On Oct. 1, wonderful Canadian “conservative” Lauren Southern posted a video highlighting several instances of shoplifters brazenly rampaging through various retail outlets in San Fransisco, only to escape arms-full yet totally unscathed as the stores’ horrified staffs simply stood by and watched helplessly.
Walgreens recently announced that inasmuch as the incidence of such crimes in San Fransisco was 4 times the national average, it would be closing 17 local outlets.
The situation would seem to be the result of a number of factors, all of them issuing from the pervasively “progressive” [i.e., incredibly naive] mentality of the majority of the State’s population and the Governor it recently chose to keep in power.
We have already spoken of Prop 47 which, passed in a 2014 referendum, made any act of thievery involving less than $950 a mere misdemeanor, while also allowing those previously incarcerated as felons for such acts to seek their early release under the new definitions. Ironically, Southern points out, the piece of legislation was called The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act. Indeed, she noted, “progressives” ludicrously heralded the reduction in the State’s felon population while failing to mention it was their re-definition of the term “felon” that led to that meaningless statistic.
As the numbers unequivocally show, crime both violent and otherwise is out of control throughout America, particularly in those States and Cities run by Democrats. Southern sees the policies consciously pursued in California as typical of those which have led to this disturbing reality. As are all the “conservative” commentators I revere, she is perfectly rational, perfectly willing to grant the wisdom of reducing California’s prison population by releasing those incarcerated for “victimless crimes.” Indeed she sees the possession of hard core drugs as such a crime, a valuation I would consider arguable at best. But, she suggests, Prop 47 which deprived judges of the discretionary power to seriously punish individuals guilty of what are now considered “misdemeanors,” resulted from a grossly flawed, incredibly naive vision of human nature. She cites the example of one Gary Ewing, a 40 year old sentenced in 2000 to 25 years in prison for stealing a few golf clubs. Outrage on the Left was epic. But, Southern points out, the man had been arrested repeatedly since the age of 22 for a number of crimes, some involving fire arms and acts of violence. His 25 year sentence was clearly seen as the only way to protect an innocent public from his irrepressible criminal impulses.
For the Enlightenment engineers of our Democracies, upholding the Rule of Law was one of the primary responsibilities of any elected government. Not so, it would seem, for the woke [i.e., brain-dead] defenders of the “disenfranchised.” Apparently unaware of the inevitable results of its decision, California’s Judicial Council, in response to the obvious dangers to which its prison population would be submitted due to Covid-19, decided in April of 2020 to reduce that population by establishing a Zero Bail requirement for all those guilty of misdemeanors and “minor” felonies. ABC 7 in L.A. reported on the results of that decision in June, citing a young Black man who had been arrested 3 times on the same day for 3 separate criminal acts, only to be released on each occasion with no apparent repercussions whatsoever!
Apparently realizing the insanity of the policy, California decided to end the Zero Bail mandate on June 20, 2020. Yet in Jan. of 2021, Democratic lawmakers in the State were once again pressing for its reinstatement.
Would the hundreds of Walgreen employees who lost their jobs because of shoplifting “misdemeanors” consider the latter mere victimless crimes? Would the thousands of small business owners who had their livelihoods imperiled due to the antics of Antifa and B.L.M. in the summer of 2020, consider it right that they were paying for injustices in which they had played no part whatsoever? While no one is suggesting there are not those born in every corner of the planet with the odds heavily stacked against them, does not the grossly simplistic and absurdly stereotypical concept of “social justice” which informs the “compassionate” Left in fact tend to produce societies rife with Injustice? Indeed is not the notion that White America [i.e., Walgreens, Walmart, Starbucks, etc.] is somehow responsible for the criminal inclinations of every inner-city Black male born to a mom abandoned by the man who knocked her up, the very definition of what our media now smugly dismisses as just another “conspiracy theory”?