Facts, Not Fear, Should Guide Irvine City Council
California has gone from being one of the states with the highest incarceration rates to below the national average. How did that happen?
In that past few years, California has passed legislative bills and ballot measures intended to reduce its massive prison population. One of them was Proposition 47, otherwise known as the “Reduced Penalties for Some Crimes Initiative.”
With a downgrading of several lowest-level non-violent drug and petty-theft crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, Prop. 47 was controversial. The move lowered prison populations by 13,000, and some worried that the change of crimes from felonies to misdemeanors would encourage crime. Some law-enforcement officials and prosecutors are calling for the measure to be repealed. They blamed rising crime rates on Prop 47, and are key proponents of the “Reducing Crime and Keeping California Safe Act of 2020.” This proposition would repeal the key elements of Prop. 47.
But, crime does not have one cause, and any change in policy could be hidden by other factors that increase crime rates: poverty, drug markets and accessibility of guns. To isolate the impact of Prop. 47 on crime, criminologists at UC Irvine recently published a study that was the first effort to systematically evaluate Prop 47’s impact on crime in California. The authors wrote a summary Op-Ed in Governing Magazine, where they write “The research found that the proposition had no appreciable impact on crime in the year following its enactment. Specifically, it had no effect on rates of homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery or burglary.” The UC Irvine results were corroborated by a Public Policy Institute of California study. The Californians for Safety and Justice coalition has a video on why incarceration is not the sole solution to reducing crime.
On February 12, Councilmember Anthony Kuo suggested that the City take up to support the “Keep Safe Act,” and the council voted along party lines to have the city support the “Keep Safe Act.” In supporting the new “Keep Safe Act” proposition, Councilmembers Kuo, Shea and Mayor Wagner focused solely on the reclassification of some crimes as non-violent, including rape of an unconscious person and sex trafficking of a child. They reiterated these as serious crimes over and over again, stoking fears that such crimes would go unpunished, while providing no evidence that they were going systematically unprosecuted. These are, of course, serious offenses that should be prosecuted and punished as such. Bills in California’s State Legislature are aiming to fix these classifications as violent felonies, such as AB-2823. However, the 2020 “Keep Safe Act” proposition supported by the Irvine Council majority throws out the baby with the bathwater, and their comments completely ignored all of the consequences of the full proposition.
It is ironic and unfortunate that the flawed “Keep Safe” proposition is being supported by a city where the leading research is being done that shows that these reforms are not bringing higher crime. As a city and a state, we must make decisions based on facts and not fear, and especially not political posturing playing on those fears.
Note of transparency: one of the authors of the UC Irvine study, Prof. Charis Kubrin, is my spouse.
