From their phones and television screens, and sometimes out their windows, Californians have seen their condition change rapidly in the pandemic. Health grew then and continued to grow. Fatal fentanyl overdoses are on the rise. From TikTok to the nightly news, there have been nasty rants during the day.

A constellation of law enforcement, prosecutors and major retailers insisted the cause was simple: The punishment wasn’t harsh enough.

They introduced a measure that elevated some low-level offenses to felonies and created ways to coerce people reluctant to seek substance abuse treatment. That measure, Proposition 36, passed overwhelmingly Tuesday night. He led 70% to 30% early Wednesday.

It reverses some of the changes voters made with a 2014 ballot measure that turned certain nonviolent crimes into misdemeanors, effectively shortening prison sentences. Amid the pandemic’s visible changes in California, in its growing homeless encampments, looted Nordstroms and ransacked railroad yards, critics of that earlier initiative finally found the right climate to reverse the law.

The strategy in the center of Prop. 36 is still a matter of debate. Its opponents argue that harsher sentences will never be an effective deterrent to crime. Much of the science, some of it funded by the US Department of Justice, supports them.

But the victory Prop. 36, despite opposition from the governor and most of the state’s Democratic leadership, was not about what people know, but what they saw.

An IT technician was afraid to walk five blocks to work in downtown Los Angeles, so he bought a parking permit and drove. A big box retailer moved all their goods to the second floor because people kept stealing from the ground floor. The fentanyl crisis has seen police on body camera videos panic and pass out when exposed to the substance.

Campaign Prop. 36 deployed on images like these and promised to make them disappear.

That Prop. 36 would pass has been pretty clear since late summer, when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest attempts to preempt the measure with other retail crime bills failed to siphon funding from Prop. 36 or to keep her away from the vote. So how did Californians who supported lighter sentences under Proposition 47 in 2014 end up supporting a tougher crime measure a decade later?

“What we may be seeing is evidence of a course correction down the long road of criminal justice reform efforts,” said Magnus Lofstrom, director of criminal policy at the Public Policy Institute of California. Prop. 36 “targets crimes and social issues that people can see: retail theft, more closed merchandise, more viral videos (of thefts) and then the media talks about it all.”

It’s those visible issues, Lofstrom said, that can quickly change voters’ minds. This also includes the growing homeless encampments associated with public drug use.

During the pandemic, the rate of commercial burglaries and burglaries has skyrocketed, especially in Los Angeles, Alameda, San Mateo and Sacramento counties. Nationally, the institute found that reported thefts of goods worth up to $950 have increased 28 percent over the past five years. This is the highest level seen since 2000.

Combining shoplifting with commercial burglaries, the institute’s researchers found that total reported thefts were 18 percent higher than in 2019.

“Voters in California have spoken with a clear voice about the triple epidemics of retail theft, homelessness and fatal drug overdoses plaguing our state,” said San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. “In supporting Proposition 36, they said yes to treatment. They said yes to responsibility. And they said yes to putting common sense before partisanship so we can stop the suffering in our communities.”

Californians still want rehabilitation for prisoners

Opponents of the measure say that Prop. 36 was a clever way to reintroduce the war on drugs in a way that will be palatable to voters in 2024. They argue that no studies of criminal justice or homelessness support the idea that tougher penalties — or the threat of penalties tougher — prevent crime or get people off the street.

Prop. 36 will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in court and prison costs, they say, without measurably reducing crime or poverty.

“We are aware that there has been a shift in the climate of criminal justice reform,” said Loyola Law School professor Priscilla Ocen, a former special assistant attorney general at the California Department of Justice.

“I disagree with the premise that California is moving further to the right when it comes to the bad times of mass incarceration,” she said. “I think in some respects, yes, the electorate is frustrated by feelings of insecurity — despite the fact that those feelings are often not based on data in terms of how likely you are to be a victim of either a property crime or of a crime against a person. .”

The Yes to 36 campaign focused on “a sense of insecurity and uncertainty,” highlighting the most visible elements of crime in the pandemic era, Ocen said. Despite overall violent and property crime rates much closer to historic lows than their peaks, certain visible crimes, such as burglaries and car break-ins, have increased year-over-year since the pandemic through at least 2023, the last year for which statistics are available.

“There’s a frustration that in addition to seeing homeless people routinely on the streets, there’s just feelings of unease, even if it’s not borne out in the data,” Ocen said.

Polls in late September showed that as many likely voters favor expanding treatment and rehabilitation as those who favor harsher sentences.

Supporters of the measure insist the changes will not require the kind of mass incarceration that led to California’s massive prison overcrowding problem in the 1990s and 2000s.

What Californians see downtown

Claudia Oliveira, executive director of the Downtown Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, said downtown Los Angeles businesses have had to make adjustments since the pandemic to combat retail theft — a Burlington clothing factory, she said , moved all his merchandise to the store. second floor for a while due to repeated thefts from the ground floor.

“It’s not something we should be angry about, but sadder that we are in a place where people are not healthy and people are still living in poverty, where they have to steal,” she said.

“Sometimes people say ‘It’s just property crime so why do you care, they have insurance.’ Which is not always true. They have deductibles. I’ve seen small businesses close after being robbed. And it’s not always true that they have the resources to get back on their feet, especially in the inner city.”

Oliveira said he could not vote for Prop. 36 because it is undocumented. But she said she supported the measure because she hopes it will connect people with substance abuse or mental health problems to social services while preventing theft on the scale California has seen since its inception. the pandemic.

Jeff Ashook, 48, said his life in downtown Los Angeles has changed for the worse.

“I started working here in downtown Los Angeles before the pandemic, and I was living in Glendale at the time, and yes, I parked maybe about a half mile from where I work,” he said. “And I felt safe going to work. i did it

“After the pandemic – the homeless came back, but the police officers never came back.”

Ashook said he now lives downtown but drives the five blocks to work out of fear for his safety.

“And I’ve had colleagues who have actually been physically assaulted. Several colleagues who ended up going to the hospital in the short distance we were traveling,” he said. “So yeah, like I said, it made me a little more tired.”

Ultimately, Ashook said he could not support Prop. 36 due to projected costs.

“I don’t like that the fiscal impact (is) anywhere from a few tens of millions of dollars to a few hundred million,” he said. “It’s a lot of money. And don’t say where this money is coming from.”

Voters are shifting California crime priorities

In the end, Lofstrom said, it’s not really a contradiction to have voted for Prop. 47 in 2014 and also for Prop. 36 this year.

In 2014, the state urgently needed to reduce its prison population, for practical reasons and because of a court order to maintain the population at no more than 137.5% of the prison system’s capacity.

Today, the emergency is pushing in the other direction, he said. But the causes behind the increase in shoplifting and general property crime are still unclear, he said.

“We don’t know what’s driving the increase in retail theft. We don’t know how much of this is driven by economic and social challenges that lead to shoplifting,” he said.

Even with Prop. 36 on the books, Lofstrom said much about the implementation of the measure is still to be determined.

“Are the cops going to arrest you for this?” he asked. “Will prosecutors pursue these charges? It’s not certain how this will all play out.”