Michael Shellenberger: Californians Finally Get Serious on Crime

Over the last quarter century, progressives argued that we should decriminalize drugs, stop enforcing laws against nonviolent crimes, and radically reduce the number of people in prison. This softer approach to crime, addiction, and homelessness was demonstrably more effective and compassionate than tougher models, they said. Hundreds of articles, books, documentaries, TV segments, and fact sheets all buttressed this worldview. 

We all needed more empathy for those committing crimes, more empathy for drug dealers, the activists said, and soon the politicians did, too. In that frenzy of compassion, it wasn’t the criminals who were demonized, but the victims.

Blue states across the country—especially California, Oregon, and Washington—spent the past decade as real-world laboratories of these radical theories. The result has been one of the worst humanitarian disasters in American history. And nowhere was it worse than my state: California, where soft policies were implemented first and most forcefully.

Historians who go looking for the beginning of the story might look at Proposition 47, passed 10 years ago by California’s voters. This law put into practice one of those “compassionate” ideas: it transformed any theft of goods worth less than $950 from a felony into a misdemeanor. It did the same with drug possession. 

As a result, prosecutors lost much of the legal authority they needed to prosecute, for example, breaking and entering, resulting in brazen smash and grabs orchestrated by criminal gangs, and leaving store employees and customers helpless as they watched criminals loot everything from luxury items to toiletries. It also became much more difficult to prosecute drug dealers, who could simply say that their drugs were for their own use. Drug dealers also took advantage of Prop 47 by parceling out their supply to homeless addicts, who would then take the fall if they were caught.

The number of homeless people in California—destitute primarily as a result of addiction and mental illness—rose by over 50 percent over the last 10 years, from 113,952 in 2014 to 181,399 in 2023. 

Violent crime rose too. As of 2022, it was 31 percent higher in California than the national rate. “This divergence is driven largely by aggravated assaults, which have been declining nationwide while rising in California,” noted the Public Policy Institute of California last November. One out of four San Francisco residents polled say they were a victim of crime in the last year; 42 percent say they were a victim more than once.

Meanwhile, the downtown areas of cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco became uninhabitable thanks to the rise of open drug use and petty crime.  (If you wonder why toothpaste and deodorant are under lock and key in drug stores, this is why.) So many businesses fled San Francisco’s city limits that the vacancy rate for commercial real estate hit an astonishing 36 percent by the end of 2023.

Such lawlessness has unfortunately hardened the hearts of many, which only compounds the tragedy. I have spent the past five years bearing witness to the lives—and the deaths—of the people suffering under these policies. A few scenes will suffice to capture their destitution and misery.