Chief Luna explains, “You had to ask yourself, what changed from 2014 to 2015, and one of the things that we believe has been a huge factor are a lot of the legislative changes that have occurred over the last several years.”
Law enforcement officials throughout California have been quick to point out that one of those legislative changes – the implementation of Proposition 47 – has had a measurable impact on the increase in crime throughout the state. Prop. 47 re-classified “non-serious, nonviolent" felonies as misdemeanors. As a result of this re-classification, an estimated 10,000 prison inmates were immediately eligible for re-sentencing.
Rather than seeing a simple cause-and-effect between the adoption of Prop. 47 and the increase in crime, Chief Luna sees the current situation in Long Beach and elsewhere as social evolution, explaining, “I don't look at Proposition 47 on its own as something that got us to where the crime statistics are in 2015. I look back historically over several years, and I see two different iterations of Proposition 36. I see Assembly Bill 109, I see Proposition 47, and there are many others. And when you put all of that together, you start seeing that the criminal justice system is, in a sense, reforming itself, trying to become (less) dependent on incarceration.”
Chief Luna doesn't seem to have a problem with the idea of reform. But implementing social reforms without implementing the necessary offsetting social programs can set the stage for the sort of problems that are being experienced in Long Beach. He explains, “It's important for me to note that when we're talking about these legislative changes, I think each one of them had the right intent, but if you're going to...not allow certain people to go to jail because you've changed certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, or (allow) other people to get out of jail early, it puts a lot more people out on the street. The question I have is where are all these people who were incarcerated and, more importantly, what services were offered to them? And when I talk about services, I'm talking about two areas – mental illness and substance abuse. We believe there is a lack of service in those two arenas which contribute a lot to not only our crime challenges but our quality of life challenges.”