California Gov. Gavin Newsom has perfected the art of political theater — all slick hair, smooth talking points, and statistics deployed like confetti to distract from the mess on the ground. On crime and homelessness, he’s turned spin into a full-time job. In part two of our look at Shawn Ryan’s marathon mid-July podcast with Newsom, we break down how the governor’s blizzard of half-truths left Ryan snowed under and the real story buried.
In the second installment breaking apart Shawn Ryan’s massive mid-July podcast interview of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, we’ll look at Newsom’s claims on crime and homelessness in California.
Newsom deployed facts like a smokescreen, void of context, leaving Ryan unable to challenge him.
Newsom began by boasting that California’s $950 felony theft threshold is the 10th-toughest in the nation, while Texas’s felony theft threshold for crimes like shoplifting is $2,500, “the weakest in the country” Newsom crowed.
But Newsom’s claim wasn’t the own he tried to say it was.
Why? Simply this: Texas prosecutes shoplifters. A person shoplifting $100 to less than $750 in goods in Texas will be charged with a Class B Misdemeanor, punishable by up to 180 days in jail and $2,000 in fines as well as restitution. Stealing $750 to $2,500 of goods in Texas will get you a Class A Misdemeanor, up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
In California, almost no one was charged for lifting less than $950 through 2024.
In fact, things got so bad that a ballot initiative, backed by large retailers, was put on the ballot. Prop. 36 was opposed by leftwing criminal justice advocates who fretted that cracking down on crime would harm minority communities.
Because the voting public was fed up with crime, and polling indicated they were inclined to approve the tough-on-crime initiative, Democrats were moved to action and drafted a series of bills to head off the tough-on-crime ballot initiative. But negotiations broke down, and Californians passed Prop. 36 by more than 68%. Newsom opposed Prop. 36.
But since California has refused to significantly expand jail and prison capacity for some 15 years—there’s no place to hold small-time shoplifters—meaning that the state’s new, tough-on-crime posture will quickly peter out. What good is a “tough” felony threshold if few ever get incarcerated for any length of time?
California is ground zero for America’s street homeless problem. Called the “unhoused” by advocates, the leftwing consensus in California is that homelessness is, at its core, an issue of affordable housing. Largely ignored or understated in this challenge is the fact that some 76% of homeless suffer from mental illness. Some studies suggest even higher shares of people suffer from mental illness and/or addiction while homeless advocates push far lower numbers.
In the podcast, Newsom defended himself and California by throwing shade at Florida, saying that, “…parts of Florida have substantially higher homeless than parts of California. Like California’s homeless growth last year—unsheltered homeless, was 0.45—it was close to 9% in Florida, I mean almost 10x!”
So, California is still number one in per capita unhoused homelessness, with about four times the rate of Florida but Florida’s lower numbers saw higher growth in one year. Weak sauce, Gavin.
At this point, Ryan stirred himself to one of his rare challenges of Newsom, saying, “I have heard that California has the highest homeless population in the country.”
Newsom responded, saying he “owns” this stat, remarking that it’s been the case “…for 20 plus years” and that California’s “highest housing costs (are) the original sin…” of the homeless crisis.
This is simply not the case, rather, it’s the left’s belief that housing is a right and that those who live on the streets are homeless because they don’t have homes—not that they’re blasted out of their minds on drugs or with untreated mental illness and that the current carrot-only “housing first” approach isn’t working—in fact, it’s making things worse by deemphasizing sobriety and treatment—treating street homelessness as the disease rather than the symptom.
Putting an untreated, violent homeless person in a home and expecting him to not try to burn it down, use the home as a stash house for the items he stole, or use illegal drugs, or live on the street anyway is an unrealistic expectation.
Instead, what’s needed is a wider array of options to address the problem—one that’s happening now under the Trump Administration and the new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Scott Turner. Secretary Turner has shifted HUD’s homelessness policy to target resources to nonprofits that work to instill self-sufficiency and well-being in the long run.
Newsom’s crime and homelessness policies lack the one thing that modern Democrats always seem to lack in their policies: an acknowledgement that responsibility is tied to human flourishing.
(Next up, we’ll look at California’s failed green policies: soaring electricity costs and high-speed rail.)
Chuck DeVore is Chief National Initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He served in the California State Assembly and is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. He’s the author of “Crisis of the House Never United.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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