Legislators debate retail theft, fentanyl, Prop. 47 at Capitol Weekly crime conference

Assemblyman Kevin McCarty said “well over half of the legislature” wants to address retail theft in California and they know it can’t be comprehensively addressed without a ballot measure during a recent Capitol Weekly conference on crime.

“Two things can be true,” said the Sacramento Democrat said during “The Legacy and Future of Prop. 47” panel at Capitol Weekly’s March 21 “A Conference on Crime” at the California Endowment’s Adelante Meeting Room in downtown Sacramento. “We can be proud of some of the work we did … to reduce overcrowding in our state prisons, overly warehousing people for low-level crimes that probably don’t need to be incarcerated for so long.

“But also we can think about things slipping through the cracks. And I do think that people do slip through the cracks with relation to retail theft.”

Asm. Kevin McCarty speaks at Capitol Weekly’s Conference on Crime. Moderator Emily Hoeven, left; Lenore Anderson and Sheriff Jim Cooper, right. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

Unsurprisingly for a conference about crime in California today, much of the conversation on March 21 was around Proposition 47 and the potential need to go back to the voters to amend it. While Gov. Gavin Newsom has been steadfast in his desire to avoid taking the issue back to voters, McCarty said he believes it’s not only a possibility, but essentially in order to comprehensively address the problem of retail theft in California.

“I think going back to the voters is something that is still very much on the table because you can’t have a comprehensive solution without addressing the organized retail side as well as the impacts on the smaller stores and that is petty theft with a prior which must be approved by the electorate,” McCarty said.

Looming over the conference was the specter of a ballot measure currently out for signatures to reform Prop. 47, the 2014 initiative that downgraded drug and property crimes in the state from felonies to misdemeanors, but crucially made it impossible to prosecute someone for a felony for repeated petty theft, among other changes.

“We really need accountability,” said Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper, a former state lawmaker, during the Prop. 47 panel. “Think about it, the recidivism rate in the county jail, over 70 percent. Recidivism rate in the state prison over 70 percent. Prior to Prop. 47, we had drug court. So, if you went to court and you had an addiction problem a judge can say, ‘You know what, I’m going to put you in rehab and get you clean, and once you’re clean, we’ll expunge your record.’

“When Prop. 47 came along, it dropped by 70 percent. No one does drug court anymore. You have to have a hammer to force people in.”

Prop. 47 was also a major topic of conversation during the conference’s first panel of the day, on retail theft, where Assembly Democratic Caucus Chair Rick Chavez Zbur of West Hollywood, who recently introduced AB 2943, the California Retail Theft Reduction Act, said that while retail theft may be linked to the Golden State in the minds of citizens, its actually a growing problem nationwide.

“This isn’t just a California issue,” Zbur said. “I know we’ll get into talking about Prop. 47 a little bit, but a lot of folks keep focusing on Prop. 47 as if that’s sort of the culprit of it. Obviously, that’s not the issue in other states across the nation.”

San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. Photo by Joha Harrison, Capitol Weekly

The only panel of the day to not touch directly on Prop. 47 was the second one, on “The Fentanyl Crisis,” where much of the discussion focused on whether prosecutors have the tools necessary to properly go after dealers whose drugs end up killing users.

“The people who are distributing it, whether it’s to long-term users or a student for the first time, in this day and age, they’re very well aware that what they’re distributing is potentially lethal,” said Sen. Kelly Seyarto, R-Murrieta. “The people preparing those drugs for them to distribute, and I recognize that they are just on the lower part of the totem pole here, but they recognize that that is a dangerous drug and that one pill can potentially end the life of the person taking it whether it’s the first time they’ve ever taken it.

“And that’s a little bit of a difference between this drug and the drugs we’ve had to deal with in the past, is usually first-time users don’t overdose.”

The conference’s keynote speaker at lunch was San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins who gave a rousing speech about the importance of public safety.

“In my beloved city of San Francisco, if you believe in accountability for crime, you’re easily deemed a racist… or a Republican, which in San Francisco is most certainly used as an insult,” she said. “But what I’ve learned over the past two years, which I instinctively already knew even before that from my own experience, is that everyone wants to feel safe. Republican, Democrat, independents, all races, ethnicities and religions. They all want and are demanding increased public safety up and down our state.”