WitnessLA: Prop. 47 Not Responsible for Crime Rate Increases in 2015, Says New UCI Study—Prosecutors Disagree
Witnessla.com recently covered the ADDA’s response to the UC Irvine study on Prop 47. In their coverage, they say:
On Friday morning, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys disagreed firmly with the study’s findings, in the form of a blog post by ADDA’s president Michele Hanissee. The ADDA made some important points.
First the prosecutors pointed out that although Prop.47 changed the designation for certain low level drug crimes, the study did not consider drug offenses at all.“Instead, it examined ‘Part 1′ crimes which include homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, auto theft and larceny.” However, since, Prop 47 only affected the sentencing on drug offenses and larceny offenses (and, to some small degree, auto thefts if the car is valued at less than $950),” the ADDA argued, it was “irrelevant” to consider its impact on “homicide, rape, aggravated assault and the other Part 1 crimes that Prop 47 never addressed.”
We’d like to interject here that Prop. 47 has been blamed by many critics for any and all upticks in crime, including Part 1 crime, but we fully get the prosecutors’ point.
So, what were the results of the study regarding larceny crimes in 2015? “Not surprisingly,” said the prosecutors, “the study showed that ‘Prop 47 did have an impact’ and ‘the larceny effect appears significant.”
Only larceny, wrote the researchers, “appears to have an impact that is large relative to the unidentified variation observed in donor pool states.”
Indeed, while the rest of the crimes that the study looked at, including auto theft, appear unaffected by the ballot proposition. Larceny, however, was, according to the study, although the authors appeared to downplay this part of their findings.
