Speaking to Fox News Digital, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said that he is spearheading the effort to reverse Prop 47, a 2012 ballot measure that he says is worsening the state’s crime crisis and homelessness situation. He also sounded off on California Governor Gavin Newsom, saying that he has been lacking in leadership.
As background, Prop 47 is what reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors. Particularly, it classified retail and property theft as misdemeanors, including theft of goods valued under $950. That misdemeanor rating applies even if there are multiple offenses in which goods just under $950 are stolen. Equally problematic, from Sheriff Bainco’s view, is that it reclassified numerous narcotics offenses as misdemeanors.
Speaking about Prop 47 and how it relates to California’s crime travails, Sheriff Bianco told Fox News Digital, “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.”
Continuing, he argued that Californians were lied to about the measure, which he characterized as having a very different description when voted on than what it ended up leading to after being passed. “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 began.
He added, “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.”
Emphasizing that point about how the proposition, in his view, ended up leading to the crime crisis for which much of once-beloved and beautiful California is now known, Sheriff Bianco said, “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.”
Sheriff Bianco then explained what he thinks a more prudent policy would be, saying that those with drugs in their possession should be given the chance to have help getting their addiction fixed, but that jail time needs to be the punishment for those who either don’t want help or are committing crimes like theft. “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,” he said.
He then noted that, whatever the “feel good” legislators say, the crime situation won’t be fixed unless criminals face stiff consequences for continued bad behavior. Explaining as much, he told Fox News Digital, “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.”
Watch Sheriff Bianco speak about Prop 47 to FOX 11 here:
That’s when he turned to Gov. Newsom and his failed leadership. Explaining that the initiatives of the current crop of politicians has failed abysmally, Sheriff Bianco said, “The governor is going to have no choice but to get on board because this is 100% complete common sense. We have a complete failed political agenda in this state. It’s been a social experiment that has been led by the governor, from his time as mayor of San Francisco, into lieutenant governor and now governor, which has been made worse by our attorney general, who has absolutely no desire to fix any of these issues with crime and protect Californians.”
Then, explaining what is necessary if the state is to be turned around, he said, “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.”
Further, he argued that people are increasingly tired of the lawless state of things, and that they can tell the political class is doing little to rectify it. “The voters have had enough,” Bianco alleged. He continued, “The voters are tired of what we’re seeing on TV with these smash and grabs. They’re tired of having their property stolen. They’re tired of seeing major retail businesses close in California and move their businesses out of state. We are experiencing a crisis here and our government leaders are doing nothing to combat it.”
Without something to fix the situation, Bianco concluded, things will just get worse and worse: “We will be doing nothing but going downhill further. Crime will just remain rampant. Drugs will remain rampant. The disaster that we have with fentanyl and fentanyl dealers will continue to grow. More and more people will die of fentanyl overdoses and poisonings, and the smash and grab theft, this emboldened movement of criminals, will just be, it’s just going to get worse and worse.”
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