Should California Vote To Roll Back Criminal Justice Reforms?
Conservatives often blame a 2014 California ballot initiative for an increase in crime across the state. Next month, voters have the option to undo some of its provisions. Should they?
California’s Proposition 47 passed by a 60–40 margin in 2014. The proposal would “require misdemeanors instead of felonies for nonserious, nonviolent crimes like petty theft and drug possession, unless the defendant has prior convictions for specified violent or serious crimes,” including murder and rape.
The measure established a monetary threshold for certain crimes, including shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, and check forgery. An offender caught committing a listed crime could only be charged with a misdemeanor, so long as the amount stolen was below $950. The change could also be applied retroactively to people who had already been sentenced.
Proposition 36, on the ballot in November, would walk back portions of Proposition 47. If the new measure passes, “an offender with two prior convictions for theft can be charged with a felony, regardless of the value of the stolen property,” and “The value of property stolen in multiple thefts will be permitted to be added together so that in appropriate cases an offender may be charged with felony theft instead of petty theft.”
The original measure’s $950 limit has long been controversial among conservatives, especially after viral social media videos depicted masked assailants committing brazen smash-and-grab robberies in San Francisco. “Californians effectively decriminalized shoplifting. Not surprisingly, they have more of it,” Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Jason L. Riley wrote in a 2021 Wall Street Journal editorial that deemed San Francisco “a shoplifter’s paradise.”
At a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, amid a larger digression about crime and policing, former President Donald Trump said California’s relaxed penalties were to blame for higher rates of theft in the state.
“Nine hundred and fifty dollars, you’re allowed to steal; anything above that, you will be prosecuted,” he said. “Originally, you saw kids walk in with calculators, they would calculate—they didn’t want to go over the $950.”
Trump has made similar claims on the campaign trail for several weeks, saying in August, “You have thieves going into stores with calculators calculating how much it is, because if it’s less than $950 they can rob it and not get charged.”
Of course, it’s not true that shoplifting less than $950 is no longer illegal—it can still be charged as a misdemeanor. “What Prop 47 did is increase the dollar amount by which theft can be prosecut
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