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.
This August, on Skid Row, a few blocks from downtown L.A., I discovered a Venezuelan mother who lived in a tent on the street, holding a 2-year-old with a large scar visible on his chest. The mother told me, in Spanish, that he is autistic. A boy of about 8 was also living in their tent. He lurked behind them, appearing frightened while a tough-looking friend or relative stared at us menacingly.
This was only one tent among thousands—people living in a major American city in conditions more violent, squalid, and inhumane than I have seen in the slums of New Delhi or Rio de Janeiro. People overdose on fentanyl and then are revived 10 or 20 times with Narcan before they die. Women, often psychotic and with open wounds, are raped in tents. People lie, literally, in the gutters, as the more fortunate walk by.
Oakland, California, meantime, brought chaos and crime directly into the neighborhoods of even wealthy residents. Long a hothouse of radicalism, no other city has more aggressively defunded and demoralized the police than Oakland. The upshot is a city that is something closer to lawless than law-abiding. The wait time by Oakland residents for a response to their urgent (“priority 1”) 911 calls rose from 23 minutes to roughly 50 minutes, on average, between 2022 and 2023. This was by design. The idea has been that we can slowly transition away from needing police at all.
Last year in San Francisco, drug dealers sold drugs that killed 810 people. The dealers, most of whom are from Honduras, are in the U.S. illegally but are protected by the city’s “sanctuary law,” which was created in 1989 to protect refugees fleeing war and violence and today is mostly used to protect the dealers and the multibillion-dollar transnational mafias for which they work.
The city’s former district attorney—he was recalled in 2022 at the start of the wave we saw crashing this week—said that the drug dealers are victims too. “A significant percentage of people selling drugs in San Francisco—perhaps as many as half—are here from Honduras,” Chesa Boudin said. “We need to be mindful about the impact our interventions have,” he said. “Some of these young men have been trafficked here under pain of death.” But no one ever seemed to spare a thought for the people dying of those drugs, or the kids who had to see people dying in the streets on their way to school.
Businesses cannot function in this kind of environment. Nordstrom, Whole Foods, Target, Denny’s, and Starbucks all closed stores over the last two years in San Francisco and Oakland, citing crime, the destruction of downtowns, and the need to protect "team members and guest safety."
Just between 2020 and 2022, a quarter of a million people fled the Bay Area, having come to the conclusion that things might not ever get better.
But finally, on Tuesday, California voters decided to trust their own eyes. They rejected the experts and the media who told them this was what compassion looked like—and voted for a return to normalcy and safety.
Just look at the results:
Proposition 36, a statewide measure to undo Prop 47, passed by 70 percent. The new law turns some misdemeanors into felonies (for example, shoplifting if it is a third offense), lengthens some felony sentences (i.e. smash-and-grab thefts involving three or more people), and requires some felonies to be served in prison (like fentanyl dealing). Notably, Governor Gavin Newsom opposed Prop 36. And Kamala Harris—who, recall, was California’s attorney general before becoming vice president—simply refused to comment on a bill that every single county in the state passed. (Even the former Sacramento district attorney who led the campaign to crack down on drugs and theft was shocked by the margin of victory. “I was expecting great numbers,” said Anne Marie Schubert, “but the 70 percent was amazing! It sends a powerful message to the rest of the country.”)
In Los Angeles, voters took the unheard-of step of electing an actual Republican as district attorney, ousting from office a George Soros-funded DA, George Gascón.
In Oakland, voters not only recalled the DA for all of Alameda County, they also recalled the mayor, Sheng Thao, who similarly hailed from the radical left and is being investigated by the FBI for possible corruption relating to city garbage contracts.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was defeated by Dan Lurie, who ran, in part, on a platform to increase police presence, increase shelter beds, and fight corruption.
These are all very positive signs. But the question is not why voters revolted against policies that made their lives and the lives of their less-fortunate neighbors so much worse—but rather why it took them so long.
After all, California used to be known as a state that was tough on crime. Its 1994, the “Three Strikes” law famously required judges to send criminals to jail for 25 years for their third felony offense. So why, over the past decade, did voters keep reducing criminal penalties and electing leaders who were openly and proudly soft-on-crime?
Part of the problem is that many voters don’t really understand that they voted for the policies responsible for the increase in crime and homelessness. When the police tell people who report everything from open-air drug dealing to car break-ins to home invasions that there’s nothing they can do, residents act with surprise and outrage. Why aren’t the police doing anything? The answer is simple: because there truly is nothing they can do.
The primary reason is because California’s progressive DAs simply stopped prosecuting many laws, while the state legislature weakened the ability of the police to fight crime.
At the most superficial level, Soros-funded politicians, journalists, and think tanks spread disinformation. They told voters that criminals and addicts would be mandated drug rehab as an alternative to prison when the framers of the laws knew perfectly well they were making both of them optional.
Consider Proposition 57, passed by California voters in 2016, which shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and released them into drug treatment and rehabilitation. Ultimately, that law and others reduced California’s prison population from its peak of 163,000 in 2006 to 92,000 in 2024. It also granted early parole to more prisoners, which contributed to the spike in homelessness.
It's not that Californians are stupid. It’s that they didn’t fully grasp what they were voting for. While Harris was serving as attorney general, her office wrote the Title and Summary of Proposition 57, which incorrectly labeled serious violent crimes as “nonviolent.”
"Proposition 57 is the misleading and dangerous ballot initiative that would allow serious, violent criminals out on early release without completing their sentences," noted Harris’s opponent, Loretta Sanchez, also a Democrat, in 2016, as they competed for the Senate seat.
But voters ignored Sanchez’s prescient warning and elected Harris with 62 percent of the vote, a testament to the voters’ commitment, at the time, to progressive criminal justice reform, as well as to the power of the Nancy Pelosi-Gavin Newsom machine.
So part of the problem was genuine ignorance on the part of voters who had been misled. The deeper problem was a misguided worldview that labeled people addicted to hard drugs or suffering from mental illness as “victims,” to whom everything should be given, including the right to camp and use hard drugs in tents on sidewalks, with nothing required of them—not even obeying the law.
Some courageous people have spoken out about this sad state of affairs—and at great cost. One of them is Seneca Scott, the cousin of Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife, Coretta Scott King. Scott has long been a street-level organizer, and he masterminded the recall of the Alameda County DA and Oakland’s mayor.
When I reached out for comment, Scott was humble, giving credit to Judge Brenda Harbin-Forte, the public face of the campaign, and the campaign’s volunteers. “The story is the people,” he said. “Oaklanders finally connected the destruction of Oakland’s business community with failed ‘Defund The Police’ policies,” he added.
Sometimes it takes people at a greater distance to see things as they really are. “How progressive politics turned Kamala Harris’s birthplace into a post-apocalyptic nightmare,” read the headline of a long piece in The Telegraph of London last month. “Hard-left causes such as ‘defund the police’ which the VP once flirted with,” it noted, “have brought crime, drugs and violence to Oakland.”
The revolt against progressive criminal justice policies has finally arrived—and with it, the promise that one of the worst humanitarian disasters in American history will eventually come to an end. The question now is, how quickly? Will the number of overdose deaths per year remain 100,000 for another decade? Or can we bring it down rapidly? Portugal and the Netherlands show how: by re-criminalizing hard drugs, prosecuting laws against nonviolent crimes, and mandating rehab as an alternative to prison.
If California does those things, the number of drug deaths could be slashed by half in a year, and brought down by 90 percent within three years. The alternative will be not two but three times or more deaths of Americans than all who have died in all foreign wars since 1900.
Michael Shellenberger is the author of San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities and the founder of the Substack Public. You can follow him on X at @shellenberger.
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