“Watch How Bad It Gets”: Rapper Says LA is “Finished” after Zero Bail Policy Reinstated

Curtis Jackson, the real name of the rapper who goes by “50 Cent,” is concerned about crime in Los Angeles. In fact, he thinks that the city’s recently brought back zero bail policy will lead to the city’s final downfall, as crime will rampage out of control.

He said so on Instagram, writing, “LA is finished watch how bad it gets out there.SMH 👀#bransoncognac #lecheminduroi” In a second post, he posted a picture of a headline about it his comment and said, “Hey I understand why Deadline is reporting my opinion. I’m a big deal, but why did they write I had run in’s with the law? 👀Im a born again Christian ! #bransoncognac #lecheminduroi”

Jackson has a point about the problem with Los Angeles’ zero bail policy. Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, speaking about the effects of the policy, told Fox News Digital, “The impacts of zero bail on violent crime are obvious, and they’re horrific. I mean, we have more people being shot at, stabbed, assaulted, robbed, beaten. These are real victims – and the numbers are staggering under zero bail.”

Reising added that the results of a study his office conducted on zero bail policy showed it to be an absolute failure at reducing crime, saying that “zero bail is a completely failed policy” because of how much violent crime increased under it.

Continuing, Reising said that the data clearly shows the policy will make everything more dangerous and now that lawmakers have the data they have no excuse for what happens under it, as all they had to do was look and they would have seen how horrible everything would get.

As he put it: “It was really important to do this study to have data available to those lawmakers in California who continue to believe that this is the answer to all of the problems in the criminal justice system, that zero bail is somehow going to make things better. And it’s not. It’s just going to make everything more dangerous.”

Emphasizing the disastrous effects of the zero bail policy on the city, he said that his community suffered when lawmakers and the court forced him to stop resisting and implement the policy; he then said, “We saw violent crime going up as soon as zero bail was implemented in our county by court order. And despite all of our best efforts to try and stop the practice, we were forced to continue to do the zero-bail system, and we saw our communities suffer as a result.”

The solution, of course, is the old sort of system where a judge can take a look at each individual involved in the case and determine what their bail needs to be or how long they should be locked up for without bail being available.

In Reising’s words:  “Every single individual and every case should be evaluated by a judge, an independent magistrate, who can look at that person’s criminal history, look at the facts of the current case and make an informed decision about what their risk level is and what’s it going to take to make sure that they don’t go out and harm somebody again. That needs to happen in every case.”

Zero bail was brought back to Los Angeles in May of 2023 after first ending in July 2022. It was brought about during Covid to reduce overcrowding the jails.

Featured image credit: By Keith HInkle – originally posted to Flickr as Val Kilmer and 50 Cent, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8844930