Rebuilding the Mound of ‘Defund Police’

The Totalitarians have had an unprecedented-in-human-history run of success. Their every plan succeeds, less the endgame ones that they keep trying to skip ahead to such as “mass starvation of deplorables”. It’s begun to backfire in a big way, however.

Today’s example is their “defund the police” movement. Release Barrabbas, persecute Christ, what could go wrong? It worked the first time! We’ll call it something sneaky and trendy like ‘Defund the Police’ so nobody will notice that we’re destroying all law & order in society.

But Normie finally, finally noticed. Not just Normie the flag-waving griller, either, but Normie the “All Hail Google!” soyboy who traded his soul for Big Brother’s protection, a rejection by a blue-haired feminist and a timeshare on a San Francisco broom closet of an apartment.

Cue the damage control!

And just so we’re clear on context, this first article demonstrates the current property-crime situation in San Francisco.

San Francisco Drivers Leave Trunks Open as Car Break-ins Surge

h ttps://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/17/san-francisco-drivers-leave-trunks-open-as-car-break-ins-surge/

By Jordan Dixon-Hamilton, 17 December 2021

Drivers in San Francisco are leaving their car’s trunk open in an effort to fend off potential auto burglaries as the city reported a 32 percent increase in car break-ins over the past year.

“I’m shocked,” said Garret Tom, former San Francisco Police Department Deputy Chief. “There’s so much that can go wrong here.”

Shocked, I say!

Tom noted that “we’re in different times” and cautioned that leaving the trunk open would invite more thieves instead of deterring them. “They could steal your batteries, your tires,” he told KGO-TV. “They could go into your glove compartment and find out where you live.”

Tires and batteries can be stolen regardless of whether the door is open. Which means that the situation here is not the auto-theft rings of B.C., Before Coof. The situation here is the organized retail theft that’s been making headlines recently. People are more worried about casual smash-and-grabs (now misdemeanors that are no longer punished) rather than grand theft auto (still a punished felony) or home-invasion robbery (still a punished felony). Criminals are doing what’s most profitable and the people who Trusted the Science are becoming desperate.

Probably with some serious buyers’ remorse, too.

San Francisco is not the only bay area city to suffer from increased car break-ins. In neighboring Oakland, both car break-ins and auto burglaries increased by 27 percent this year.

“We have got to do more to get us through this holiday season,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said. Schaaf called on private property owners to assist in the city’s surveillance of these criminals by installing security cameras.

“Pointing the cameras towards the street and register it with the Oakland Police Department,” Schaaf said.

Remember, kids, the only way to thwart crime is a crowd-funded surveillance state… because your senator spent the public budget on hookers and blow!

There is no case to be made, none at all, that is is normal criminal behavior. Legalizing theft and demoralizing cops has had the very obvious consequence that people are starting to advertise the fact that they don’t own anything worth stealing. Comparable to the ‘no radio in car’ signs that Los Angelenos put on their vehicles back in the day.

And now, our feature presentation!

California’s ‘smash and grab’ robberies – what’s really going on behind the headlines?

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/california-smash-grab-robberies-really-110026684.html

By Abené Clayton, Sam Levin and Dani Anguiano, 17 December 2021

Do not believe your lying eyes! It’s not what it looks like!

Amid fraught discussions over the future of policing in major American cities, a series of mass thefts at high-end stores across California have made headlines nationwide.

The incidents have drawn widespread coverage linking them to “organized crime” and spotlighting concerns from retailers about a theft crisis. They also reinvigorated a political debate over crime rates in California, prompting pledges from local and state leaders to charge those involved and increase police presence in affected areas. Meanwhile, conservatives and some local leaders have pointed to the incidents as evidence that criminal justice reform and progressive policies are encouraging crime and making California more dangerous.

But despite their high profile nature, experts say there is little evidence to suggest the robberies point to a wider retail theft crisis, and that some law enforcement and industry groups are overstating the problem.

Here’s what we know so far.

We know that squaring THIS circle is going to take some serious lying. It’s catechism time! Let us restore your faith in progtards with names like London Breed.

What are the “smash and grab” robberies that police and retailers have been reporting?

Last month in San Francisco’s downtown and the posh Union Square shopping district, groups broke into Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Bloomingdale’s at the height of the holiday shopping season. In suburban Walnut Creek, about 80 people, some wearing ski masks and carrying crowbars, grabbed armfuls of merchandise from a Nordstrom and fled to waiting cars in what police called a “planned event”, and a similar incident occurred at a mall in the nearby city of Hayward. In Los Angeles, more than $330,000 in goods were stolen in 11 “smash and grab” incidents over about two weeks.

In some high-profile cases, authorities have said there was evidence of coordination. The state attorney general announced earlier this month that five defendants had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit organized retail theft after officials seized roughly $8m in stolen merchandise from CVS, Target and other major retailers.

Many of those named businesses now closing their Gay Area branches. It’s not a ghetto… it’s a retail desert!

While a majority of respondents in a recent national retail trade association survey claimed that “organized retail crime” had increased over the last year, there isn’t clear research data to substantiate that claim in California, experts said.

We open with the most trendy spin tactics of cherrypicking the experts and selective amnesia on the topic of causation…

A recent San Francisco Chronicle analysis concluded that the local data is “woefully inadequate”, finding that one reported “spike” in shoplifting came from a single store that was using a new reporting system. And an LA Times investigation found that a California retail association dramatically overstated the possible losses from “organized crime” and when pressed for an explanation, said “there’s no way of knowing exactly” how much businesses lose from thefts.

…Experts in Democrat-loyal mass media! “Journalists report that journalists report that the problem journalists reported on is not consistent with the latest reports of journalists.”

“Organized retail theft crimes are not new. This is something we’ve seen for years nationwide,” said Rachel Marshall, communications director for the San Francisco district attorney. “What seems to be new is the virality of the videos. But everyone deserves to feel safe in the city, and we take seriously the fears that the viral videos generate.”

…Experts such as the staff of Chesa “Son Of Weatherman Terrorist” Boudin, who refuses to prosecute these exact perpetrators then claims there is no crime!

How has the state responded?

Thus far, the immediate response to the shoplifting in San Francisco and Los Angeles has been led by law enforcement.

And that’s a problem because ACAB. Hence this article trying to reassure people that anti-police measures are not automatically pro-criminal despite the smashed windows of your Prius.

In late September, the mayor, along with the San Francisco police chief, unveiled the organized retail theft investigation and deterrence strategy. The initiative will expand the city’s retail crime unit from two to five officers.

“Look, we’re handling the problem!”

The city will also triple the number of unarmed community ambassadors, from eight to 25.

“We’re handling my problem with my pet project! Armed drug dealers would never hit a girl!”

This move came after months of scrutiny driven by people breaking into cars near tourist hubs such as Fisherman’s Wharf and shoplifting attempts at Walgreens locations in the city, including one that appeared to show a man riding his bike out of a store with a trash bag filled with stolen items. That suspect was arrested and charged.

Citing one specific incident to deny the existence of a trend.

Segue

Walgreens San Francisco drugstore thief arrested trying to steal again

h ttps://scallywagandvagabond.com/2021/06/jean-lugo-romero-walgreens-san-francisco-drugstore-thief-arrested/

By Christopher Koulouris, 21 June 2021

A man suspected of committing a brazen, caught-on-camera theft inside a San Francisco Walgreens that went viral last week was arrested over the weekend as he attempted to steal from yet another another drug store in the city, according to reports.

He could no longer be ignored.

Police said Lugo-Romero was being sought in a series of drug store thefts, including one at a Walgreens where he allegedly shoveled items into a black plastic bag and pedaled away on a bicycle with little resistance from a store security guard.

The June 15th crime was recorded and posted to Twitter, where it went viral and renewed debate about a San Francisco law that critics say embolden shoplifters because of laxed punishment.

I checked and guess what? He’s being held in jail! In lieu of $25k *bail*, which politicians keep trying to get rid of! How did that happen?

The controversial city law, called Proposition 47, lowered the penalty for stealing goods worth less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor.

Jean Lugo-Romero, 40, was arrested Saturday morning circa 8.34 a.m as he sought to rip off a business on Haight Street with about $978 in cosmetics that police say he intended to steal, according to a release via San Francisco police.

See, kids? Math CAN save your life!

Capoliticalreview estimates that Romero has stolen a total of $40k in retail merchandise.

He also had an outstanding warrant for skipping a court date for a past theft case, police said.

End segue

To critics of California’s leaders, store closures and reports of mass thefts seemed to confirm the narrative that California is a lawless place where officials turn a blind eye to crime, to the detriment of local commerce.

QED.

Political leaders have pushed for more police, particularly in high-traffic areas. Gavin Newsom, the state’s governor, has called for California’s highway patrol to increase their presence and doubled down on his Organized Retail Crime Task Force, a collaboration between police and prosecutors that was established in July. On Friday, the governor announced a $250m proposal to help police fight organized retail theft, which would create a dedicated team in the attorney general’s office to prosecute these crimes.

Which is it? Are the critics wrong about the increase in lawlessness, or is this a problem needing another quarter-billion dollars of re-election slush money err, additional bureaucracy and specialized teams because the last thing we need is more patrolmen in the marketplace?

And as we’ve just seen, “doubling down” on organized crime means going from 2 officers to 5.

Are criminal justice reforms or progressive policies contributing to the problem?

Republican leaders and some law enforcement representatives in the state have blamed the spate of recent offenses on the state’s criminal justice reforms, which have aimed to curb mass incarceration. Some have cited Prop 47, a ballot measure approved by voters in 2014, which reduced penalties for certain non-violent and low-level offenses, with the Sacramento district attorney saying: “There’s no consequences any more to theft.”

“It’s not our fault! We’re only doing what Soros, I mean, the voters told us to!”

Fact checkers and criminologists, however, have said it is false to suggest there were no consequences to theft and that there was no research-based evidence linking retail thefts in the state this year to reform measures. Prop 47 did not eliminate punishments for thefts, but directed that thefts under $950 be prosecuted as misdemeanors, not felonies (the previous threshold for felonies was $400).

“We didn’t legalize it! We only MOSTLY legalized it!”

California’s laws also remain harsher than the majority of states, which dictate amounts higher than $950 for thefts to be classified as felonies.

I’ll guess that Florida doesn’t need harsh laws when it has harsh store clerks ‘standing their ground’ with Samuel Colts.

“There are a lot of unknowns about what’s behind the smash-and-grabs and robberies, but I’m quite confident that this is not the result of Prop 47, specifically, or criminal justice reforms more generally,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, whose 2018 study found that Prop 47 was not responsible for an uptick in crimes.

She was paid for that. Seriously. And that’s totally normal and not a red flag that her research might be prejudiced.

She noted that there were other states without Prop 47 seeing similar smash and grab cases, and also pointed out that it would be difficult to prove that a 2021 trend was the result of a law passed seven years prior.

Moving the goalposts. “You can’t prove that Prop 47 was EXCLUSIVELY the cause of this current trend!” But it’s really hard to keep criminals off the streets when their crime is a misdemeanor, which happens to be exactly what advocates of Prop 47 said would happen. They said it would reduce prison overcrowding.

Prop 47 was passed in 2014. The Los Angeles Times linked spikes in recidivism to it in 2015. This was declared a qualified success, per wikipedia, because it also meant that men who Roofied women on dates were also getting ‘slaps on the wrist’.

Speaking of wikipedia,

Segue

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charis_Kubrin

Kubrin’s research focuses on, among other topics, the relationship between race, violence, and social disorganization theory. She has also researched the perception of rap music as violent and dangerous, as well as whether a rapper’s music can be used as evidence against him in a court of law.

Well, it IS a crime against music…

With Graham Ousey, she has also studied the relationship between immigration and crime in the United States, finding that immigration is related to lower rates of crime and violence in U.S. neighborhoods. Kubrin has stated that the Public Safety Realignment initiative was not a factor in the 2019 California stabbing rampage.

She’s a professional at un-linking criminal behavior from pro-criminal government policy. “Just because they sing songs about drug dealing and murder doesn’t mean they’re bad people!”

End segue

While some have also accused progressive prosecutors in LA and San Francisco of not taking these crimes seriously, advocates have noted that high-profile smash and grab cases and retail thefts had occurred in both cities before the current DAs were elected.

Today’s stores didn’t close en masse as a consequence before the current DAs with extremely anti-law enforcement, totalitarian ideas came along.

In San Francisco, data also shows that prosecutors have filed charges for the vast majority of commercial burglary cases that police have presented to the DA this year.

Filed charges, then let them back on the streets because the charges were only misdemeanors. Exhibit A: Jean Lugo-Romero.

And in LA, advocates noted that property crime is down compared to the 2019, when the previous DA was in office.

By some definitions of property crime. I can play statistics, too!

Segue

h ttps://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-08/marking-one-year-in-office-l-a-d-a-gascon-touts-accomplishments-spars-with-critics-on-crime

One year and one day later, Gascón was flanked by progressive prosecutors from around the country as he stood before a room full of reporters during a 90-minute news conference meant to celebrate what he saw as his successes during his first 12 months on the job.

But on the heels of weeks of high-profile crimes, including the killing of a beloved Beverly Hills philanthropist, an explosion of gunfire that left one child dead in Wilmington and viral videos of smash-and-grab robberies at retail stores, Gascón instead spent much of his time sparring with reporters and trying to counter questions about criticism levied by those seeking to recall him.

The consequences of his policies are a feature, not an unexpected bug, hence he focused on the real problem of keeping the media sold on the correct Narrative.

Gascón stood firm, saying there was no link between his policies and what he called the inaccurate perception that crime is rising in L.A. County.

Understand that, peasant? There is NO LINK between emptying the prisons and increases in crime rates! THE ONLY REASON THAT ANYBODY GOES TO PRISON IS BECAUSE COPS ARE PIGS! So says Gascon:

After one reporter questioned the D.A. about an insult the sheriff had lobbed earlier in the day, Gascón responded in kind.

“My dad used to say that when you wrestle with a pig, you both get muddy and the pig likes it,” Gascón said, before clarifying that he didn’t mean to insult law enforcement.

Oopsie!

Connecting crime rates to Gascón’s policies is complicated. Homicides are up roughly 46% in Los Angeles as of Nov. 27 compared with the same time frame in 2019. As of Oct. 31, murders had increased by the same rate in areas patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department compared with the same time frame in 2020.

Notice they’re comparing to different years. City to 2019, County to 2020. Those two years are much more different from each other than normal because of Coof.

Car thefts — which also surged during Gascón’s tenure in San Francisco — are also up 53% in Los Angeles compared with 2019.

That’s a trend, not just a data point.

But property crime, which experts more often link to policies like Gascón’s that lessen punishments on low-level offenders, is down in 6.6% in L.A. compared to 2019. Robberies are down 13.6%, and burglaries are down 7.7%, in the same time frames, per LAPD data.

In Sheriff’s Department territory, robberies are down 12% and burglaries are down 9% as of Oct. 31, according to data published on the agency’s website. Violent crime is relatively static, while property crime has increased 5%, the records show.

So, Gascon isn’t making much difference in property crime after all, meanwhile car theft and murder is way up under him specifically.

He touted a dramatic drop in misdemeanor filing rates for crimes related to addiction — a delivery on his Day 1 promise to stop prosecuting low-level crimes like minor drug possession and public intoxication…

We could call that the Prop 47 two-punch. First the felony is reclassified as a misdemeanor, then it often goes unpunished because it’s only a misdemeanor.

If nobody gets charged than has a crime really occurred? The Christian would say yes because all evil is ultimately against God, not man. They who worship government as their god, would probably claim that crime is only ever what the State says it is on a day-by-day basis.

End segue

Recapping all the tricks they used:

Tame “experts” who consistently reach the same, politically convenient conclusion.

Moving the goalposts.

Claim it was the voters who wanted this situation.

Presuming that causation is unknowable. (nihilism)

Strawman argumentation.

Motte-and-bailey between isolated incidents and trends.

Not filing charges is conflated with a lower crime rate.

Differing standards of comparison.

Silence about the fact that the stated goal of their no-incarceration policies was, by definition, more criminals on the street.

And straight-up lying. They lie. We know they lie. They know we know and can’t help themselves. Or don’t care. They need their job to pay their mortgage, now don’t they? And if their job is lying then they’ll get paid to lie from here to the grave and call themselves a winner.

Unless there really is a God.

We have time to close with a sob story.

A Closer Look At L.A.’s Robberies

Dead Tree Edition, 1 January 2022

By Matthew Ormseth & Brittney Mejia

On Black Friday, a man and two women walked into an upscale consignment shop on Melrose Avenue. The women started shoving pairs of shoes into their bags and walked out, as alarms blared.

Stop, thief!

In an interview, the man said one of the alleged thieves, a young mother, steals and resells merchandise in order to pay her rent.

Stop, pussy pass! “I have to steal for a living because Walmart won’t hire me after CVS prosecuted me for theft!”

“That’s how people pay their rent, pay their car loans,” he said. “Going to the mall, stealing clothes–that’s how people have money.”

That is some pure, Grade-A, smell-that-skunk Bullshit. Companies are offering signing bonuses for low-level workers, California has possibly the world’s biggest welfare state too and yet, poor ol’ Vibrant Momma has NO CHOICE but to steal everything in broad daylight just to eat and… make her forking CAR PAYMENTS?!

Maybe she wouldn’t steal as much if she was limited to a bicycle? Maybe she wouldn’t even need to?

A series of high-profile crimes in upscale parts of Los Angeles – “smash and grab” and “follow home” robberies – have received widespread attention in recent months. Police have deployed officers to malls and shopping corridors such as Melrose and Rodeo Drive. Right-wing media have seized on the robberies as proof that crime in California is out of control.

True dat.

Largely absent from the conversation, however, are the people accused of committing the crimes. Culprits have appeared in pixelated surveillance footage as blurry, masked figures. Police news bulletins offer only vague descriptions of suspects – race, age, height.

“Crime is pixelated man’s fault!”

Sitting on the porch of his mother’s home in South Los Angeles, the man arrested in the theft on Melrose insisted he had no intention of stealing anything when he and two women walked into the consignment shop the day after Thanksgiving. The 21yo said he planned to buy sneakers at the store. But once inside, he said, the women started shoving pairs of shoes into their handbags.

Which is why he stuck around to give mall cops their names? No.

“I’m telling my friends, ‘Don’t walk to my car. Walk somewhere else,’” he said. “But they still opened my door and got in my car. I can’t put a gun to their head and tell them to get out of my car.“

Of course you can! It’s fun! And it works, too!

What you can’t do is knowingly drive off with stolen goods in the backseat…

He drove off with the women – and the shoes – in his Nissan Altima. He was headed down Melrose Avenue when he made eye contact with a police officer driving in the opposite direction. The officer turned the cruiser around and pulled him over…

BUSTED!!! The cops knew him by sight! Probably that Altima, too!

…ostensibly because his windows were tinted.

He was driving while black! …ed out.

Since he was on probation for a conviction of petty theft, the officer was allowed to search his car. After the officer found the shoes, he and the two women were arrested on suspicion of burglary. The police said they had stolen $1,100 worth of merchandise.

More than $950? Oh noes! Math is hard!

In his prior case, he said, he was stealing over-the-counter medication from CVS and reselling it. It was fast, easy money.

Just like those fruit trees in Africa.

He pleaded guilty to petty theft in 2019 and was sentenced to three years of probation.

He recently got a job at Walmart, he said, and is determined to keep it.

NOOOO!!!!! Walmart DID give him a job after CVS convicted him of theft! *sob*