By Will Swaim
Sunday, July 30, 2023
In politics, recommending “further study” is a well-known way to appease supporters without committing to anything. So it is that Governor Gavin Newsom likely figured he had satisfied his most radical supporters when, in September 2020, three months after the killing of George Floyd, he signed a bill creating the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
“As a nation, we can only truly thrive when every one of us has the opportunity to thrive,” Newsom said in his signing message. “Our painful history of slavery has evolved into structural racism and bias built into and permeating throughout our democratic and economic institutions.”
But over the following two years, details of the commission’s work emerged. They were not good for the governor. It turned out that task force supporters had taken Newsom seriously. There are the bank-busting financial demands (“qualifying Black Californians” will receive up to $1.2 million in cash payments) and misrepresentations of California history that are obvious to almost anyone with eyeballs.
By the time the task force returned late last month with great trumpet blasts and its final, 1,100-page report, Newsom was gone — had literally departed Sacramento for a press conference with state fire officials in remote Nevada County’s Sierra Nevada foothills. “The last thing fire needs is another politician,” Jonathan Burgess, a fire battalion chief from Sacramento and advocate for reparations, told CalMatters. Then, speaking directly to Newsom, he said, “If you are not here, I want you to know that Black America is watching nationwide.”
If black America is watching, what they’ll see next will likely horrify them. Task-force members in the state legislature are now using their report as evidence that what California needs today, in the midst of a dramatic rise in crime, is a bold experiment in decriminalizing crime. Already high, crime would rise higher, falling most heavily on poor communities.
Californians in those communities would have Newsom’s reparations task force to thank.
The first strange legislative fruit came in April, two months before the reparations task force completed its work. That’s when Ashley Zavala, one of the capitol’s few independent reporters, noted something unusual happening in the capitol’s lower house: Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer and the Democratic members of his Public Safety Committee were routinely “rejecting numerous measures to boost penalties for domestic violence, rape of a developmentally disabled child, rape of an unconscious person, [a previous bill to punish] human trafficking, and the use of a gun during serious crimes, among other issues.” Those “other issues” include “bills on gun violence, homeless encampments,” and “inmate release transparency.”
They weren’t just killing reasonable bills but advancing terrible ones. The worst of these may be Jones-Sawyer’s Assembly Bill 852. It would require that, “when determining what sentence to impose on a defendant,” judges “consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations,” Jones-Sawyer wrote. He is specific about his inspiration, saying that his bill would help “rectify racial bias that, as documented by the California Reparations Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans (Reparations Task Force), has historically permeated California’s criminal justice system.”
Jones-Sawyer is more than a mere assemblyman, more than chairman of the assembly’s powerful Public Safety Committee. He’s also a member of the very same reparations task force. And he has allies outside the capitol. In supporting AB 852, the California Defenders Association asserted a claim so uninformed that it demands immediate investigation by the state bar, now busy prosecuting its case against Trump attorney John Eastman.
“Criminal sentencing law in California rests on the presumption that all people are treated equally by the law,” the group declared. “Sadly, as every study to consider the issue has determined — that presumption is a myth. In fact, sentencing outcomes frequently turn on the accused’s wealth, national origin, poverty, and skin-color.” AB 852 would fix that, the group says, by releasing convicts today because of alleged racism in sentencing of others in the past.
This isn’t the place to argue over the phrase “every study,” except to say that it’s flat wrong and that its deployment in advancing this bill sure seems like legal malpractice. (Consider this, this, this, and this.) But it’s worth noting that the public defenders don’t identify a single specific case of racism in sentencing. They can’t even bring themselves to use the phrase “convicted criminals,” referring to them instead as “justice-involved individuals” in need of “job training” and “other meaningful alternatives to incarceration.”
Two weeks ago, Jones-Sawyer blocked a proposal that would have made child sex-trafficking a “serious felony.” Though authored by one of the legislature’s few Republicans, state senator Shannon Grove of Bakersfield, Senate Bill 14 had already passed unanimously in the upper house.
That rare unanimous vote in the senate seemed to assure SB 14’s passage in the assembly. But on first contact with Jones-Sawyer’s assembly Committee on Public Safety, all six Democrats, including Jones-Sawyer, abstained. That killed the bill.
“Those in the audience could be heard yelling, ‘You’re horrible!’ and ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ to the committee members,” reporter Zavala noted. “Human trafficking victims embraced and sobbed in front of the dais.”
Twitter nearly burst into flames. Even reporters who might otherwise merely conveyor-belt the Democrats’ propaganda into the public square were scandalized.
The purpose of the Democrats’ united front in the committee was revealed later in the day. In a message on his official site, Jones-Sawyer said that calling child sex-trafficking a “serious felony” would qualify it as a strike under California’s Three Strikes law — and that would likely punish people of color who, let’s remember, will have been convicted of selling children for sex, children who are quite likely also people of color. According to Jones-Sawyer:
The Three Strikes model of sentencing is ineffective in preventing crime and protecting the public’s safety. We will not build on a deeply flawed sentencing system that unfairly punishes disadvantaged communities. SB 14 makes no new corrective actions or enhancements to laws already in place. Ultimately, members of the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee understood the author’s intent but recognized this bill needs considerable work and granted reconsideration.
The vote and the explanation for it were so outlandish that Gavin Newsom intervened. “I want to understand exactly what happened yesterday” in the committee, Newsom told reporters. “I take it very seriously.” He asked Jones-Sawyer to give the bill a second look.
Newsom’s “seriousness” won the day. Jones-Sawyer relented. On a second vote, just two of his committee colleagues abstained. But the chairman and three of his Democratic colleagues voted with the two Republicans, keeping the bill alive.
One of those who abstained is Mia Bonta, a Democrat who represents Oakland. In that city, politicians are already hard at work decriminalizing crime. The director of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention begged the public to go gently on nine minors arrested for several robberies — “our babies,” he called them.
The results of such initiatives speak for themselves in the recent headlines of Democratic-aligned newspapers. “These women were violently robbed. In Oakland’s crime surge, they say it’s ‘like nobody really cares.’” “Oakland police advise residents to reinforce doors as home invasions increase.” And, in a sign of things to come, “Angry crowd of more than 500 turn out for Oakland meeting on crime and violence.”
Speaking at that town hall, one man may have been speaking for all Californians of any color or political stripe. “We need to stop the violence and killers,” he told council members seated at a dais high above the crowd. “We’re coming after you all.”
It’s a safe bet that man was speaking of ballot-box revenge. But even pausing to consider the dark alternative is a measure of how far the problem of public safety is beginning to split deep-blue Californians.
Their divorce — and it’s coming to that — will have huge ramifications for California and the nation. In a sprawling, Day of the Locusts article for Vanity Fair, reporter Joe Hagan pushed a finger deep into that wound. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing a bluer-than-blue stretch of the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, told him that California dysfunction — homelessness, street addicts, burglaries, and outright violent crime — will leash in Newsom’s national ambitions. “I think the message that says ‘Make America California’ is not a winning message,” he told the reporter. Hagan meets newly minted Los Angeles resident Bari Weiss at a Hollywood Hills dinner party. She tells him, “One of the things that has shocked me about living in Los Angeles is how many people who are not at all politically conservative own guns here.”
During a sit-down at San Francisco’s landmark Pier 23 tavern, Hagan tells former House speaker Nancy Pelosi what he’s seen in the city’s Tenderloin (“drug addicts splayed out on street corners and a hundred human tragedies strewn across UN Plaza, City Hall looming helplessly in the background. Dickens meets Dante.”). In a moment that reveals the yawning chasm among California Democrats, Pelosi seems to agree with Hagan’s dark assessment: “Oh, it’s sad,” she tells him. “It’s worse now.”
It goes on like this for nearly 10,000 words, all of it balanced on this single, undeniable point: “Increasingly among Democrats,” Hagan concludes, “there is a call for greater toughness. Fear, as Pelosi knows, is contagious. And the ‘biggest challenge’ to California, she says, is ‘safety.’”
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