LA & SF DAs Facing Recalls - Voters Have Had Enough
‘Crime Tourism’ Is Now a Thing in California?

Voters just might be ready to reject lawlessness and disorder.

It seems that California is now attracting an entirely new category of vacationers.

Sid Garcia reports for KABC-TV in Los Angeles:

Law enforcement agencies call it “crime tourism” -- groups of thieves from South America traveling to California to burglarize homes...

They’re able to easily obtain tourist visas to travel to California by applying online. Once they have a visa they land at LAX and start their crime spree.

Residents in one Camarillo neighborhood say they’re well aware of the South American burglary crews that have been targeting their community and the surrounding areas.

“Several of my friends have been hit repeatedly,” Camarillo resident John McGrath said... According to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, last year alone, they handled 100 cases involving crews from South America.

Of course California’s permissive politicians have enabled lots of homegrown criminals, too. Readers may recall Ms. Yu’s informative report last year in which she interviewed a local expert who memorably assessed the safety measures at a San Francisco supermarket:

I think that they’re not very good because I’ve personally been able to shoplift here with relative ease.

This column recently asked if San Francisco had become the most intolerant place in America given the city government’s bizarre refusal to do business with most U.S. states. A number of readers argued that city officials were in fact extremely tolerant because they have been permitting all manner of crimes and misdemeanors to be committed against the citizenry. This seems especially true when it comes to theft.

Although violent crime in San Francisco is lower than in many other major U.S. cities, business owners, residents and visitors here are dealing with a rash of thefts, burglaries and car break-ins.

Among the 25 largest U.S. cities, San Francisco has had the highest property-crime rate in four of the most recent six years for which data is available, bucking the long-term national decline in such crimes that began in the 1990s... Businesses have been affected in every corner of San Francisco, even traditionally low-crime areas such as the Sunset District, where commercial and residential burglaries rose 80% in between 2019 and 2021.

Michael Hsu’s Footprint shoe store got broken into for the first time in February 2021. The thief used a blowtorch to crack the glass door without setting off the alarm and took tens of thousands of dollars worth of high-end North Face jackets. More people arrived soon after, taking whatever they could grab before they set off the alarm.

Mr. Hsu, who grew up in the Sunset, said he recalled thinking: “Oh, they finally got me.”

Eventually they’ll get everybody if there is no political will to protect and serve the community. Mr. Elinson notes:

Some former police officials said in interviews that officers don’t feel it is worth making an arrest in low-level cases because they assume the district attorney won’t file charges. They also point to a statewide ballot measure passed in 2014—Proposition 47—that raised the dollar amount at which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950.

The good news is that it doesn’t sound like voters want to tolerate more lawlessness. In a separate report, Ms. Knight recently noted:

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin has just 12 weeks left to make perhaps the biggest case of his career: convincing the city’s frustrated voters that he should keep his job.

But a new poll, commissioned by the campaign seeking to recall Boudin, suggests that might be a daunting task. Of 800 voters likely to participate in the June 7 election, 68% said they would vote yes on recalling Boudin. Seventy-four percent said they have an unfavorable opinion of him, and 78% rated his job performance as “only fair” or “poor.”

Mr. Gascón, who is now the D.A. in Los Angeles County, is also facing a recall. Alexa Mae Asperin for Fox station KTTV in Los Angeles reports:

The Recall DA George Gascón campaign announced Wednesday it has collected over 125,000 signatures, which is on track to meet the July 6 deadline for submission.

To qualify to be on the ballot, the recall must collect 566,856 signatures from registered Los Angeles County voters (about 10% of total current registered voters).

If successful, the recall would likely appear on the Nov. 2022 ballot...

The city councils of more than 30 cities in the county have issued “no confidence” votes involving Gascón.

How could anyone have confidence in district attorneys who have spent so much time describing the offenses they won’t prosecute? wsj.com