California officials and residents are growing irritated as Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses funding for a bipartisan tough-on-crime law despite his efforts to deploy more police teams around the state.
Newsom announced greater numbers of Highway Patrol officers in California cities during a Thursday press conference, assuring that President Donald Trump is wrong to claim California needs the National Guard’s help. But local officials and residents are also ramping up pressure on Newsom to dedicate more funds to Proposition 36, a law passed by 68% of voters in November that the governor calls a gateway to excessive incarceration.
Among other measures, Proposition 36 turned some theft and property-related misdemeanors into felonies and lengthened sentences, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. It also requires some repeat drug offenders to choose between a treatment program and three years in prison, increasing the consequences for such crimes. Courts can lengthen some sentences based on the amount of drugs sold.
“The Governor is committed to operationalizing Prop 36,” Newsom’s office told the Daily Caller News Foundation, referencing a portion of funding for the law in the state’s budget. But the governor still opposes parts of the law because they will take away funding for mental health and drug treatment, K-12 school programs and housing services in favor of putting more people in jail, his office said.
“It’s about mass incarceration, not mass treatment,” Newsom said of the new law in September 2024.
Newsom has maintained that if counties want to enforce the law, they should rely on more of their own funding. He agreed to $100 million in funding in the state budget for county behavioral health departments, pre-trial services and court expenses, Politico reported in June. Supporters of Proposition 36 say that $400 million is needed for its enforcement to run smoothly, lambasting the governor at a Torrance town hall hours after his policing announcement, FOX11 reported.
“It’s much slower,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman told the outlet Thursday about current implementation of the law. “If the jails effectively have to be the treatment centers, they are not equipped fully to be proper treatment centers.”
“We will call him. We will send him social media. We will DM him,” Hochman said. I’ll say it right to the camera: Governor Newsom, if you’re watching, get us this funding. If you want to save lives, get us this funding.”
Hochman’s office has filed more than 1,600 theft-related Proposition 36 cases since the law went into effect. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna and Interim Torrance Police Chief Robert Dunn also urged more funding for the law at the town hall, according to FOX11.
Proposition 36 overturned portions of the Newsom-backed Proposition 47, which downgraded thefts of less than $950 from felonies to misdemeanors. Researchers have associated Proposition 47’s passage in 2014 with a spike in some property crime, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Meanwhile, reporting of thefts decreased by more than 7% from 2010 to 2022, a bipartisan state commission found.
Newsom’s California continues to dedicate funds drug and mental health treatment available under both Propositions 36 and 47, showing that there is plenty of overlap between the two laws, the governor’s office told the DCNF.
“Treatment funding was ample prior to Prop 36,” his office said.
Some still feel that Newsom’s support falls short.
“Without the legal tools necessary to confront the challenges of repeat offenders, namely drug addicts and the crimes they commit, the crime suppression teams and the National Guard will face the same long term problem that local police face — a game of criminal whack a mole,” Steve Smith, a public safety expert for the California-based Pacific Research Institute, told the DCNF in an email.
“Prop 36 was designed to provide police, prosecutors, and judges with the ability to charge and impose ‘treatment mandated felonies,’ thus ensuring that addicts would get the rehabilitative treatment they need but will not seek or complete in out of custody settings,” Smith said.
The criticism of Newsom has come from many angles. Republican and Democratic state lawmakers have attacked Newsom for ignoring voters’ wishes to see the tough-on-crime law in full effect. Local business owners previously told the DCNF that his actions meant he was failing to stand up for them against shoplifters.
Newsom’s choice to send Highway Patrol officers to six regions of California to collaborate with local officials expands a strategy he has taken in other areas in recent years, CalMatters reported. Newsom began sending the officers to the high-crime city of Oakland in 2023, according to his office. Oakland and Compton were two of the nation’s top ten cities for murder rates, in 2024, according to the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The liberal governor has repeatedly brushed off concerns about California crime by pointing to Republican-led states with higher homicide rates. Such claims ignore data showing that the Golden State has higher violent crime and felony arrest rates than most of the country, the DCNF previously reported.
Violent crime decreased by 6% across California in 2024 but remained 10.8% higher than pre-COVID-19 levels, data from the state’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center shows.
Trump has floated sending the National Guard to liberal cities around the country to ensure order since he began using more federal resources against crime in Washington, D.C., in August. “Look at what the Democrats have done to San Francisco. They’ve destroyed it. We could clean that up, too. We’ll clean that one up, too,” he said Aug. 22.
Newsom’s administration sued in June over Trump’s decision to send the troops into Los Angeles amid violent rioting in support of illegal immigrants. “He’s de facto militarizing American cities,” Newsom, who many suspect will run for president in 2028, said on Thursday.
If Newsom wants Trump to leave California alone, he should do a better job helping counties clean their streets, Smith told the DCNF.
“If Prop 36 had been funded Governor Newsom would not be faced with the threat of National Guard Deployment!” Smith said.
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