California voters decided in November that they wanted to celebrate the holidays and ring in the new year by locking up criminals who are finding out the hard way that their get-out-of-jail-free cards have been revoked.
California voters defied the pro-criminal sympathies of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and other leading state Democrats to pass Proposition 36, which, among other things, allowed prosecutors once again to hit repeat shoplifters and thieves with felony charges and repealed the terrible California law that made shoplifting a slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanor if the criminal took under $950 in merchandise in each shoplifting spree.
This has led to some wonderful realizations from the career criminals now getting caught up in the new law, which went into effect on Dec. 18. One such interaction between criminals was posted by the Seal Beach Police Department, showing a conversation between two women who had just allegedly stolen $237 worth of goods from Kohl’s and $600 worth of goods at Ulta Beauty. “It’s a felony?” the first woman asked. Her friend filled her in on the news: “B****, new laws. Stealing is a felony.”
It’s hard to tell which part is funnier: that the second woman admits she only got probation for stealing from Target last year in the same county or that the whole conversation is taking place in the back of a squad car.
A broadcast from local media in Sacramento tracked the new undercover shoplifting missions by local police, capturing a similarly great moment when a shoplifter begged for her normal citation so she could be let go, evidently unaware of the new law change.
The difference is night and day, with law enforcement once again allowed to do their jobs and know that the people they are going to the trouble of arresting won’t be back in a week committing the same crime over and over again. San Francisco is hitting a criminal with seven prior convictions with steeper charges courtesy of Prop 36 after he stole $400 worth of cough medicine on Christmas Eve. San Bernardino is doing the same with a woman with “an extensive criminal history including convictions for prior thefts” who was stealing from Ulta Beauty.
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Police in Folsom have already made 30 arrests thanks to Prop 36, recovering over $10,000 worth of stolen merchandise. That is an average of around $333 per thief, well below the previous standard of $950 that let repeat thieves get a slap-on-the-wrist citation and go back to their lives of crime. Under the old system that Newsom and state Democrats loved so much, state retailers lost an estimated $7.8 billion in annual revenue, while cities such as San Francisco lost businesses that closed their doors thanks to the regular shoplifting losses.
It is a Christmas miracle, made possible not by California’s political “leaders” but by the voters themselves. The holiday season is a time of giving, and California voters decided to give career criminals a few more consequences for their crimes, with law enforcement officials playing the role of Santa to deliver them. The new year can now be one in which California is more focused on locking up criminals and less focused on locking up toothpaste and deodorant.
