6 myths about crime in California: Voters support anti-drug and shoplifting measures

There has been disagreement about crime and punishment in California for years.

In 1994, they voted for harsher penalties and a three-strikes law.

Twenty years later, in 2014, nearly 60% of voters approved Assembly Bill 47, which aimed to reduce the state's prison population by making some crimes misdemeanors and providing more state funding for drug and psychiatric rehabilitation.

Now, another decade later, Californians appear ready to change course again by reversing some of the changes made by Prop. 47. A new poll shows they overwhelmingly support Proposition 36, which was put on the ballot in November and would have increased penalties for certain property and drug crimes.

Treating California voters as a predictable monolith is a national pastime, but that doesn't seem to hold true. Voters have changed course on criminal justice once in the last 30 years and seem poised to do so again.

Here are six more myths about crime in California—from street violence and guns to prisons and death row—and the truth behind them.

Myth: Street crime makes Californian cities uninhabitable

If crime is making California's cities uninhabitable today, it is reasonable to assume that the quality of life in these cities must have been better in recent decades due to lower crime.

But that's not even remotely the case. Statewide, the violent crime rate in 2023 was 511 per 100,000 residents. The peak in 1992 was just over double that rate.

Even then, and despite a violent uprising after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in connection with the beating of Rodney King, Los Angeles made it into the top 50 most livable cities in 1992 according to Money Magazine. San Francisco, Oakland and San Diego also achieved this.

The overall decline in violent crime in California has been enormous, falling 47% between 1993 and 2022, the latest year for which national data is available. The state saw a slightly larger decline in the violent crime rate of 49% over the same period.

The last time the violent crime rate was as low as it is today was in 1970.

Property crime in California peaked in 1980 and has not reached that level in any decade since.

Still, the pandemic-related increase in property crime at the state level, particularly theft, has worried many retailers and residents of some major cities, including Oakland.

Those concerns led to a series of anti-shoplifting laws that Newsom recently signed that make it easier to prosecute suspects for property crimes. They also shaped Prop. 36, the bill backed by district attorneys and major retailers in November to increase penalties for certain theft and drug offenses – something the governor opposes.

Myth: California opened its prisons 15 years ago and put criminals back on the streets

Decades of harsh sentencing laws in the 1980s and 1990s left California's prisons with a problem: There were too many inmates and no room to house them. At their fullest in 2006, prisons housed 173,000 people, more than twice the system's designed capacity.

In 2009, a three-judge federal panel declared overcrowding to be the primary reason for the prison system's health care deficiencies and ordered the state to reduce its prison population by about 30 percent.

The result was a decade-long experiment in criminal justice called “Realignment.” By reducing the number of crimes considered capital offenses, California's prison population has slowly declined—about 92,000 this year—and the number is expected to continue to fall.

This meant that more people were serving their sentences for non-violent, non-serious and non-sexual crimes in prison rather than jail. The change helped lower the incarceration rate across the state.

In 2014, voters went a step further and approved House Bill 47, which downgraded certain property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. These changes are now up for reconsideration with House Bill 36.

While California did not simply open its prison gates, it did experience the largest reduction in prison population of any state in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, 17 other states and the Federal Bureau of Prisons are housing more inmates than their prisons can accommodate and are viewing California's experience as a possible model.

Myth: Prop. 47 is the main reason for the decline in California's prison population

Supporters of Prop. 47 promised that the measure would save the state billions of dollars while helping reduce occupancy in the state's overcrowded prisons.

The prison population declined steadily over the past decade, then rapidly during the pandemic. A year-long study by the Public Policy Institute of California found that prisoner releases during the COVID-19 pandemic were a much larger factor in the decline in prison and jail populations.

Although California has a much larger prison population, the incarceration rate fell by 8% after Prop. 47 went into effect, the report's analysis shows. Between 2014 and 2019, the prison population fell from 135,000 to about 120,000, or about 11%.

By comparison, at the peak of the pandemic between March 2020 and February 2021, the number of prison inmates fell by 23%, from 123,100 to 94,600.

Myth: California gun laws are ineffective

California voters have always supported strict gun control measures, but that choice was partially taken away from them when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down New York State's strict restrictions on people carrying a concealed firearm in public.

Since then, Newsom has been trying to gain support for his proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would restrict gun ownership nationwide – but so far without much success.

California's gun control laws are among the most comprehensive in the country, ranging from waiting periods and background checks to gun storage and licensing.

Health statistics suggest that California's gun laws protect lives. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, California had the sixth-lowest gun death rate in the country in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

The National Institutes of Health found that between 1984 and 2015, in large urban counties, gun-carrying and “stand your ground” laws were associated with an increase in gun murders. Background checks associated with obtaining a gun permit and laws prohibiting the use of guns by people convicted of violent crimes were associated with a decrease in gun murders.

California's gun control measures are clearly not working for gun rights advocates. The California Rifle and Pistol Association not only opposes restrictions on gun purchases, but says the process of keeping a gun you've already purchased is complicated by at least 111 gun laws and administrative regulations issued by the state's attorney general.

The Giffords Law Center, which supports gun control measures, gives California top marks for its gun control measures. The National Rifle Association, which advocates for less restrictive gun laws, argues the opposite: California's gun laws make the state one of the worst for gun owners.

Death penalty activist Katie Wilde holds a sign during a rally and march in front of the federal building on September 28, 2010 in Westwood.

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Kevork Djansezian

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Getty Images

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Myth: There is no death penalty in California and therefore more violent crimes

It is an unusual situation: There are 623 people on death row in California, the largest number of those sentenced to death in the entire country, and yet none of them are expected to be executed.

The last execution in the state was carried out in 2006. Newsom imposed a moratorium on such executions in 2019, meaning the execution chambers will not reopen at least during his term in office.

The death penalty is still in place in California. When Proposition 34 asked voters to consider abolishing the death penalty in 2012, they rejected it, voting 53% to 47% to keep it. A similar proposal was defeated by a nearly identical number of votes in 2016.

But a 2019 poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that 62% of respondents favored abolishing the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

To examine the impact of the death penalty on violent crime, researchers must go back to the 1990s, when the state routinely carried out executions.

A 1999 study in the journal Homicide Studies found that after an execution in the state gas chamber in 1992, the murder rate fell briefly, but then rose again for at least four months. The researchers called this development the “brutalization effect.”

While the researchers do not claim that the death penalty leads to more violent crime, they found that it almost certainly does not have a deterrent effect.

Myth: In California, undocumented immigrants commit crimes more often than the rest of the population.

Stephen Miller, a Santa Monica native and adviser to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, said in a controversial interview after a presidential debate on Sept. 10 that illegal immigrants commit violent crimes that shock the conscience. He then referred to Vice President Kamala Harris, the former attorney general of California.

“I trust Kamala Harris to allow illegal immigrants into this country to rape and murder children,” Miller said, repeating Trump's previous allegations about the rate of violent crime by migrants.

Miller's argument is unfounded. Numerous studies – from libertarian think tanks analyzing statistics from Texas to Stanford researchers studying crime in California – have found that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than people born in the United States.

A study by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Criminal Investigation released two days after the presidential debate in September summarized six years of drug, property, traffic and violent crime.

“Undocumented immigrants are arrested less than half as often as native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes,” the study’s authors write, “and only a quarter as often for property crimes.”