NRLEA

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to decriminalize undermines police

Posted by NRLEA under Articles, Latest News

With a current budget of 26.1 billion dollars and with a plan to reduce 1.2 billion dollars from the California State Department of Corrections yearly budget, the governor wants to reduce the number of inmates going to prison by changing the criminal justice system.

One example is to reduce the amount of a vehicle theft valued from $2500 or less as a misdemeanor.

It makes this crime a catch and release and puts the criminal back out on the streets.  The over-crowding of jails and prisons is already a burden and instead of cutting the fat from legislators who appoint their buddies and term-limited politicians from positions that only require them to show up once a year for one vote and get paid a whopping $280,000.00 and all the other pork feed machines, the real criminals need to be reduced from the Capitol first.

If this passes we can rest assured that crime will increase especially since vehicle thefts have been dropping in the State of California at record numbers.  This plan is a disaster and severely undermines police and their efforts to protect the communities in which they serve.

Some provisions of Schwarzenegger’s plans are:

- making the writing of bad checks, receiving stolen property, and petty theft misdemeanors instead of felonies. The proposed change would mean the crimes will no longer be publishable with prison sentences. This will simply encourage more criminals to pursue identify theft.

- raising the threshold for grand theft from $400 to $2,500 which means the theft of an item valued at $2,300 would be considered a misdemeanor. The end result is no state prison time and minimal time in the San Joaquin County Jail due to overcrowding.

- placing paroles who commit some parole violations to be eligible for GPS supervision outside of prison by eliminating the current law requiring them to be automatically sent back to prison.

- possibly commuting the sentences of illegal immigrant inmates to allow them to be turned over to federal officials for deportation. His plan calls for starting with low level cases and proceeding on an individual basis. Up first on the list are those who have committed just one felony and have never committed violent acts or a sexual offense.

- inmates released who are considered low to moderate risk will not be subject to supervision by parolee officers in a bid to get the case load down from 70 to 1 to 45 to 1 per probation office. They would still be subject, however, to warrantless searches by police.

- allowing some prison inmates deemed low-risk offenders to serve their prison sentence in a home or a hospital treatment center wearing a GPS device on an ankle bracelet. Inmates eligible would be sick, elderly or have less than 12 months left on their sentences. The governor gives no indication of who would monitor these individuals.

This is very bad news for police and their communities and the NRLEA does not support this plan to put criminals back onto the streets.  However, we do support the sending home of illegal aliens and the passing of a law that would send them to prison for an extremely very long time if they return illegally.  Police chiefs will have a difficult time fighting the same criminals all over again.