Riverside County, California Sheriff Chad Bianco recently criticized Governor Gavin Newsom over his policies on crime.
Bianco is helping lead an effort to reverse a 2012 ballot measure he says is directly contributing to the homelessness and crime crisis in the state.
“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,” Bianco said.
Prop 47, passed in 2012, reclassified a number of felonies, including retail and property theft, as misdemeanors.
Under the measure, petty theft of goods valued under $950 is classified as a misdemeanor.
“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 explained.
“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,” the sheriff continued. “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.”
According to Fox News, “the ballot measure Bianco is hoping will be on the ballot this November, which he calls the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, will undo the lowering of narcotics possession penalties from felonies to misdemeanors, will allow judges to recommend rehab for drug and substance abuse, and will allow prosecutors to add the value amount of multiple thefts together in order to meet the $950 threshold set by Prop 47 thus cracking down on serial thefts.”
“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,” Bianco said.
Newsom allegedly opposes the changes to Prop 47, which Bianco says is an example of a failure of leadership.
“The governor is going to have no choice but to get on board because this is 100% complete common sense,” Bianco said. “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.“
