Another day, another camp. This latest vagrant camp to pop up is here on Inglewood Blvd. under the 90 freeway, by the very upscale Sunkist Park. First it’s a couple of tents, then more, then the city comes to clean up after them, and soon we have a permanent camp with property rights.
These camps are a breeding ground for petty crime, drugs, and disease. Scabies, staph, and now Dr Drew is already talking about “epidemic typhus” which we haven’t seen since the civil war. And it promises to get worse, because with our current government we have no way to stop anyone from living anywhere.
In 2006, the ACLU won a case against law enforcement, when the 9th circuit court of appeals argued that police can’t break up homeless camps if the vagrants “have nowhere to go.” They hailed this victory as an “end to criminalizing homelessness.” This is an outright lie. We have no interest in keeping vagrants in jail, we just want them off the streets, away from where we live and work. It’s a public health issue and a public safety issue.
https://www.facebook.com/ronfor37/videos/936660179859598/
Any impartial person can see where this ruling would go. If anybody can sleep anywhere, with no repercussions, then that’s exactly what people do. And that’s what’s happening – this policy attracts more vagrants to come and settle here. Their camps pop up everywhere – in rich neighborhoods, in poor neighborhoods, on the beach in front of multi-million dollar homes. Why work and struggle with rent or mortgage out in the boondocks when you can hang out on the beach all day and all night?
As if the ACLU ruling wasn’t bad enough, the state of California has watered down its penal system to make petty crime impossible to combat. A few years ago, California’s prison system got so bad that the federal government sued them to reduce prison overcrowding. Rather than build prisons to match population growth, or find better ways to keep residents safe from criminals, state Democrats instead released everyone they could.
Enter Props 47, 57, and AB109. That article explains it very well, but let’s recap how state Democrats hoodwink well-intentioned voters to pass laws that work so disastrously against us:
Prop 57: Grants early release to “non-volent offenders”. The catch is the drafters never defined which offenses were non-violent. This has led to the release of some rather violent people. “sex traffickers, rapists, abusive spouses and even drive-by shooters have qualified for early release under the state’s nonviolent parole process.”
AB109: amends more than 500 criminal statutes, reduces penalties for parole violations, and shifts thousands of convicted felons from state prison to county jails. This is the big one. Democrats love to talk about how the mentally ill shouldn’t be put in jail. But our old jail system actually had programs to take care of the mentally ill and get them the help they need. Now petty criminals have to share county jails with hardened criminals who belong in more secure facilities. This kills our ability to treat people and burdens jails with a function they can’t handle.
Prop 47: declassifies drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies. This is what’s made the criminal element of these vagrant camps impossible to prosecute. Shoplifters and bike thieves now act with impunity, because they know nobody is coming after them. As constituents have told me, there are legitimate homeless in these camps, but the criminals hide among them. And so long as we can’t prosecute the criminals, these camps remain a hotbed of crime.
In all three laws, we see how state Democrats hoodwinked voters. This is their modus operandi. They use pretty phrases like “rehabilitation”, “victimless crimes”, “don’t criminalize homelessness” to hide the reality that they’re just backing out of the public safety business. They simply don’t care about your safety, or mine. As I posted before, they have no problem keeping where they live and work safe and clean.
Even our public health system is under siege. My opponent brags about her Community Coalition she created. But is that something to be proud of? She funneled $3 million from the Center for Disease Control to this organization – which is basically out campaigning for Democrats. That money could be better spent, maybe, studying the various diseases that threaten to overwhelm our district? Diseases that we thought we eradicated a century ago?
And it gets worse. Now that they’ve attracted hordes of vagrants into our neighborhoods, they turn around and pretend it’s a problem with housing costs, and they need to regulate our homes to solve this problem they created. Yes, that’s right. Every vagrant who wanders into our city is owed a free house and stipend, and needles, and we have to give it to them. Meanwhile they pass more taxes on us, like Measures H and HHH, to pretend they’re solving the problem.
Under the current state administration, this problem is on the fast track to madness and ruin. I legitimately think California can’t take two more years of this trajectory. That’s why I’m running. I’m running to be a voice for the besieged resident, the overburdened taxpayer, who plays by the rules and abides by the law, whom state Democrats have abandoned.
For confronting this problem, for contradicting the state Democrat party line and saying we have a legitimate law enforcement and public health crisis, I have been smeared as a (very Jewish) Nazi, a white supremacist, a greedy fat cat, a Trump/Putinbot … more smears than any private citizen would care to deal with. It’s what I expect from a one-party monopoly, and it’s enough to make me want to move out of state. But I stay, and I run, because I love Los Angeles, my wife and I want to keep it our home, and we want it to be great again. I do hope you will join me. Not for my sake, but for yours.
