them may even be found innocent. Prisons, on the other hand, are for criminals already convicted of serious crimes. They're designed for long-term sentences and are run by the state. Assembly Bill 109 aimed to reduce the state prison population through realignment, taking low-level criminals and transferring them from state prisons to county jails. And they kicked the problem down to the county jails. They gave some funding, but what they didn't know when they gave the funding to the county, that the county was not going to give it to the Sheriff's Department. The county kept the money, so the conditions of the county jail continued to deteriorate. They were not billed for long-term stays into rehabilitation. We don't have prison yards and vocational shops and all those things. We have a few, but not enough. The problem is, is that our jails have been and continue to be overcrowded. And when a jail is overcrowded, the sheriff has to release a certain number of people in order to keep the numbers at an acceptable level. And so what happens is, I'll give you a very real example. In Riverside County, if somebody steals a car, and that's still a felony in California, but after AB 109, that felony is only punishable by time in the local jail. Let's say they're caught. They're arrested by police, by our task force. That comes to my office. We charge that person, that individual with a felony. And let's say that the judge sentences this person to two years in the local jail. So they go into the jail. Because our jail is overcrowded, they get released from that two-year sentence in about 10 days. Wow. So the law also says that once they're released, their sentence, their two-year sentence is deemed served. So that, you know, there's no going back in. There's no, hey, we're going to release you, but if you don't do these things, you're going to go back into the jail. That's not an option. Once they're released under a so-called federal release, that's it. After realignment, county jail population rose significantly in the first couple of years. At the same time, state prison population decreased by over 27,000 inmates. However, after the initial drop, the prison population did not decline again. Not until Proposition 47. Under Prop 47, there will be little to no jail time for anyone found possessing drugs such as methamphetamine or cocaine. And any shoplifting, forgery or fraud under $950 is now considered a misdemeanor. And so what we've seen is the absolute ransacking, both of Walgreens, but other stores, drug stores and the like. Up to $950, they feel very confident that they not only won't be prosecuted, but that they won't even be arrested. Security guards are often told to stand down to avoid injuring anyone and starting lawsuits for the store they are working at. In the last five years, 17 Walgreens stores have closed down due to rampant looting and organized shoplifting. But California is not unique. Most states have a shoplifting threshold of $1,000 or more. Some states like Texas and Wisconsin allow up to $2,500. The problem with Prop 47, however, is not that the threshold is too low or too high, but because it did away with California's Penal Code 666, known as petty theft with a prior. And that Penal Code section allowed repeat offenders for petty theft to eventually be charged with a felony. So under Prop 47, somebody who steals $900 worth of merchandise from a store or from anything, anywhere, can only be charged with a misdemeanor. But worse, they can be charged with a misdemeanor no matter how many times they've done it. And we're convicted of it. So I can charge a thief, a petty thief with a misdemeanor, 100 days in a row, convicted each time, and I can never charge them with a felony. But even when someone in California steals more than $950, is arrested and prosecuted. They never see the inside of a jail cell because of our overcrowded jails, because of AB 109. So when you put AB 109 together with Proposition 47, what's happened in almost all of our is that there literally is no punishment for theft. People are arrested. They don't even see the inside of the jail. They're just given a ticket to come to court. And guess what? The vast majority don't appear in court. So we've all but legalized theft in California. So I'm going to ask you one question. The purpose of Prop 47 was to keep nonviolent criminals out of prison and offer people a second chance to rehabilitate. When California voted for Prop 47 in 2014, the state had spent over $60,000 per prisoner each year. Today, the cost has gone up to over $100,000 per prisoner. In theory, Prop 47 would help reduce the prison population, saving the state money on housing inmates and use those funds to support education as well as rehabilitation programs. Look, I think that the reform laws, by and large, the people behind those laws had good intentions. The problem is, is that many of the laws and the efforts are not based in reality. They're theory on how things should work. But there's been little kind of check back with, you know, how is this really working out in practice? They call the safest schools and safe neighborhoods. And essentially, it made the thresholds a lot lower. It didn't make nothing safe. It didn't. Kirk Johnson is the program director of an adult rehabilitation and reentry center in San Francisco. I mean, you know, like not making everybody be charged with a felony for a misdemeanor. That's that's good. But again, it has to be looked at in real time. And is it really working or is it not working? So does it make people want to commit more crime? It's easy. If you can commit crime and not go to jail, what would you do? If you could commit crime and get out of jail the next day, what would you do? Would you stop doing it? I mean, come on. I mean, really, we're looking at a symptom of a real problem. And the real problem is addiction, you know, and that's not being addressed. We're ignoring that. We're worried about whether someone has a house to stay in. We're worried about their mental health. But the mental health stuff is driven by addiction, too. But we're not addressing addiction. We're not creating services that will allow people a chance to go and get addressed their drug addiction. It was Craig that helped Cedric Akbar to get out of crime and addiction. Today, they run the reentry center together to help others stay away from committing crime and stay sober. Are these thefts and crime that are happening, are they out of poverty or are they out of drug addiction and other reasons? It's a combination of all of it. Some of it is out of kind of like how I grew up. It's been taught in your home from day one. Parents have done it. Brothers and sisters have done it. So what else are you going to do? Just the same as drugs being stolen. And when you were younger and people watched that, it's just a natural progression of it. And how did you get out of it? What I realized for me in my life, I always did what I wanted to do. And when I saw that, it was like, oh, so you got to be accountable. If I go across the street, I need to let somebody know I'm going across the street. That's when it kicked in for me about besides all the other things I learned in the program, but that's when it kicked into me the magic of being able to stay sober. We always pass laws and stuff and we don't ask the community what they think. And the people that think they know who represent us think they know, but they don't know because they're not affected by it on a day-to-day basis. So they really don't know. Californians voted for Prop 47. Do you think we were sold something that we didn't need? I voted for Prop 47 in 2014, and I did so because I was concerned about mass incarceration. I was concerned about the racially disparate impact of incarceration. I felt there was a better way, particularly drug rehab, particularly psychiatric care, since so many crimes are committed by people that are addicted to hard drugs or suffering untreated mental illness. I understand that we have to address the mental health, get you on proper medications, but today people can refuse. I don't want to take medications. They'll say it's a choice. They just use and stay high and, you know, and die. That's literally what happens. So now you see a thousand percent increase in overdose deaths, consequence of Prop 47. You know, my understanding, I worked on this issue in the late 1990s for George Soros' foundation, as well as for other progressive organizations, was that we were seeking alternatives to incarceration that would rehabilitate people. But that's not what's been going on. We've seen an effort by progressive district attorneys to just reduce sentences and prosecution altogether, basically not enforcing laws. So the efforts to do alternatives to incarceration really ended up being no consequence whatsoever for breaking the law. He has a lengthy criminal record. He was arrested 11 times. The 30-year-old is a repeat offender in California. There's a small percentage of criminals that commit most of the crime. And the three strikes, whether they want to admit it or not, it worked. Why? Because they put the worst of the worst away and they can't harm the community when they're incapacitated. And we need responsive DAs who are going to enforce the rule of law. Then we can start turning the ship around, hold people, the bad people accountable and rehabilitate the people that are rehabilitatable. And stop thinking that everyone can be rehabilitated. And yeah, we can play, you know, think of unicorns and ukulele music and sing kumbaya. It's just not reality. Authorities are finding out more about the mass shooting in Sacramento, California this past weekend. One of the suspects was released from jail just weeks before the shooting, despite a 10-year sentence. So in the last couple of years, there's been thousands of prisoners that have been released early, right? No, it would be tens of thousands. Likely close to 20,000 folks were released. That number is always growing, of course. If you look at educational outcomes, they haven't gotten better. Certainly, we've got evidence that community safety outcomes have gotten much, much worse. And so the very things that we said we were attempting to achieve, we've got worse outcomes in both. So we've covered these laws and we've talked to multiple experts about impacts of each of these laws. As things have become relaxer, you're saying that thousands of prisoners are getting released and they're not going to face any accountability if they commit crime. Do you think as a result of the crime, the statistics could get a lot worse than what we see today? They're going to continue to get worse unless there's accident change. Many times, people commit a criminal act and they should not be incarcerated. They should get probation or they should be diverted. There's a whole array of ways to deal with those who happen to violate the law. Steve Cooley has been the longest serving district attorney in California's recent history. It was Cooley, along with George Gascon, who led the effort to pass Proposition 36, which would reform California's three strikes law, making it not only tough, but also smart on crime. The bill was overwhelmingly approved by California's voters in 2012. I think some of the people don't value the fact that the criminal justice system really is a very fair system in terms of sentencing and sentencing alternatives. You know, there's drug courts. There's probation. There's diversion. There's reentry programs. There's a lot of resources that are spent to keep people out and keep them productive. And that's good. But there's also some people that that's never going to work. And they endanger everyone. And they should be incarcerated. They have earned the right to be kept away from us. But if you say, no, we're just not going to do that, or we're not going to do parts of that, or we're going to make it easier over here to get bail or no bail. Oh, yeah, we're going to make sure the sentences are reduced. Oh, yeah, we're not going to have enhancements. We're not going to charge prior convictions. You do all that, you don't have much of a system left. As for the people we met during the making of this documentary, things have gotten more personal than ever. These are becoming very popular with security services. If this is a good non-lethal alternative to it, that has enough stopping power to take away someone's will to hurt you. I was in Safeway the other day. There was a man who was filling his backpack. I can't stand here and say nothing. People say, oh, don't do it because it's dangerous. Well, for God's sakes, life is dangerous. I mean, I'm not one to run away from the problems. And we can't just blame one person or one position. It starts with you. From like 10 o'clock in the morning until one o'clock in the afternoon, is that I roll around and I try and warn people parking their cars not to leave anything in their cars because nobody else is doing it. By the time the cops show up, they're gone. I think all of us have thought about quitting at one point, and a lot of people have. But for me, it's my hometown and I'm not ready to give it up yet. And I don't want it to fall all apart. And that future is not one that I'm going to support. So I'm going to do everything I can to push back against it because my job is to get the job done. Author and environmental activist Michael Schellenberger officially announcing his run for California governor. The state has so much potential and it's just not living up to it. And it would be my honor to be governor of California and help it realize its potential. I've been here for 33 years and I'm not leaving. We have a lot of people who have the exact same attitude, which is, oh no, right, it stops. We're stopping it. It is my home. You cannot abuse my home. What do you think will happen to California? Well, I mean, I think the brain is on the wall. We know that California is such a wonderful place to live. It has such a mild climate, spectacular geography. We have the oceans and the mountains. Many people love to live in California. And so that's kept housing prices very high. But if the crime continues to spiral out of control, if the chaos continues, then we're going to see a significant decline in property values. I think we're just losing, though, our moral character. Our taxes are actually enabling crime, drug addiction, drug dealing. It's not right. It has to change. I think the voters are there. They want to see change, but we're in a crisis of leadership. And so it's not clear to me whether things need to keep getting worse for them for there to finally be a change or whether we are at that tipping point right now.