Addiction and Crime in California

For some in California, there is no question. The San Francisco Chronicle writes of an “explosion” in local property crimes “due to Proposition 47.”^[10] The Chronicle quotes data from the FBI that shows that San Francisco experienced the biggest increase in rates of property crime from 2014 to 2015. The statistics come from local and state police departments, all submitting data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The FBI then compared crime rates from 2014 to 2015, after Proposition 47 was passed. Other reporting has further cast doubt on the long-term benefits of the reform; an increase in car break-ins, for example, which went up by 31 percent between 2014 and 2016, was described by the paper as “rampant.”^[11]

The Chronicle blames Proposition 47 for reducing and even eliminating the penalties for property crimes, leading to a spree of such crimes, as people who are physically and psychologically dependent on illegal substances have one less barrier in their way to procuring money to get more drugs.

By comparison, the next four largest states in the country – Florida, Texas, New York, and Illinois – all saw decreases in property crime in the same period of time that San Francisco and California reeled from the increase thereof.

Property crime causes enough headaches, but violent crime rates also increased. From 2014 to 2015, San Francisco placed 8th on the number of cities that saw its frequency of incidents of violent crime go up. Over the entire state of California, 48 other cities noted similar problems, and 34 of those cities saw increases of violent crime by more than 10 percent.

The cities are paying an economic toll. San Francisco lost $120 million in dealing with the crimes that occurred during the spree of 2014-2015. Los Angeles County spent $250 million in that same timeframe. The San Francisco Chronicle repeatedly savaged the “reckless” Proposition 47 as nothing more than an experiment in criminal justice reform – one that eliminated penalties for drug-related criminal activity and left taxpaying citizens with the bill.

That point is made by the National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP), which has touted the effects of drug courts in other jurisdictions across the country. Drug courts have long been praised for the way they offer users a way out of the cycle, promoting accountability by erasing criminal records as a way of rewarding treatment milestones. NADCP notes that individuals who are enrolled in a drug court program because there are legal implications tend to perform better than those who go to drug courts of their own free will. Users are compelled by the influence of the criminal justice system – channeled by drug courts – to actively participate in treatments and community services.

But if that motivator is removed, then drug court professionals and police officers fear that addicts have no reason to stop using drugs, particularly if those addicts know that they’ll be back on the streets while the officers are still at their desks. For that reason, NADCP officially came out against Proposition 47, knowing that for all the good that drug courts do, the system can be rendered useless if it is stripped of its leverage.^[14] The executive director of the Countywide Criminal Justice Coordination Committee, an organization that administers and manages drug courts, told the Los Angeles Times that Proposition 47 gives addicts no incentive to participate in programs that could remove them from the drug-crime cycle.^[15]

The result, police tell NPR, is that more drug users are free to steal, to keep their habit going, The police chief of Huntington Beach said his city saw property crimes increase in the 12 months after Proposition 47 was signed. There was a 21 percent spike in car theft, a 30 percent increase in larceny from vehicles, and a 33 percent rise in garage burglaries. Police attribute a lot of those numbers to “lower-level drug offenders who are now out and trying to support their habit,” in the words of the Huntington Beach police chief.

Proposition 47 supporters say that police are being selective with their numbers and reporting. The manager of Californians for Safety and Justice, one of the groups that supported the proposition, emailed NPR to say that other Californian cities experienced a drop in property crime. He asked if the police chiefs interviewed for NPR’s story would give credit to Proposition 47 for reducing the amount of crime in those communities.

Similarly, public health and drug addiction experts have defended Proposition 47, arguing that a better approach was required after the three-strikes laws placed an inhuman burden on California’s prison system, and national crime data suggested that habitual offender laws were not as effective in deterring violent crime as was once thought. An evolving understanding of the nature of substance abuse also led to calls for being “smart on crime,” to think of drug addiction as a disease that required treatment and not a moral failing that required incarceration. Speaking of the positive effects that Proposition 47 would have on the War on Drugs, the Huffington Post wrote that reducing the nature of drug charges will allow the people most vulnerable to the drug trade a humane way out of their quagmire.^[16]

But for someone with an addiction problem, who is not compelled to enroll in a drug court program, Proposition 47 presents the wrong kind of opportunities. By April 26th of the following year, Rabenberg had been arrested six times. All of the arrests were misdemeanors, even when he brandished a deadly weapon while having drugs on his person, so he was eligible for release within a matter of days of his arrest. Like clockwork, he would be back in cuffs a few weeks later; and like clockwork, he would be released again.

Rabeberg’s case was one of the thousands that the San Diego City Attorney and Chief of Police looked at, as they tried to think of what they could do to convince the “frequent fliers” to voluntarily enroll in a drug court program. With Proposition 47 removing the threat of significant jail time, many people affected by addiction find it easier to cool their heels in jail for a few days and then return to their drugs. The city attorney told the Washington Post that addicts don’t abide by the honor system; even when they get their court date, their cases are of such low priorities that there’s nothing to make them show up. Since people like James Rabenberg aren’t causing trouble, and aren’t interested in getting help, no one – not police, not social workers – can do anything about it.

The Washington Post published its story on James Rabenberg in October 2015, almost a year after his first arrest. By that time, he had been arrested 19 times, causing so much frustration in his local San Diego court that someone scrawled “Enough!” on his case file. When the Post story was published, Rabenberg had failed to make his scheduled court date.^[17]

The word epidemic was also used by the Los Angeles Times to describe the situation in California, where a new law that protected pharmaceutical corporations from government regulation was criticized for giving those companies a way to get the Drug Enforcement Agency to postpone or abandon federal investigations into unusual or suspicious orders of controlled medication, like the ones that the MacArthur Park pill mill placed.^[20]

The “crime” element of pill mills is very different from the property crime that some meth addicts and heroin users commit to fund their habit, but California does not look kindly on how the operators of such establishments contribute to the state’s drug problem. In February 2016, for example, a Los Angeles judge sentenced Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng, a Southern California doctor, to 30 years to life in prison, for “unlawfully prescribing a controlled substance,” an act that led to the deaths of three of her patients (for which she was charged with murder). The decision marked the first time that a doctor was held criminally liable for “recklessly prescribing drugs,” in the words of the Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney.

Tseng was not part of a pill mill setup, instead being a self-employed physician who, as CNN put it, “[abandoned] patient care in pursuit of greed,” but she fell to the same laws that target illegal or dangerous prescription practices. There are not too many doctors who go into business for themselves – most work in collusion with drug smuggling rings – but even the few who do can devastate a local community. A retired DEA agent, who was one of the first law enforcement officials to go after corrupt doctors in Southern California, told CNN that “you can draw a straight line from pharmaceutical opiates to shooting heroin,” and that individuals who got their fix from drugs given to them by doctors eventually resorted to directly abusing heroin, being the kind of people who cops in Huntington Beach would find living out of their cars.

Prosecutions related to pill mills are rare, says San Jose’s Mercury News. As the prosecutor of the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s narcotics unit told the paper, making the connection between “the pill rings on the street [and] the dirty doctors” is “very difficult.” Cases against doctors are hard to make, since the prosecution has to prove that the doctors were aware that their prescribing methods were excessive.

Sometimes, however, corrupt doctors make life easier for the police. An undercover officer got 870 prescriptions from one such physician, despite ever having his pulse, blood pressure, or medical history taken. The doctor counseled the cop on how to pass a urine test, and was recorded as saying that the FBI and DEA were “a pain in the neck” and that she was afraid of being monitored by the government.

The mother of one of the people who died as a result of that doctor’s prescriptions said that such doctors are “basically drug dealers.”^[21] It is another perspective on the problem of crime that addiction creates; those who fall prey to it and those who exploit it. Having been at both ends of the spectrum – the “tough on crime” days of habitual offender laws, to the “smart on crime” era of Proposition 47 – California knows, perhaps better than any other state, that the nature of the relationship between crime and drug use is as complex and unpredictable as those two issues on their own.