The Long Beach City Council on Tuesday will decide whether to throw in its support for Proposition 36, a voter-led initiative that, if passed in November, will overhaul rules on how cities throughout California punish petty crimes.
The topic came Friday before a town hall of several dozen residents and business owners at Altar Society Brewing and Coffee Co. in Downtown Long Beach. Council members Kristina Duggan, Cindy Allen and Mary Zendejas were in attendance.
Long Beach City Prosecutor Doug Haubert led the discussion, explaining what Proposition 36 would change. Also known as the Homelessness, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, it is focused on repeat offenders, those with two or more convictions, of theft crimes or drug possession.
If passed, it would allow courts the discretion to raise a misdemeanor theft or possession case to a felony, punishable by up to three years in county jail or state prison. Sentences would also be raised if three or more people committed the act together. And dealers whose sales of fentanyl kill or seriously injure a person who uses those drugs could be charged with murder, among other changes.
Some of these new rules would apply to select inmates already serving time in county jail, resulting in their transfer to a state prison.
It comes as a response to Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot initiative that reclassified possession of heroin, methamphetamine and other illegal drugs as misdemeanors in California. Proposition 47 also raised the threshold to prosecute felony theft from $400 in stolen goods to $950.
The new measure qualified for the Nov. 5 ballot in April after securing more than 900,000 signatures from California voters.
Haubert, who didn’t share his position at the town hall, has previously come out in strong support of the measure, as it establishes a “treatment-mandated felony” that prosecutors can option to some repeat offenders instead of a misdemeanor. Those who accept and complete treatment will have their charges dismissed, while those who don’t finish could serve up to three years in prison.
“The goal is to get them into treatment,” Haubert said. “I wouldn’t be supporting it if the goal was to put people in jail or in prison.”
He spoke on the measure last month before the city’s Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, composed of council members Roberto Uranga, Cindy Allen and Megan Kerr.
“In the fourteen years that I’ve been the city prosecutor, I have never advised the council to support a ballot measure, state or local or county,” Haubert said at the meeting. “This is the first time I’ve done that because I believe that this is so important for the people of California but particularly the people of L.A. County and Long Beach.”
The committee ultimately came out in unanimous support of the proposition, along with support for the state Senate’s Safer California legislative package.
“I think it provides a comprehensive approach to addressing critical issues like substance use disorder and opioid uses, criminal justice reforms and the overall retail theft prevention,” Allen said.
Passed a decade ago, Prop. 47 made California the first to “de-felonize” drug use, with the promise to divert money from punishment toward job training, mental health and drug addiction treatment. It was enacted three years after violent crime in California hit a 45-year low, and as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the state’s prison conditions were dangerously overpopulated — one in three prisoners came from L.A. County — and ordered them to be reduced.
But much has changed in those 10 years.
Fentanyl, once a little-known drug, has since cemented itself at the center of California’s opioid epidemic. From 2016 to 2021, there was a steady rise in fentanyl overdose deaths in Long Beach, dropping only slightly in 2022, according to city statistics. In 2021, the city averaged higher opioid-related deaths than both Los Angeles County and California.
Due to overcrowding in the Los Angeles County Jail, Haubert said, those sentenced to the maximum term for drug possession — 180 days or less — are typically released the same day. Sentences of more than 180 days, he added, are usually reduced to about two months.
In Long Beach, treatment centers and diversion programs built up in recent years — and recently covered through the Medi-Cal expansion — are overwhelmed. “These things didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Haubert said.
“The biggest problem is most people don’t want our programs because the criminal justice system is such a light touch on them,” Haubert said. “They would rather plead guilty and leave right away than, you know, accept an offer from me to go into a treatment program.”
This comes as public safety and homelessness are expected to be top issues in this election, especially in California. While violent crime statewide remains well below historic peaks of the ’80s and ’90s, many lament the rise in petty crimes and drug possession.
At the town hall, residents — many of whom owned businesses or property Downtown, appeared in support of the proposition over their own frustrations with retail theft and property damage.
They spoke from their side of the counter — smashed windows, feces and urine on the ground, people that lurk around the storefront.
“Prop 36 is the most significant thing in the last 10 years to help us, the citizens, that have been dealing with all this,” resident and local property manager Joe Harding said. “We know we want it.”
Petty thefts citywide declined from 2017 to 2022 but rose again last year. In the first seven months of 2024, police are seeing an 18.5% increase in petty theft cases, as well as a rise in commercial burglaries.
“It could have been a lot worse for me,” said Greg Beck, owner of Sake Secret. “I managed to go almost a full year before I got broken into … almost feel lucky given the problems.”
Despite paying into security and cleaning services, Beck said he still deals with crime and detritus that festers around his store. About a month ago, someone busted his backdoor and stole a smart tablet. It cost “less than $950, so my insurance didn’t cover it. And then a couple days later, an officer came. I gave them the security footage. … I haven’t heard anything back in over a month.”
Homelessness may have dipped about 2% from last year, but it has risen 81% since 2018, Haubert said. “So if you perceive a significant increase in homelessness in the last six or seven years, you’re not wrong,” he added.
Statewide, lawmakers are largely divided on Proposition 36.
Those in favor of the change include the mayors of San Diego and San Francisco, as well as nearby City Councils such as Whittier, Newport Beach and Huntington Beach.
It’s also been endorsed by the California Sheriff’s Association, the League of California Cities,
the California Republican Party and the California District Attorneys Association.
Opposition, meanwhile, has come from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, as well as a coalition of social justice groups that analogized it to the 1990s era of mass incarceration.
“Prop 36 is an attack on our communities and the public safety reforms Californians have fought and voted for,” wrote Executive Director Irene Kao of Courage California in a joint letter representing 13 partner organizations. “The funders and supporters of this ballot measure have no concern for the actual safety of our communities–if they did, they would not be working to strip away the parts of Prop 47 that have diverted more than $800 million in savings from our pre-2014 days of over-incarceration to fund the critical treatment and diversion programs that our communities need!”
Under the new measure, courts could see a massive increase in workload that could cost the state up to “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually, as the state prison population could swell by around a few thousand people, up from the 90,000 currently jailed. The county population — at around 250,000 people — could rise by a few thousand people.
Newsom, who signed a bill Thursday that toughened penalties for larger-scale robberies and schemes, crafted a softer, rival measure in the summer but rescinded it last month.
“California already has some of the strictest retail and property crime laws in the nation — and we have made them even stronger with our recent legislation,” Newsom said in a statement. “We can be tough on crime while also being smart on crime — we don’t need to go back to broken policies of the last century.”
In an interview with Politico last month, Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said he “can’t associate everything bad with Proposition 47. … It’s scapegoating the problem. We saw crime really pick up after the pandemic. Now we’re starting to see things go down.”
The discussion has been difficult to navigate, as Californians — many of whom spent the last decade championing progressive policies — want stricter penalties for crime without being seen as unsympathetic towards social ills.
It’s the fear of returning to the former that has stymied changes to the current measure, including an attempt in 2020 for revisions failed to secure enough votes in the fall election. But recent polls show that a growing number of California voters are reconsidering their approach.
“I can tell you what is not empathetic is letting people die on the street,” said Ziyad Zreik, a resident whose windows overlook the Billie Jean King Library downtown. “Something has to change and for me, that’s Prop 36. I really feel the city depends on this.”
The City Council will vote on the issue at its regular session on Tuesday, Sept. 17, inside the Civic Chambers. If you cannot attend the meeting, members of the public have the option to submit email comments to [email protected]
Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct Greg Beck’s last name.